Klangfarben (Timbres) is a three-movement work for unaccompanied women’s chorus on poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. The work’s title reflects the juxtaposition of several significant compositional elements. First, these three otherwise unrelated poems are assembled here in a sequence designed to reflect aspects of musical color and timbre; traveling from abstract sound (Gong), to birdsong (Die Vogelrufe), culminating with an homage to music itself (An Die Musik). Then, the idiom of women’s chorus, with its many available subtle shades of treble, is manipulated to support the work’s overall trajectory, as is Rilke’s colorful and evocative use of the German language itself, both of which support the architecture, concept and context of “Klangfarben”.