Duration: ca. 20′
Instrumentation: 1(=a.fl).0.1.0 – 0.1.1.0 – 2perc. – pno. – mezzo – strings (1.0.1.1.1)
Performance Note: The first time I set poems by Rainer-Maria Rilke, I was a graduate student finishing up my Master’s degree at the Boston Conservatory. Those Rilke-Lieder – four poems drawn from Rilke’s 1905 anthology, Das Stundenbuch – were as ambitious a piece as I had written to that point: condensing all the contemporary techniques I knew (or could think of) into a twenty-minute score and throwing a series of intense challenges towards the mezzo-soprano soloist.
As I spent more time with the piece, though, I soon became dissatisfied with it. It attempted things I’d never before tried, but its expressive depth was shallow; there was too much repetition of a few basic ideas; the scoring was riddled with problems; and, melodically, there wasn’t much that charmed my ear – let alone a stranger’s! For a few years, I put the piece aside, thinking that I’d happily revise it if the right circumstances ever emerged.
They didn’t (at least from a commissioning standpoint), but, in 2014, soon after finishing my large-chamber-ensemble piece, Through the Looking Glass, I thought that the time was ripe to again tackle Rilke. Thus began the two-year-long odyssey that resulted in the present Songs from The Book of Hours.
Two movements remain from my original Rilke-Lieder – the first, “Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen,” and the last, “Mein Leben ist nicht diese steile Stunde” – though they were both extensively revised and rescored. In between come settings of three different poems from the Stundenbuch collection: “Ich habe viele Brüder in Sutanen,” “So ist mein Tagwerk,” and “Wie der Wächter,” the last of which is intended as a Requiem for the fifteen Coptic Christians martyred on the shores of the Mediterranean on 14 February 2014.
The new song cycle drastically reduces the original orchestral scoring to a reasonable chamber ensemble of eleven players: pairs of winds, brass, and percussion, plus piano and single strings. Like the earlier (now withdrawn) Lieder, the Songs from The Book of Hours is dedicated to my friend Deb De Laurell, whose insistence that I set some Rilke back in 2006 and started me off on this rich, winding, and, ultimately, rewarding journey.
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