Listening to the opening trumpet fanfare of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is to step across a threshold. Its call is declarative, commanding attention, almost challenging the listener: you are about to witness something immense. Decades and continents away, Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s thunderous opening in the Symphonic Suite Akira evokes a similar sensation—a flash of elemental sound signaling entry into ritual space, a sonic invitation to stand at the edge of human comprehension. Two works from completely different worlds, yet moving through what feels like the same structural and emotional architecture.
And it is here, at this threshold, that the parallel begins—not in style, genre, or historical influence, but in function. Both works confront the listener with forces that exceed human measure, only to bring us back, briefly, to what we can understand, inhabit, and act within.
Threshold
In both the Missa Solemnis and the Symphonic Suite Akira, the opening signal marks the entrance into ritual. Beethoven’s trumpet peal is ceremonial and formal, imbued with grandeur and expectation. In Akira, the peal of thunder does the same: it marks the city, the psychic forces, and the story as beyond ordinary life. These openings function as a gate, suspending the world we know and preparing us for the extraordinary. The listener is dwarfed, aware that what follows will exceed ordinary scale, even before any human action occurs.
Human Scale
Almost immediately, both works pull the listener back into human terms. In Beethoven, the Kyrie is intimate: a pleading, measured human voice asking for mercy. The music is deliberate, breathing, almost hesitant. In Akira, Kaneda’s battle against the clowns is kinetic, muscular, fast, and precise. Both passages remind us of human presence. This is not yet the realm of divine or cosmic transformation—it is the realm of bodies, reflexes, and human consciousness.
The contrast between threshold and human scale is vital. The music shrinks not to de-escalate, but to re-anchor the listener. It allows humans to act, breathe, and respond. Beethoven’s voice and Akira’s percussion give us agency and measure, even as the ritual looms.
Embodiment
Both works rely on the body—not just as performer, but as instrument and site of transformation. Beethoven’s choral writing stretches breath, lung capacity, and vocal endurance. Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s techniques—shōmyō, folk polyphony, and kecak-like patterns—require performers’ bodies to act as ritual engines, producing sound through collective breath and synchronized exertion.
The listener’s body is implicated as well: heart rate, breath, and tension shift in response. These works do not merely depict transformation; they enact it physically, through bodies in motion and bodies in resonance.
Awe and Terror
Then comes the rupture. After re-establishing human scale, both works confront forces beyond it. In Akira, the transformation sequence dissolves bodies, identities, and cities into psychic excess. Tetsuo grows beyond containment, tearing at the fabric of his environment. Beethoven, in contrast, presents awe through the presence of the divine: harmonies stretch, counterpoint thickens, and the listener is reminded that humans exist under laws they cannot control.
In both cases, awe is not consoling. Terror arises from proximity and exposure. The listener is no longer merely observing—they are in the presence of something that cannot be reduced to human scale. Here, both works enact tremendum et fascinans: the simultaneous pull and push of awe, attraction and fear.
Collective Voice
A striking parallel is how both works harness the human collective. Beethoven’s choir becomes a single organism, a massed voice transcending individual identity. Geinoh Yamashirogumi is literally a collective—hundreds of performers trained in dozens of vocal traditions, merging into a single ritual body.
In both, the collective voice summons the overwhelming. The many breathe as one, and the listener perceives humanity acting in unison, reinforcing the ritual’s power.
Apotheosis
Awe gives way to apotheosis, an irreversible crossing. In Akira, the transformation is complete: Tetsuo and Akira cease to exist in human terms. The Symphonic Suite renders this through sustained, luminous sonorities and floating choral masses, untethered from human timing. In Beethoven, the Sanctus and Benedictus elevate the divine to full presence. The music no longer addresses humans pleading for mercy—it embodies the divine, saturating the sonic space.
In both cases, apotheosis is not triumph. It is reclassification: human scale is left behind, time and measure suspended, and the listener must witness without control.
Aftermath and Cost
The crossing carries a cost. In Akira, the world is scarred; the boys that were Tetsuo and Akira are gone, and the closing drumbeats mark their removal from human time. It is a benediction to what existed, a farewell to forms no longer contained. In Beethoven, the Dona nobis pacem is undercut by tension: peace is requested, not guaranteed. The human world remains, but the experience of the divine has left its mark.
The aftermath differentiates spectacle from ritual. Encountering forces beyond comprehension is not free; the listener, the world, and the human subjects themselves are permanently altered.
The Listener’s Role
Neither work treats the listener as a mere spectator. The threshold is crossed with them. The awe is experienced through them. The aftermath leaves them holding the weight of what cannot be resolved. These works do not simply present transformation—they initiate the listener into it. The ritual is performed through them.
Unresolved Ending
Neither work concludes neatly. Both refuse resolution. Akira leaves the viewer in a quieted, altered world, aware of what has departed but offering no answers. Beethoven refuses closure through harmonic tension and unresolved plea: peace remains uncertain. This refusal is ethical, not careless. To resolve would domesticate the absolute, pretending mastery where there is none.
Unresolution preserves awe’s integrity, maintaining responsibility and reflection for the listener. The ritual completes not at the end, but as its consequences continue to resonate.
The Secular Sacred
What unites these works is not theology, but function. They create spaces of reverence without requiring belief, enact transformation without invoking metaphysics, and summon awe without promising consolation. They belong to a category that has no formal name: the secular sacred—ritual architecture confronting the overwhelming, without appealing to the supernatural.
Convergence Across Traditions
There is no influence between Beethoven and Geinoh Yamashirogumi. One emerges from Western sacred music; the other from postwar Japanese ritual applied to cinema. Yet the convergence is striking. Both move through a ritual cycle: threshold, human scale, embodiment, awe and terror, collective voice, apotheosis, aftermath, unresolved ending. The cycle is self-evident, arising from human encounters with forces beyond comprehension.
The Symphonic Suite is not conventional film music; it is pure ritual, pure intent. Its cinematic application is incidental. That both works map onto the same experiential architecture suggests certain structural patterns recur whenever humans attempt to process, perform, or witness the extraordinary. Medium, culture, and history differ—but the cycle remains.
Closing Reflection
The power of this comparison lies not in style or period, but in shared ethical and emotional logic. Both works ask the listener to traverse human scale, confront the overwhelming, witness irreversible transformation, and reckon with cost—while leaving closure deliberately open.
These works do more than move the listener: they teach us how to inhabit a world in which the absolute has passed through, without claiming mastery, explanation, or reassurance. The ritual is complete not when the music ends, but when its architecture reshapes perception, leaving awe, cost, and responsibility in its wake.