With Pinions of Immense Desire (2018) 5.5'
For trumpet or horn and piano. (Either version available upon request.)
Premiered at the Curtis Institute of Music, 4/22/18. Self-published (Morningside Press, ASCAP).
With Pinions of Immense Desire borrows its title from Dante. Dante’s Divine Comedy describes a journey through heaven, hell, and purgatory, and althroughout, the reader encounters a great many references to wings and to flight. Flight imagery appears across all three chapters of the narrative, used always as a strong metaphor for human striving. For Dante, to be human is to desire: to journey, to ask burning questions, and to work tirelessly toward our goals. We fly ever forward, in other words, driven ahead by the wings of our desire. My favorite flight metaphor in the Divine Comedy comes in its middle chapter. Dante writes that in order to climb Mount Purgatory and move towards heaven, he “had to fly: I mean with rapid wings and pinions of immense desire, behind the guide who gave me hope and was my light.” This music responds to the image of a steep, often arduous climb, but invests also in the idea that we have within us the wings to carry us upward.
Watch:
Listen, on trumpet:
An illustration of Dante's Inferno by William Blake