An open rehearsal of “Lost Codes,” a work-in-progress by Ibrahim Quraishi, will be presented next Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at the Watermill Center, where Mr. Quraishi is currently an artist-in-residence.

    “Lost Codes” reflects Mr. Qurai­­shi’­s interest in the relationship between religious communities and their sacred rituals. To that end, he is said to be immersing himself in the East Hampton Jewish community and the Shaker community, to better understand the dynamics of rituals.

    Admission is free, but reservations are required.

    The new Parrish installation of its permanent collection galleries, which is taking shape to be an annual fall event, offers some delightful surprises and some disappointments. The museum continues to attract major gifts and acquisitions to its new state-of-the-art facility in Water Mill, but the 2,700 works in its holdings are not all created equal and some seem just plain tired to eyes accustomed to the usual East End themes and memes.

    First, there is the good news. It depends on how you navigate the rooms, but the ones closest to the double gallery separating the permanent collection  from the temporary shows are the strongest. One side is devoted to Fairfield Porter and Robert Dash in visual conversation with each other. The other has a series of landscapes and cityscapes with an eclectic mix of older and more contemporary artists that looks even better the longer you linger.

    During Dash’s earlier, more realist, days, he owed a great debt to Porter’s own distillation of artists such as Pierre Bonnard. He stayed at the Porters’ house in Southampton during the early days of his visits here before he created Madoo, the garden conservancy in Sagaponack.

    While Dash echoes the Porter style, he does not mimic it, adding more open interpretations of color and form to create a more modern expression wholly his own. It is not as evident in a spare interior from 1965, which has a more Impressionistic feel. But just the simple choice of subject matter, a room entrance framing another one in the distance, is a more abstract construct than the more straightforward Porter subjects surrounding it in the gallery. Looking at it, one is far more aware of the painter and his choices, and even simple geometry, spaces and voids, lines and structure, than the more traditional landscapes and interiors of Porter.

    Two other works from a decade later take these early departures much further, using the play of natural light as a launching point for a more individual interpretation of an outdoor terrace and a portrait of John Ashbery.

    The room is a well-edited anthology of Southampton-style realism and another example of Porter’s enduring legacy through those who followed him.

    The other exceptional room, titled “Painting as Metaphor,” again brings  Porter together, not with his followers, but with those who tackled similar and not so similar subjects within the landscape genre. It’s a pretty room and can easily be enjoyed and then departed, but there is a lot going on in here.

    Upon closer reflection, the superficially neutral subjects are country and cityscapes during times of distinct change and possibly upheaval. It is probably noticed first most prominently in Porter’s cityscape from around 1942. One of the few canvases in the room to portray people, the grouping of figures and their expressions reveal much of the uncertainty and hardship of the time.

    The three figures, a matronly woman, a man in a dress coat and hat, and a child in the distance, could be a family in another context, but here they seem to be archetypes, removed from each other to lend symbolic weight and psychological complexity. The isolation of the modern city and the divisions taking place in families from the war effort no doubt inform this work.

    In the background, modern high rises loom over the tidy block of brownstones and an old neighborhood begins to lose its character. Porter moved permanently to Southampton in 1949.

    Implied metamorphosis is all over this room. It figures into the earliest painting as well. William Merritt Chase’s image of Bensonhurst in an oil sketch from 1889 shows a bucolic waterfront, developed only with a promenade and in no way recognizable in the cityscape of today.

    John Sloan’s depiction of Gloucester from about 1916 would lead one to believe he had been in France prior to painting it. The avenue he represents has the feeling of Nice or other southern French seaside towns or cities. As a new, racy convertible charges down the street, it kicks up dust in the direction of a horse and buggy and ruffles the feathers of some birds gathered there. Flaneuses promenade their way down the sidewalk, revealing their ankles in a modern style. It is not quite the Roaring Twenties yet, but this is already modern America in its infancy.

    As the empire rises, so does it fall, and with it outmoded technology and amusements. In what could have been merely a honey-coated nostalgia piece, Howard Kanovitz takes the complexities of post-Modernism and locates them, writ large, on the South Fork landscape. Even a rural paradise is subject to the shifting needs and wants of its populace, and what seemed state of the art a few decades ago becomes a lumbering dinosaur when tastes change. In “Hamp­tons Drive-In,” a photorealist work from 1974, Kanovitz presciently captured the dusk of that Bridgehampton landmark, helpfully imbuing the horizon with the salmony-orange glow of a Hamptons sunset at last light.

    Perhaps realizing that this might be his magnum opus, he painstakingly documented each step of its creation in a documentary also in the Parrish’s possession. The film on the drive-in screen, caught in a still and helpfully announced by the depicted sign, is “Cabaret,” set in Weimar Germany, another time and place where society and the landscape would be radically altered within the next decades. As if all this foreshadowing were not enough, a small sign at lower right announces the availability of stores by Kimco, the developer that transformed the site into the present Bridgehampton Commons, home to such country pleasures as Kmart, Staples, and The Gap. Once seen in this light, every painting seems to tell a similar story, some more subtly than others but none as powerful as this.

    The other rooms might be termed the eat-your-vegetables rooms. They dutifully pay homage to some of the titans of the East End art-making tradition, or in some cases the titans of Parrish patronage. That is not to say that Esteban Vicente does not deserve his due, but the museum may be risking overkill in its effort to show appreciation for his foundation’s financial support for its new home. Still, even the room devoted to his circle brings several exciting pieces out into the light, including some great works on paper by Robert Motherwell, Perle Fine, Norman Bluhm, Lee Krasner, and James Brooks.

    Other rooms bring out new aspects of the museum’s sizable collection of William Merritt Chase and a few other themes that continue to be relevant from the mid-20th century to the present, such as the artist at work in his studio and the enduring relationship between practitioners of arts and letters.

    We should look forward to future iterations of these installations. They will no doubt continue to tell both the story of East End artists and the Parrish’s evolving role in presenting them.

    The Springs residence of Roger Ames and Elizabeth Bassine is an active place. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Ames’s daughter, Beth, and her boyfriend were working in the living room. Ms. Bassine returned from a walk with her son, Adam, and two large and exuberant dogs who proceeded to thump in and out through the pet door. In one corner of the living room, beneath several of Ms. Bassine’s large paintings, are a piano, a keyboard, and a laptop. Mr. Ames is a composer, and it’s a wonder there’s room for his muse there.

    Mr. Ames moves between projects like a master chef with an assortment of pans bubbling on the stove. On one front burner is an opera adapted from “How Green Was My Valley,” the 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn set in a Welsh coal-mining community, which John Ford made into an Academy Award-winning film two years later. The opera, for which Mr. Ames has composed the music and Ms. Bassine the libretto, will premiere as a staged concert in Colorado in August.

    Mr. Ames and Ms. Bassine, who have been married since December 2005, are simultaneously collaborating on “No Parking,” for which Ms. Bassine wrote the book and lyrics. It is the story of a woman who, at age 70, is forced to enter a nursing home, where, under the watchful eyes of the matron, she searches for her rabbit and the rabbit hole. “A story of life and its wonders and death and its transcendence,” according to Ms. Bassine, the production is designed for an acting-singing ensemble of seven, with keyboards, clarinet-sax double, and cello.

    “How Green Was My Valley” first took shape in 2006 as a theater piece. “I was attracted to ‘Valley’ because the novel is so rich in both drama and lyricism,” said Mr. Ames. “The Welsh language emerges in a way that would appeal to any composer. Moreover, Elizabeth and I are inclined to put a lens on sociopolitical issues. During the time we’ve been writing this piece, hundreds of men have died in mining accidents, and untold damage to the environment has taken place.”

    An early version was presented in 2007 in workshops at the Nautilus Music Theater in St. Paul, Minn., and at the Actors Studio in New York. Lincoln Center was interested in the musical — until it was discovered that a previous version of the story, called “A Time for Singing,” had been produced in 1966. (It closed after only 41 performances.)

    “Elizabeth did a huge amount of work rewriting the libretto,” said Mr. Ames. “She made it lean and mean, so there’s more singing in the opera version than in the musical. After Elizabeth’s work I did a full orchestration, which took six or seven months.”

    His next step is to reduce the music to a vocal score, so the singers can learn it. “One difference between an opera and a Broadway musical,” he said, “is that if a piece is billed as an opera, the singers are expected to arrive at the first rehearsal with it memorized, while if it’s a musical, Equity actors can show up without any knowledge of the material. The amount of study that takes place before an opera singer enters a rehearsal is enormous.”

    The staged concert in Colorado, a joint project of the Central City Opera House, the Colorado Springs Conservatory, and the Chamber Orchestra of Colorado Springs, will include an orchestra, a full choral ensemble, roles for actor-singers, and some lighting and costume suggestions. “The staged concert is a way to attract investors so it can be taken to a full production,” Mr. Ames explained.

    “How Green Was My Valley” is not Mr. Ames’s first flirtation with Broadway. A musical version of “Martin Guerre,” for which Laura Harrington wrote the book and Mr. Ames the music, premiered at the Hartford Stage in Connecticut in 1992 and enjoyed a sold-out, extended run. “It was the closest I had come to a real commercial success,” Mr. Ames recalled. “The producers were sure it would go to New York — until Cameron Mackintosh announced the ‘Les Miz’ team was working on the same story. At that point, the backers disappeared.”

    The Mackintosh production eventually opened in London, where it reportedly lost all of its $7.5 million investment.

    Mr. Ames grew up in Worcester, N.Y., a town of 2,200 in Otsego County where his father was a self-taught church organist and his mother a first-grade teacher. “My dad was musical, and he was determined to give my older brother and me piano lessons. We had the amazing luck to have Florence Russell, who had been piano coach for the Metropolitan Opera, retire tovWorcester. She started teaching my brother. I was maybe 4 or 5, and I would watch my brother practice his lesson, then I’d get up on the bench and play his lesson myself, by ear. I don’t know if it made me a prodigy, but it sure annoyed my brother.”

    The younger brother started lessons with Ms. Russell at age 6 and continued with her through high school. When he was a sophomore, his parents surprised him with a used grand piano and gave him permission to play it any time, day or night. At the same time, his high school music teacher encouraged him to write music.

    Valedictorian of his high school class, he enrolled in 1963 at the State University of New York’s Crane School of Music in Potsdam, where a surprising number of important musical artists, among them John Cage, came up every year and lectured. “My life dream was pretty limited. I wanted to be a high school vocal teacher.”

    Mr. Ames’s first job after graduation fulfilled his goal: He was hired by Whitesboro High School in Whitesboro, N.Y. From there, he moved to Somers High School in Westchester County, where he involved more than half the school, 400 students, in the school choir. While there he began writing large works for chorus and orchestra.

    His next move was to Washington, D.C., for a position as music director of a professional theater ensemble. “At that point, the world got really big, really quickly.” He soon founded the Montgomery County Masterworks Chorus, and was minister of music and composer-in-residence at the Westmoreland Congregational Church, where he wrote several large works for choir, congregation, and orchestra.

    Since then Mr. Ames has created oratorios and choral music as well as operas and musical theater pieces. His work has been performed throughout the United States and abroad, and his oratorio “A Requiem for Our Time,” which uses the poetry of Anne Sexton and texts from the Latin Mass, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in music. He served as chairman of Music Theater at the Hartt School of Music, Dance, and Theater from 1987 to 1992, when he became composer-in-residence and director of vocal music at Great Neck North High School. Though recently retired, he still consults and teaches part time.

    Mr. Ames first visited the South Fork in 1993, when he rented a former ice-house on Mulford Lane at Lazy Point on Napeague. Two years later he purchased a house in Springs, where he has since lived full time, despite many years of arduous commuting to Great Neck.

No Vacation for Grenning

    The Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor is inaugurating its first warehouse sale, complete with cookies and coffee, on Saturday morning at 10. The sale, which will be held in the gallery Fridays through Mondays this month and next, includes paintings, small sketches, works on paper, and a large selection of handmade frames.

    The gallery will have a booth at the Wellington Equestrian Festival in Wellington, Fla., through March 30. Grenning will show the works of gallery painters Sarah Lamb, Karl Dempwolf, Ramiro, Marc Dalessio, and Joe Altwer, among  others, and has invited its artists to visit Wellington and paint its landscape and culture.

William King in New York

    William King, whose eccentric and often witty figurative sculpture has earned him the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Sculpture Center, is exhibiting at Algus Greenspon Gallery in New York City through Feb. 15.

    Mr. King grew up in Florida before moving to the city in 1945 to attend Cooper Union. He received a Fulbright grant to Rome in 1950, and then returned to New York, where he had his first exhibition in 1954. Since then he has exhibited worldwide and received numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant, and three honorary doctorates.

    Mr. King is perhaps best known for his elongated, flattened figures, familiar to anyone who has driven past Goodfriend Drive on Route 114. He has created sculpture in bronze, wood, ceramic, metal, and plastic, ranging in scale from monumental public works to intimate figures and portraits. Mr. King lives in East Hampton with his wife, the painter Connie Fox.

“Altered Art” at Ashawagh

    Ruth Nasca, an East Hampton artist, is exhibiting more than 100 works through Sunday at Ashawagh Hall in Springs. For more than 20 years, Ms. Nasca has been drawing and painting the human figure directly on movie posters and other public art, transforming the original into what she calls “altered art.” Her work has been shown at galleries and museums throughout Long Island.

    The exhibition is open daily from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Ms. Nasca will speak about her work on Saturday at 4 p.m.

    This weekend’s musical menu at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton ranges from blues and jazz to classical. Rhonda Denet, a vocalist, and the Silver Fox Trio will perform a selection of jazz standards and soul classics that pay tribute to Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, and others, tomorrow evening at 7.

    Cross Island, featuring Suzanne Muel­ler on cello, Elinor Abrams Zayas on piano, and Yeou-Cheng Ma on viola and violin, will perform duets and trios of works by Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Debussy, Gershwin, and others on Sunday at 3 p.m. Both programs are free.

    Rick Darke, a designer, author, and photographer, will give an illustrated talk on “The Accidental Landscape: Celebrating the Collision of Culture and Ecology,” on Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons in Bridgehampton.

    Mr. Darke’s projects include parks, transportation corridors, corporate and collegiate campuses, conservation developments, and botanic gardens. His newest book, “The Living Landscape: Designing for Beauty and Biodiversity in Home Gardens,” will be published this year.

    The program, which will include refreshments, is $10, free for Alliance members.

    A free screening of “Shored Up,” an 84-minute documentary by Ben Kalina about coastal development, sea level rise, and the science and policy debates surrounding these issues, will be held at the Westhampton Beach Library tonight at 7.

    While the film focuses on Long Beach Island in New Jersey and the Outer Banks in North Carolina, it poses questions relevant to any coastline community and includes footage captured after Superstorm Sandy. The program replaces the regular monthly meeting of the Southampton Citizen Advisory Committee (West) and is open to the public.

    The Hampton Theatre Company in Quogue will hold open auditions for “The Foreigner,” a comedy by Larry Shue about a shy Englishman’s unexpected adventure at a lodge in rural Georgia, on Sunday and Monday, from 6 to 8 p.m., at the Quogue Community Hall.

    Auditions will be held for the roles of Charlie Baker, a British gentleman; “Froggy” LeSueur, a Cockney military man; David Lee, a minister; Catherine Sims, a pretty ex-debutante, and Ellard Sims, Catherine’s simple-minded brother. Rehearsals will begin Feb. 4, with performances scheduled from March 13 through March 30. More information is available at info@hamptontheatre.org.

    Leander Arnold, a mason from Springs, found a message in a bottle while working at the Thomas Moran House restoration on Main Street in East Hampton.

    More accurately, the bottle was a broken Ball canning jar, and the message was a note commemorating the laying of the cornerstone for the artist’s studio. Signed by Thomas Moran and Mary Nimmo Moran, his wife, as well as a group of friends and neighbors, the document establishes that the cornerstone was laid on Sept. 30, 1884, at 10:30 a.m.

    The note was discovered in a brick support pier beneath the turret on the left side of the house. Before the restoration began there was some debate about whether to put the house back on piers once it was raised and leveled, or to put n a full basement. The decision was made to restore it as it was originally constructed. Mr. Arnold was hired by the Thomas Moran Trust to take the piers apart and clean the original bricks so they could be used as veneer on the new concrete piers.

    The original piers were solid brick, but Mr. Arnold discovered that one of them was hollow. He reached inside and withdrew a glass disc. Next he removed a piece of crumbly metal, which he realized was the top of an old Ball jar. Reaching in again, he found shards of glass and a folded piece of paper. “It was like finding an old treasure map,” said Richard Barons, executive director of the trust.

    The house was built by accretion, with bits and pieces added on over the years. “It was an artistic, elastic approach to the creation of a building,” said Mr. Barons. “The first engineer who took a look at the building said it was astonishing that it was still here. However, the great thing about having a house in such bad condition is that you can really open up the walls and structure and get a complete understanding of how it was built.”

    Moran, who is most famous for his landscape paintings of the American West, was a scavenger who brought to East Hampton architectural components he obtained from buildings being torn down in New York City. The large bay window in the studio came from such a building, as did the stair railings and newel posts. A plinth supporting one of the bay window’s pilasters was made of cigar boxes.

    Much of what has been accomplished is not visible from Main Street. Mr. Barons explained that all-new piers and a new foundation for them have been created. New sills are being installed – 80 percent of the original sills were rotten — and steel I-beams are in place.

    “The desire is to get everything firmed up before winter,” Mr. Barons said, laughing as he looked out his office window at last Friday’s snowstorm. “If we had had a heavy snow a year ago, the building might have collapsed. But now the foundation is solid and the house is relatively level.”

    Mr. Barons expects the exterior to be finished by year’s end and the interior restoration completed by the end of 2015. After that, it will take six months to restore the gardens. Once all restoration work is completed, the focus of the trust will turn to the educational function the building will serve. “There will be many opportunities to talk about the early days of the summer colony and about Thomas Moran himself,” Mr. Barons said. “He spent eight months a year in East Hampton, was an early member of the Maidstone Club, and was a fund-raiser for many local organizations. The Morans were very much a part of the year-round community.”

    The Moran studio, which took up almost the entire ground floor of the house, was the first artist’s studio built in East Hampton. The house was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1965. More information about the restoration project, including a link to photographs of its progress, can be found at thomasmorantrust.org.

    Center Stage at Southampton Cultural Center is premiering “Sex: What She’s Really Thinking,” a new play by Ilene Beckerman, next Thursday at the Levitas Center for the Arts. Conceived by Ms. Beckerman with Michael Disher, director of Center Stage, the play presents the unspoken thoughts of women — and men — about sex, in a fast-paced series of monologues and sketches.

    Performances will take place on Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sunday afternoons at 2:30. Tickets are $22, $12 for students under 21 with ID. Group rates are available; reservations have been encouraged. The play will run through Jan. 26.