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“Ritual”, lyrics by Ariel Giacardi and original music by Bernardo Latini, is a composition for mixed choir and kultrúm percussion.

HELBLING PUBLISHING (Innsbruck, Austria) has released the score, available here.

“Ritual” was written by the commission of Estudio Coral Meridies, conducted by Mª Virginia Bono, to be premiered at the 11th World Symposium on Choral Music, Barcelona, 2017.

“Ritual” is a piece based on two texts which are convergent and divergent at the same time and pose realities that are seemingly unrelated in time and space.

The central idea in the first section is that of collective identity, expressed through ancestral ceremony; the invoking of “us”, of the earth, of shared space-time and the drama that arises in the confrontation between the worlds of the good and the bad, of life and death. Everything has a mythical foundation that evokes dimensions that overlap and intertwine.

The second section focuses on the individual and their quest in the big city, in the mid-twenty-first century to make sense of everything in an environment where individuals can feel a lack of sense of community … where solitude, alienation and boredom offer no support.

In both cases, the individual’s search implies a challenge. Towards the end, the hope that shines light on everything represents the opportunity to restore the balance between these two dimensions and ties together both poems.

The music reflects the ambivalences, tensions, juxtapositions and the points in common and of equilibrium.

In the first section, the use of modal harmony and timbres which imitate the sound of the “trompe” (instrument of the Mapuche people, from Argentina and Chile) also allude to an ancestral ceremony. The four terms from the Mapuche language, used at random, almost like a mantra, emphasize the ritualistic character.

In the second section, reminiscence of modern tango, with 3+3+2/8 and 4/4 bars superimposed, and the use of onomatopoeia with tango like articulation insinuate an urban ritual happening in Buenos Aires. 

Here, the video of the World Premiere.