In the past fifteen years, Thomas Pasatieri has become one of America's leading composers. His major output has been dramatic works for voice: opera and song literature. The two dramatic cantatas, Heloise and Abelard and Rites de Passage, are exemplary of his style. Pasatieri draws his formal structures from traditional solo and duo cantatas and combines this with the ability to dramatize the texts of Louis Phillips. Pasatieri s style is conservative and represents a neo-romantic idiom which he models after Bellini, Puccini, and Richard Strauss. This paper presents a brief biographical sketch of Pasatieri and an analysis of the two cantatas. A chronological list of Pasatieri's published vocal works appears in the Appendix.