The piano and orchestral versions of Tour de Trance are two independent readings of the highly musical and multi-layered poem of the same title by Monika Rinck. Its imaginative appeal lies in the visualization of an event through the description of its most distant reflections: no one heard, everyone felt, the waves of shock. This is achieved above all through images of movement, which lend themselves particularly well to musical adaptation.

Nevertheless, poems and music remain art forms in their own right; from their own specific perspectives, they refer to a common third party, a poetic idea or a shared plot, and use different means to achieve this. While the poem, for example, is divided into two unequal halves by its punctuation, the song subdivides the two parts into two or three independent sections, each with different models of movement.

The overall formal progression of the song appears more as a development from dull, resonant static – like the foothills of distant tremors – to complex, differentiated pulsations on several levels of the piano writing, whereby the ambitus of the vocal line corresponds with the increase in inner movement in the piano. The tendency to transcend the framework provided by the piano is already inherent in this idea of tone colour. The song points beyond itself in several senses, to a larger apparatus and at the same time to its concealed background and undertones.

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