Ritual - Feature review

by Huntley Dent

L.A.-based composer Jonathan Beard describes Ritual as an “electroacoustic suite for six performers,” who are unnamed except for himself on the cello. The music is arresting and dramatic, with a broad appeal beyond the coterie of listeners with a specialized taste for electronica. Before talking in detail about what gives Ritual its strong crossover appeal—in this case not crossover from classical to pop but from acoustic to electronic—let me give a little background to the composer. 

Beard studied cello from a young age and was attracted to composition in high school before continuing in both areas at Stanford and UCLA. His career took him into a uniquely specialized field, orchestrating scores for TV and movies, which he has done extensively at a high level of the industry (familiar titles include The Walking Dead and the latest versions of Jumanji, Terminator, and Godzilla). As he told a recent interviewer, “My musical passions … stem from a common ingredient, which is my love of exploring/playing with the ‘colors’ of musical sound. As such, my two favorite sonic playgrounds are the orchestra (a truly amazing and flexible acoustic color-palette), and electronic sound design.” 

Ritual, no surprise then, is vividly coloristic, deploying different timbres in its five movements. The conventional instruments are cello, bass and alto recorders, pitched and unpitched percussion, piano, and organ. The sixth instrument is described as “boutique electronics.” Nothing I’ve said so far is likely to pull a general listener into the orbit of electroacoustic music, but the experience of Ritual fits some categories that are widely popular. The first is devotional music. Beard aims at the kind of transcendence found as far back as medieval plainchant, which he refers to as timelessness rather than using religious terms. “I hope to explore a sound-world that is in essence outside of time.” 

Without a religious text and conventional structures like the Mass, how does a contemporary composer approach transcendence? Ritual relies on techniques that are well established. The first is repetition (Beard uses the rather carefully worded term “agnostic devotional repetition”), but not in the mechanical mode of generic Minimalism. He is after a sustained inward mood, which he describes by saying, “There is a seeking within this music.” In part because he has worked with hundreds of film and TV scores, Beard understands how to grab the listener’s ear with striking, immediate effects, and I think the seeking quality is subtly and beautifully communicated from the start. 

A second technique besides repetition is a grounding tone that reaches into deep psychological recesses. The first movement, Quest, opens with a deep, pulsing bass tone that evokes Wagner’s Erda, Tibetan ritual singing, and John Luther Adams’s Become trilogy. Those images come from my own subjective response; someone else might call the groaning, pulsing tone seismic, or a pedal point serving as the fundamental of the movement. Against this fundamental a sinuous cello melody keens in a high register. Using a free hand with tonality, Beard pits instrumental lines, which are sometimes quite melodic, against different fundamentals in each movement. Particularly striking are two semi-vocal backgrounds, an irregular hyperventilating and gasping breath in Thanatosis (the word describes an animal defense of pretending to be dead) and a whispering glissando in the last movement, Battalion, that teeters between the sounds of the wind and breathing. The other two movements are Ritual and Midwinter. 

Techniques do not constitute music, of course, and electronica has a tendency to wander off into the non-musical as far as my conventional ears are concerned. That can be intriguing, exotic, intrusive, insinuating, and many other things one might want to experience. Beard, however, remains fixed in musical intentions. He lectures at UCLA on electronic music and music technologies, but in his brief note for this album, he points out that he isn’t resorting to historical electronic sounds (by which I think he means beeps, twittering, and theremin-like swoops and whistles). In some ways the electronics in Ritual are akin to color field painting where subtle gradations of hue and tone create the undulating visual field effect. 

I found myself drawn into the fields specific to each movement, feeling no resistance or alienation. Whether the composer would consider it a compliment or not, Ritual can be appreciated the way you’d appreciate Ockeghem, Schütz, and Bach—not for their idioms, which are wildly different from Beard’s, but for the music’s ability to touch a universal sense of yearning to go beyond everyday life. This yearning says something very essential, even elemental, about why we love music, and Ritual succeeds in tapping into it.