NEW YORK, NY.- “It’s the last hour, and I’m feeling the energy draining,” performing arts polymath Taylor Mac announced near the end of a recent rehearsal at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

If the artists — an ensemble of a dozen singers, as well as several instrumentalists — were exhausted, it was because of the sheer scale of what they were working on: “Bark of Millions,” a show by Mac and musician Matt Ray, which has its American premiere Monday at BAM’s Harvey Theater. Essential to that scale is Ray’s score of 55 original songs that add up to four hours of performance.

That would be enough to fill several albums by any recording artist, and yet it’s business as usual for Ray. He has been not only the musical core of Mac’s recent shows — the daylong marathon “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” for which he arranged over 240 songs with the purpose of queering the American canon, and “The Hang,” for which he wrote 26 — but he has also been the force behind much of New York’s alt-cabaret scene, with collaborators including Justin Vivian Bond, Joey Arias and Bridget Everett.

“This is a community of risk-takers and rule-breakers,” Everett said in an interview. “It’s a really exciting, vital scene. And there’s one person who’s the musical nexus of that. It’s Matt. His heart is beating at the center of all of it.”

Ray, 51, has had expansive taste in music since his childhood growing up on the East Coast. Whether as a player — he started learning the piano when he was 2 years old — or as a listener, he never limited himself to any one genre. “I really admire monochromatic types of work,” he said, “but I just don’t work that way.”

Broadly speaking, he is fascinated by American music and settled into identifying as a folk artist in the purest sense: music by and for the people. From a young age he wrote original songs, mostly out of a love for experimentation and the process of creation. He might perform a song a few times, he said, and then set it aside.

But when it came time to focus on something specific at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, he chose jazz, partly because of an influential high school band teacher, and partly, he said, because “jazz is the hardest of American styles, and you really have to study it.”

During school, he often collaborated with vocalists, which continued to expose him to different styles, even personalities, and would travel to Cleveland for professional gigs. At one point, he was performing six nights a week. He later moved to New York, and in the early 2000s began performing at Joe’s Pub. He became such a staple there that, during the past couple of decades, he has appeared on its stage at least 50 times per year. “There used to be some Decembers,” he said, “where I was there the whole month.”

And Ray, long accustomed to adapting his musical direction and composition to specific singers, quickly became a darling of the downtown scene. Bond called him “such a sensitive artist” and said, “for being a consummate Leo, he’s just great at letting other people shine.”

“It’s interesting that he works with, say for instance, me, Bridget and Taylor,” Bond added. “We are all such unique individuals, and our voices are a very strong part of what our shows are about. And Matt somehow manages to be a chameleon, there for you to make you look the best you can look.”

Ray said that the community around his work is “the most important part” of his artistry. He can write music for himself — and has, whether for performance or at home — but “the light kind of goes on when there are other people in the room,” he said.

He is attracted to artists who are interested in long-term collaborations but also those with a mixture of highbrow, lowbrow sensibilities. Everett’s shows, for example, are profoundly philosophical yet unfold with songs like “Titties.”

“Whenever there’s music in my work, Matt’s my first call,” Everett said. “He knows how to celebrate each of our voices, and it’s mind-boggling how much he does. His 24-hour musical with Taylor is an incredible accomplishment. When I walk through Target and push the cart, my arms get tired after 45 minutes of shopping; can you imagine playing for 24 hours?”

Ray was Mac’s music director for “The Lily’s Revenge,” a sprawling theatrical work from 2009. Since then, their collaborations have been prolific; Mac traced the inspiration for “Bark of Millions” to that show but also to “24-Decade.”

“Almost all of those 240 songs are centered around straight people” and cisgender people, Mac said. “And there was this desire to give us some of the things that we’ve missed in life.”

“Bark of Millions,” which will feature supernova-spectacular costumes by another frequent Mac collaborator, Machine Dazzle, is considerably shorter but still unusually substantial — “party-length,” Mac called it. “We say this in the beginning of the show, and it’s tongue-in-cheek, but the goal is a reverse conversion therapy session,” Mac said. “We spend our entire lives being told to be something different, so it’s going to take more than 90 minutes to change that.”

During the pandemic, Mac and Ray wrote dozens of songs. Mac would send a steady flow of lyrics, and before writing a note, Ray would simply read them — studying the meaning, the narrative, the rhythm and the stressing of syllables. “Then,” he said, “I’d put it away, then do it all again.” Eventually, he’d record ideas into voice memos, then lay down instrumental tracks in the basement studio of his Brooklyn apartment. “Things,” he added, “kind of get born like a spasm. A lot of it is divine vomiting.”

They settled on 55 songs for “Bark of Millions” as an organizing principle — initially, to have one for each year since the Stonewall uprising, then for each year since the first Pride march, in 1970. (That would technically be 54, so Mac called the 55th song a “cherry on top.”) Each is named for a figure in queer history, but doesn’t represent or celebrate so much as use the person as inspiration for poetic meditation.

At a rehearsal last week, surrounded by furniturelike sculptures of genitalia and breasts, one with a pierced nipple, the cast sang with a communal spirit and nudged soloists, forward, including Mac, who unspooled cleverly colorful lyrics like “a queer is not a slut, but a slut is a queer” in a nod to Margaret Cho’s comedy during an ode to her. And, when blocking a scene, Mac told a performer who had been called a twink, “Welcome to 35, you’re now a ’twas.”

The result, so far, has been a communal fever dream, starting with a queer origin story for the world then freely skipping across styles in what Mac’s program note calls “an opera-concert-song-cycle-musical-performance-art-piece-play.” At its most enchanting, the music sits patiently in mantralike repetition, sometimes with ensemble members layering onto a soloist’s vocal line, building out rich harmony.

“I think the score is just exquisite,” Mac said. “There’s an authenticity to these songs, within their theatricality, that you don’t often get in music theater. Music theater is often trying to be something else, and the music that Matt writes is this overpouring of what’s inside.”

If the music works its magic, Ray said, it will “stretch toward the audience.”

“I always want to feel like they’re leaning in to us onstage,” he added. “The music is designed to make them feel like they’re part of it. Taylor and I don’t believe in ‘buttons’ — something we can ‘press’ to get applause. We don’t ask for cheap things, and it’s because I want to have meaningful experiences, with everyone in the room.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.