includes five additional pieces from the same sessions, including two "4 Hands" piano tracks. Sorey released his second album, Koan, in June 2009. Featuring Todd Neufeld (on electric and acoustic guitar) and Thomas Morgan (on bass and acoustic guitar), the 482 Music release was reviewed favorably by All About Jazz and the BBC, included in the 2009 Village Voice Jazz Critics’ Poll, and praised in NPR's "Take Five's Top 10 Jazz Records Of 2009". In the fall of 2009, Sorey enrolled in a master’s program at Wesleyan University to study composition with Anthony Braxton. He completed his M.A. in the spring of 2011 before beginning a doctoral program at Columbia University in the fall. His enrollment at Columbia coincided with the release of his highly-lauded Oblique – I. During the six years of doctoral study that followed, Sorey worked closely with George E. Lewis and Fred Lerdahl; off-campus, he recorded three albums with pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini. The first of these, Alloy, was released on Pi Recordings in 2014. For The Inner Spectrum of Variables, the trio was joined by three string performers: violinist Fung Chern Hwei, violist Kyle Armbrust, and cellist Rubin Kodheli. The Chicago Reader called The Inner Spectrum of Variables "one of the year's most arresting and ambitious recordings", and The Nation included the album in their "Ten Best Albums of 2016"; Nextbop's Rob Shepherd named it the best jazz album of the decade. The following year, Sorey returned to the trio format for Verisimilitude, which was listed third in both the 2017 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll and The New York Times Best Jazz Albums of 2017. In 2017, Sorey also completed his Doctor of Musical Arts in composition at Columbia. His dissertation comprises scores for his song cycle Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine and an essay on the aesthetic practices and critical reception of the composition, its subject Josephine Baker, and the composer himself. Sorey cited Julia Bullock and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble as integral to his endeavor to "challenge the improvisation/composition binary and celebrate collaborative modeling"; in 2019, these artists joined Sorey in performing the piece on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After receiving his DMA, Sorey began his appointment as Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University, where he established the university's Ensemble for New Music and taught courses on composition and improvised music. In