It’s been a big year for composer Jeff Beal.
In September he won an Emmy Award for Netflix’s House of Cards, for original dramatic score for a series; he was also nominated for original main title theme for the CBS miniseries The Dovekeepers.
And November 15 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, his work The Salvage Men, a co-commission of the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the London-based Eric Whitacre Singers, will receive its U.S. premiere on the Chorale concert program “Made in L.A.” The composition had its world premiere in London in March.
Beal, who had previously won three Emmys – for USA’s Monk and TNT’s The Company and Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King – decided to write a choral piece at the urging of his wife Joan, a former member of the Chorale.
“My wife had been nudging me for years to write for the Master Chorale, knowing what a great group they are,” he recalls. “She wanted me to write for voices.”
Another wife then became involved: Elissa Johnston, a singer and the wife of Chorale artistic director Grant Gershon. “We ran into Elissa at a record session,” Beal recounts. “She came to our house and I asked her about meeting with Grant. It turned out they were both big House of Cards fans.” And voila! A commission was born.
Beal later ran into Eric Whitacre, a noted U.S. composer-conductor who heads a London vocal ensemble bearing his name, and who had unknowingly played a significant role in Beal’s life.
Beal was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2007, and that night put on a Whitacre recording, Cloudburst, which calmed him. “I told him how much his music meant to me,” Beal relates. “He said, ‘Why don’t we make it a co-commission?’”
The idea behind the nearly-25-minute work, written in five movements for four-part chorus without accompaniment, is, Beal says, that “I wanted to confront what had happened to me. I wanted to write a piece that was cathartic. Singing has always been healing.”
The composer’s first inspiration for the work was a poignant letter written by Oscar Wilde, who was imprisoned in London for being homosexual. Called De Profundus, the letter contained Wilde’s musings about imprisonment, suffering, and the responses we choose to suffering. Beal had first become aware of the missive during the time he was scoring the documentary Wilde Salome for director Al Pacino, also in 2007.
“I saw a beautiful way into the piece,” he says. “My idea was to take the text as a springboard and then use something by a contemporary writer. I was looking for something transcendent.”
Through a friend, he discovered the works of former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Kay Ryan, and connected with her. “She’s got a really beautiful sense of spare language, almost like Emily Dickinson,” he observes. “Her poems are short, concise. You need economy when you want to set something to music.”
A small portion of the written-in-despair De Profundus comprises the text of the first movement of The Salvage Men, with four Ryan poems providing the four-movement response.
“How do you respond to what comes at you in life?” Beal describes. “You have a choice: ‘I’m not a victim.’ I wanted to get to the heart of the piece. There is a universality to the human drama we all share, we all go through.”
The title comes from Ryan’s poem of the same name, about those who clear up the mess after a wreck. “You don’t deny the hard stuff,” Beal remarks. “But you can choose how to respond.”
Writing for voices, he adds, “was fun. I like the creative challenge. I like feeling that I’m not safe, the feeling of fear, of ‘How am I going to do this?’ I went to the Chorale, and listened. I felt I had to get the sound of the Master Chorale in my bones. They can do anything. They really excel at delivering text; Grant is passionate about text. I knew I was in good hands.”
Beal likens vocal composition to one aspect of scoring House of Cards: the dialogue is very lyrical.
When he won the Emmy this year, “I was thrilled,” he says. “This was my fourth nomination for the show, but I hadn’t won, and I didn’t expect to win. Besides Joan, I brought David Low, who had played all the cello solos, and his wife, Neli Nikolaeva, a violinist. The best part was being able to share it with them.”
Undoubtedly the premiere of The Salvage Men at Disney Hall will also be thrilling; the London premiere, in the Union Chapel, was “pretty incredible. I was sitting in the church with Joan, and with the first lines, we were bawling.”
The church was small and intimate, with about 20 singers; there will be 60 singers at Disney Hall, which seats almost 2300 people.
“I wanted to write a cathartic piece and I wanted people to feel the catharsis,” Beal says. “I felt better when I finished writing it.”
