Rituals

For string quartet
Duration 21 min.

For upcoming - as well as past - performances, please click here

Commissioned by the Danish String Quartet with the support of Carnegie Hall, Cal Performances, Vancouver Recital Society, UC Santa Barbara Arts & Lectures, Washington Performing Arts, Flagey & Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ.
Premiered by the Danish String Quartet at at the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music in Frederiksberg, Denmark on 19 March 2023 (watch a recording on YouTube)

Selected reviews:

“[an] entrancing series of permutations in which a set of musical gestures are rearranged like matter …“Rituals” wasn’t written as a direct response to Schubert, but in the context of Thursday’s program it came off as something of a distant cousin; her work is less interested in repeating whole passages, but like her Viennese predecessor she obsesses here over gestures, reshaping them, foregrounding and obscuring them, layering them in explorations of counterpoint and compatibility … her score speaks with poetic concision.” - Joshua Barone, The New York Times, April 2023

“Rituals is a proud and distinctively realized contribution to this project. Its ever-shifting and vaguely ritualistic 11-section structure is steeped in Thorvaldsdottir’s established yet malleable artistic voice. She’s a true poet among current high-profile composers, writing with a blend of sonic sensuousness, intuitive structures, and “stream of consciousness” pursuits. Abstraction and extended techniques interact with lyricism and melodic grace, and surprises are around many corners. ... Not surprisingly, the DSQ delivered a powerfully persuasive account of this engaging and enigmatic piece.” - Josef Woodard, San Francisco Classical Voice, April 2023

“[Rituals] explores a series of obsessive, ritualistic states of mind in which the four players become deeply involved in mirroring, echoing, repeating gestures. The composer’s fingerprints are all over it ... [she] has an ability to draw an audience deep into her processes, which comes surely from the severity of gesture she asks for and her astonishing control of form.” - Andrew Mellor, The Strad, June 2023

Program notes

my music emerges as a stream of consciousness that flows, is felt, sensed, shaped and then crafted, it does not emerge from a verbal place — but when a piece is completed I often spend quite a bit of time finding ways to articulate some of the important elements of the musical ideas or thoughts that play certain key roles in the origin of the piece — with Rituals however the accompanying text needed to be left impressionistic and unfiltered

as with my music generally, the thoughts and ideas associated with the origin or development of a piece is not something I am trying to describe through the music – it is a way to intuitively approach and work with the core energy, structure, atmosphere and material of the piece

*

repetition in atmosphere — going through motions, the same motions, but it is never the same — with every repeating breath is a new feeling, new vision, new life, new being, same life — the same but always different — various perspectives of ritualistic feelings, sensations, explorations, from the hymn like Ascension to obsessive percussive materials… from parts that move like a rigorous engine to others of flowing atmospheric ether — but all have in common the ritualistic approach to the material — rituals in lyricism — rituals in hope — rituals in repetition — rituals in song — rituals in material — rituals in prayer — rituals in obsession — rituals in life — rituals in being — rituals in harmonies — bending rituals — rituals in difference — ritual as an escape — ritual as peace — ritual as continuation — ritual as burden — ritual as hope — ritual as obsession — ritual as being — ritual in harmony — each part is its own ritual and together the eleven parts form one ritual