The Poet Speaks of Praising (TTBB)

For TTBB chorus a cappella. Written for the fifteenth anniversary of The Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, Poet Speaks of Praising is a setting of John L. Mood’s translation of Rilke’s Love and Other Difficulties — a miscellany, really, of essays, letters, and the occasional poem — which contained the following emblazoning lines: "But the monstrosities and the murderous days, | How do you endure them, how do you take them? | — I praise." Rilke, in 1921, had sung the kind of determined gratitude I was seeing all about me these days: the will to stay spirited amidst the most dispiriting events.