He recorded several renderings of 20th century music, such as from Schoenberg (Pierrot Lunaire, Erwartung), Varèse, Messiaen, and contemporary American composers (e.g., Elliott Carter, Stefan Wolpe, and George Crumb), mostly with the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, the Orchestra of the 20th Century, and the Ensemble 21.
Newlin herself sang in a costumed performance of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which she had translated into English, in Lubbock, Texas in 1999.
Since the ensemble's beginning, Manning has championed Pierrot Lunaire and a number of twentieth century works influenced by it, ranging from Walton's Facade to Miss Donnithorne's Maggot by Peter Maxwell Davies.
Otto Erich Hartleben (3 June 1864 – 11 February 1905) was a German poet and dramatist from Clausthal, known for his translation of Pierrot Lunaire.
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Albert Giraud's Pierrot lunaire (1884) marked a watershed in the moon-maddening of Pierrot, as did the song-cycle that Arnold Schoenberg derived from it (1912).
There he studied singing as well as composition with Bernhard Sekles and published his first work, a musical version of Albert Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire (independently from Arnold Schoenberg's work of the same year), in 1912-13.
Examples may be found in Claude Debussy's "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune" (1894), Maurice Ravel's Daphnis and Chloë Suite No. 2 (1913), Richard Strauss's Elektra (1909), Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, "Columbine" (1914), and William Schuman's Three Score Set for Piano (1944).
Since the mid-1990s his works have been mostly composed for the combination of instruments known as the "Pierrot sextet" (after Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire: flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, with percussion instead of Schoenberg's singer), and have explored the application of the Fibonacci series (a numerical series in which each number is the sum of the previous two numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233…) to musical structures.
Among the members of his chamber company was Christopher Bruce, the lead in his signature work, Pierrot Lunaire who cites Tetley as one of his inspirations.