I began my own efforts to address space in modest fashion, in a music-theater composition "Emperor of Ice-Cream" intended for the ONCE Festivals but not actually premiered until 1965 in the context of the Nuova Consonanza Festival of Franco Evangelisti's, in Rome. … So, in the case of Stevens's line "And spread it so as to cover her face," the eight singers, arrayed across the front of the stage, pass the phonemes of the associated melodic phrase back and forth by fading in and out successively.