Enticed
Commissioned by Saint Paul City Ballet (2006)
- Bob Pearson - clarinet
- Laura Handler - cello
- George Maure r- piano
- Scott Chabot - drums
- Jeff Engholm - bass
- Rich Witteman - trumpet solo
- Lauren Vork - trombone
- Gretchen Vork - horn in F
- Erin Vork - horn in F
- Ken Vork - bass trombone
One of my favorite literary muses has been the
German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1927). In 2006, I spent two weeks in Prague, CZ, his birthplace, setting several of his poems to music for
the song cycle For the Sake of a Single Poem. Over the course of 2 weeks, I wandered about Prague, soaking up architecture, riding old Soviet-era street cars, observing people, wandering into cafes, jazz clubs, and otherwise just listening very closely to the city, and to myself. Each evening, I ended up in the Corjova Tea Room in old town, consuming numerous pots of green tea while writing next to a big open-hearth wood-fired oven, the murmuring of conversations from backpackers and students all around me. It was quite magical. I was enticed!
And torn, when I had to leave; torn between my desire to be back home, to be in my familiar life, or to be in this magical Eastern European land. It was not strange to be the one who feels the need now and then to see what is over the next rise in the road. We discover new feelings, deeper awareness, and we grow because we risk.
Enticed is structured around 2 different keys; Eb (the world in which I lived) and Gb (Prague, the world in which I wanted to live), and around two different patterns; a pulsed 12/8 triplet pattern and its connected, straight eighth counterpart. These concepts switch, literally, every 4 measures, so that the song flows along, undecided what key it is in, undecided what rhythm is dominant, but deeply and closely intertwined. For all its hesitations, it is a content song. The moment we come to the very last chord, a pyramid tone cluster that unfolds in slow beauty along an Eb color chord, just as it seems it is over..very slowly…each instrument is enticed, in one slow slur, into a Gb color chord. Even up until its end, Enticed is meant to evoke that tug we know as indecision.
