Composer Sam Nichols had a first performance of his things that had no opposites—fragments from Tim Horvath for soprano, flute, guitar, and harp—with the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, on their December 7 and 8 “Sung and Strummed” concerts (2014). Nichols received a Fromm Foundation award and commission for the piece. As reviewed by Benjamin Frandzel of San Francisco Classical Voice:

The three bits of text for that piece come from contemporary fiction writer Tim Horvath, a friend of the composer, and they enigmatically skirt in and around the consciousness of characters speaking in a mode somewhere between prose and poetry. Nichols responded empathetically, with a composition in which instrumental lines and the voice overlap and coincide with each other like different aspects of a single mind.