Commissioned by conductor Scott MacPherson and composed for the premiere concert of the Chamber Choir of San Antonio, Graue Liebesschlangen is the setting of a brief yet evocative poem by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (from his uncollected works). From the start, the poem inspired a kind of homage to both German Expressionism (Schoenberg) and the German Romanticism (Brahms) from which it evolved. Both would have been a part of Rilke’s cultural vocabulary, as the poem itself (circa 1915) would have been composed at the height of this remarkable transition. In this resulting work, amidst unfolding dark and rich colors (attributes common to the aforementioned artistic movements), an almost snake-like chromaticism is employed with mellifluous shifting tempi throughout, evoking, hopefully, a kind of internally emotional setting of the poem’s imagery.