Bedford - Rode with Darkness for orchestra

Luke Bedford’s second work for full orchestra (the first being the prize-winning Five Pieces) derives its title from Book 9 of Milton’s Paradise Lost where Satan, cast out from Eden by Gabriel, becomes “bent/On Man’s destruction” and determines to re-enter the garden undetected by Uriel – regent of the sun – and the Cherubim.

…thence full of anguish driven,

The space of seven continued nights he rode

With darkness; thrice the equinoctial line

He circled; four times crossed the car of night

From pole to pole, traversing each colure;

On the eighth returned…

Bedford chose his title after completing the composition, but what is significant here is that Milton’s description of the anguished Satan’s progress finds resonance in the momentum and expression of the new work’s musical journey.

In choosing titles for his pieces, Bedford has (until now) tended to eschew the poetic, preferring instead either the quirky (Broken Neon Arabesque, Man Shoots Strangers from Skyscraper) or the abstract (Five Pieces for Orchestra, Five Abstracts). However, what all these pieces have in common is a clarity of premise and purpose in which the ‘abstract’ logic of the musical process is always at the service of a distinctive, not to say poetic, sensibility.

Rode with Darkness is founded on four twelve-note chords that function as a harmonic skeleton: always present in the background, if not always apparently so. However, at least initially, Bedford does not deploy all twelve notes simultaneously, preferring to reveal only a few notes at a time, in varying instrumentation. The discipline imposed by the four chords yields a musical continuity of great suppleness and spontaneity. A similar sleight of hand can be found in the work’s approach to rhythm: a single tempo holds throughout, but just as the harmonic world is revealed only gradually, so the regular pulsing that will come to dominate the work emerges fitfully.

This gradual exposition of pulse and pitch determines Bedford’s approach to the orchestra, which becomes a giant resonating chamber for chords and melodic fragments made from (ever wilder) arpeggiation of the background harmony. The piece creates its own acoustic. Once a regular pulse is established (by timpani and a variety of percussion), Rode with Darkness proceeds inexorably with increasingly intense climaxes signalling the modulation from one skeleton chord to the next until all resonant orchestral texture is suddenly bled dry at this disturbing work’s conclusion.

© Christopher Austin