Symphony No. 3, "Rituals"
Rituals is the title of Jeffrey Ching's Third Symphony, a Philippine government commission for the centennial of the Philippine Declaration of Independence from Spain on 12 June 1898. It is in one continuous movement lasting about forty-four minutes. After weeks of planning and research, Ching began sketching it in London on 28 October 1997, completing the full score there on 19 May 1998. The world premiere was given in Manila on 14 June 1998 by the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra under Josefino Toledo.
Plan and instrumentation of the work
The orchestra is divided into three ensembles which enter one after—and on top of—another with totally distinct music in different meters, keys, rhythms, and bar-lines, coordinated by a single conductor beating a common pulse for all three. Each is essentially a transcription for modern instruments of the ancient high-art music of the Malays, the Chinese, and the Spaniards. The symphony is therefore a celebration, in the Philippines’ centennial year, of her incomparably diverse cultural legacies from different civilisations.
The Malay layer
The Malay layer plays for the entire length of the symphony, condensing into three-quarters of an hour the complete eight
The Chinese layer
Ranged behind the Malay ensemble is the Chinese ensemble of violins and double basses on high harmonics, plucked ‘cellos, piccolos, oboes, clarinets and piccolo clarinet, muted trumpet, harp, and various percussion. After a crescendo bass drum summons, these play a sequence of six slow
The Spanish layer
In the middle of the second hymn, which is also the close of
. An integral fifteen-minute composition in its own right (although only heard superimposed on the Malay and Chinese ensembles), the motet consists of:- Incipit "Dies Irae"
- Motetus, a 9
- ContrapunctusI, a 5
- Canon I, a 8
- ContrapunctusII, a 4
- Canon II, a 10—this is Canon I per arsin et thesin(upside down)
- ContrapunctusIII, a 5
- Canon III, a 8—this is Canon I in motu cancrizans (backwards)
- ContrapunctusIV, a 5
- Motetus, a 9—reprise of the first motetus, but with ornamentation in strings and woodwinds
Close of the work
The Spanish layer, entering last, also terminates earliest. The Chinese layer, entering second, yet outlives the Spanish. Finally only the Malay layer is left sounding alone, as at the beginning. But five minutes before the end of the last tabuh, the instruments from the Chinese and Spanish ensembles re-enter by gradual degrees to be reintegrated as a symphony orchestra. Ching then inserts a dissonant, polytonal version of the opening of
While Tabuh VIII carries on to its own close, it is engulfed by portents of post-1898 events—in particular, the sinking of the USS Maine—in the unmistakable guise of the Wagnerian Rhinegold of free-market capitalism and election-year demagoguery. The bar-lines, once disparate, now line up, as if by way of metaphor for the cultural levelling of the global village. This is at once apotheosis and lampoon, as the quotation and metamorphoses of the world’s best-known national anthem make clear.
I think the message intended in my Third Symphony is not too obscure: The best, the richest, the most glorious part of a country’s heritage is also her past—in the case of a country like the Philippines, first and foremost her Asian past, shared to a large extent with her East and Southeast Asian neighbours, but also, since the Spanish Conquest, the high civilisation of Renaissance and post-Renaissance Europe, which touched off many a sympathetic vibration in her native spirit. 1898 may have brought about the end of Spanish rule, but it was also the logical culmination of over three hundred years of it. What followed, on the other hand, was a fundamental psychical disruption. The sense of the hierarchical, the numinous, the ceremonious, and the patrician—common to Asia and Europe alike—has no place in the Republic of Mob Rule and Pursuit of Profit.
Yet we let it vanish at our peril.
Human rites, as much as rights, are worth dying for.[1]
Critical reception
Rituals was a turning-point in Ching's compositional evolution, and marked the first time that his diverse cultural background and historical training were allied to his mastery of counterpoint and of large-scale forms. Something of this achievement was recognised by local critics:
Strangely, while the music took us to era after era, we had a feeling that time was standing still. With its layering upon layering, its piling upon piling on [sic] of density upon density of sound, it amounted to an architectonic marvel, a milestone... In brief...it is highly intellectual, singularly refined, yet to the point—very erudite, very Ching: the work of a creative genius.[2]