Usher House is [Getty’s] treatment of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, and it is a more edgy work. Poe is introduced into the drama in the role of narrator telling the story. Getty has made other adjustments…He actually makes the Ushers more appealing and likeable than they are in Poe (or in Glass’s opera), and the horror of the ending is all the more dramatic because we have been attracted to them. The music is darker than [Getty’s] Plump Jack, as is appropriate for the story. One hears echoes of Bartók, Debussy, and Mahler in the writing. But the score is not mere copying of others’ music. Even if Getty has not developed a strong musical voice that one can identify as his, it is not music that sounds like a rehashing of someone else’s. Poe’s monologue beginning “Where is my lady, O where has she gone?” is eloquent and beautiful, and stays in the memory. Usher House takes longer to get to know than the more immediately appealing Plump Jack, but its rewards may well be deeper. The more I returned to it, the more I enjoyed it. In addition to Getty’s typically strong vocal writing, the orchestration of this work is imaginative and colorful…Usher House merits exploration on the part of anyone interested in hearing a conservative but imaginative voice in contemporary opera.