By Lewis Spratlan | For Male Chorus, TTBB, and Piano, four-hands | 9′

Title: Travels
Composer: Lewis Spratlan
Text by: Mary Jo Salter and Brad Leithauser
Year Composed: 2011
Instrumentation: For Male Chorus, TTBB, and Piano, four-hands
Duration: 9′
Format: Full Score
Catalogue Number: OM0420

Printed Edition Price: 40.00 USD

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The itinerary literally begins bouncing in 6/8 time for Australia: Kangaroo; then a delightful play on musical and textual palindromes arrives in the equally evocative second movement, “II. New Jersey: Halted Train in the Rain.” The final leg of the journey is an unforgettable stop in Paris, where a musical rainbow swells in choir and piano. Then– “the dazzle of this monumental prism, cut by drizzle, is that it vanishes.”

Commissioned by the Rutgers University Glee Club, Patrick Gardner, Conductor, and premiered by Daniel Spratlan on the podium.

I.

KANGAROO
Like flustered actors
who don’t know what to do
with their hands, they’re hanging
around in awkward clusters,
paws dangling, ears pricked for a cue.
…

II.

HALTED TRAIN
It’s too perfect: can the small boy on the train
really be an OTTO (as finger-painted
on the steamed-up window), a name
…

III.

A RAINBOW OVER THE SEINE
Noiseless at first, a spray
of mist in the face, a nosegay
of moisture never
destined to be a downpour.
…