Tavener: Christian Composer, Inspired by Allah’s 99 Names

NYT
June 17, 2007
Music
Christian Composer, Inspired by Allah’s 99 Names
By MICHAEL WHITE

CHILDE OKEFORD, England

FOR anyone in Britain and for millions of television viewers elsewhere, a defining image of the year 1997 was the aerial view of the coffin of Diana, Princess of Wales, inching through the darkness of Westminster Abbey. And the defining soundtrack to that image was a stark lament sung by the abbey choir that captured the moment with heart-stopping potency.

Overnight the worldwide exposure of “Song for Athene” transformed John Tavener from a distinguished classical composer into a public figure. New fans registered his odd appearance: tall and thin, with long hair parted in the middle and the ’60s-pop-star look of shirts unbuttoned to the navel. He was re-evaluated. He was knighted. And for many he became almost a spiritual guide: All his work was steeped in Christianity. Or, as he liked to say, “primordial tradition.”

Although English-born and -bred, Mr. Tavener, 63, turned in the 1970s to Eastern Orthodoxy, mirroring its stark, sluggish severity and tonal structures in his music, which, like his conversation, came with allusions to St. Dionysus the Areopagite, St. Gregory of Nyassa and other blissfully obscure divines. His scores bore titles like “Diodia,” “Apocalypse” and “Agraphon.” And being slow, spare and repetitive, they earned him the affectionate but slightly mocking label Holy Minimalist, a term that survivors of his three-hour “Resurrection” or seven-hour “Veil of the Temple” might challenge.

Most of his output these days tends toward the huge, praising God across long time spans with enormous forces in vast spaces: more events than concerts. And the event to have its premiere in Westminster Cathedral on Tuesday could be considered one more example, but it does something likely to unsettle Mr. Tavener’s devotees. Instead of Christian words it sets a text from the Koran.

Given the times, this is newsworthy, and variants on “Tavener Goes Muslim” headlines have already surfaced in the British press, along with items that report his loss of faith and disenchantment with the Christian church. None of which is true.

But for Mr. Tavener to have written “The Beautiful Names,” a meditation on the 99 names of Allah, commissioned by no less than Prince Charles, for performance in a Roman Catholic cathedral does raise certain issues. For one, the charge of opportunism. For another, the risk that Muslims, who don’t exactly value music in worship, might not be appreciative.

“Well, if you look at it like that,” Mr. Tavener muttered in his endearingly distracted way recently, “I suppose it could be a can of worms I’m opening. I’ve no idea what Muslims will make of it. I haven’t really asked. But right after the London premiere, it’s being done in Istanbul, and no one seems to have raised any objection there.

“All I can say is, it’s a wonderful text — basically a list of names, some of majesty, some of mercy — that I’ve set as theophanies: as soundings-forth on the nature of the divine, with music that reflects their meaning. The Beneficent, the Opener, the Subtle. ...”

And the Dangerous?

“Yes, that’s one of the names. The Koran can be quite fierce at times. Not that I’ve read it all, or in the original Arabic. That’s beyond me. But I have a brother who’s a Sufi, and he finds God in the Koran in ways he can’t in the Bible. A loving God. That’s there as well.”

The matter-of-factness with which Mr. Tavener talks about his brother the Sufi is disarming, since the Tavener family is in every other respect quintessentially English middle-class business stock: respectable, patrician, people who drive vintage Jaguars and Bentleys. There is one of each parked on the grounds of Mr. Tavener’s home, a comfortably disordered farmhouse by the parish church in an attractive Wiltshire village, with (when I was there) what looked like several years’ supply of cat food piled up in the hallway. It’s the stuff of Country Life magazine. Or Horse and Hound.

But enter the barn, and you discover that it has been turned into the kind of Orthodox chapel you would more likely find on a Greek hillside. Enter the stables, and you see the huge American Indian powwow drum that appears with regularity these days in Mr. Tavener’s works. It all contributes to the incongruity of a contemporary composer who with some justification considers himself “rather radical” for writing music that echoes the distant past. A composer who, like Bach, devotes his life and work to God but who keeps the pop-star look.

In a sense the unbuttoned shirts pay homage to the past. Mr. Tavener first came to attention with a noisily iconoclastic entertainment called “The Whale,” which was first performed at the debut concert of the London Sinfonietta in 1968 and was seized on by the Beatles, who had started dabbling in the avant-garde. Recorded on their Apple label, it propelled the young Mr. Tavener into fashionably swinging circles.

Then along came Orthodoxy, with a vengeance. Always drawn to Christianity, Mr. Tavener spent his youth playing the organ in a Presbyterian church and programmed spiritual content into early works: even “The Whale,” which was built around the biblical story of Jonah. But his discovery of the Orthodox faith concentrated all that into an artistic identity. And with the zeal of a convert he became, as he now says, “dramatically” Orthodox.

His works were not for entertainment; they were “icons”: musical correlatives of timeless, emotionally impassive Byzantine portraiture, conceived as aids to prayer and windows on the world beyond. Mr. Tavener dismissed the idea of progress or development as meaningless; all art had reached perfection in “primordial” times, so everything the modern West had produced — even the spiritually motivated West of Bach and Bruckner — was in error.

And he morphed into a cultural ayatollah: popular with general audiences who were pleased to find a “serious” composer writing music that was easy to absorb, but isolated among his professional peers.

“It bothers me,” he said, “that I don’t really have any composer friends. It would be nice if I did.” But maybe the time is approaching. As “The Beautiful Names” makes clear, Mr. Tavener has changed. He hasn’t abandoned Orthodoxy. He remains devotedly Christian. But his mind and ears have opened out.

“I reached a point where everything I wrote was terribly austere and hidebound by the tonal system of the Orthodox Church,” he said, “and I felt the need, in my music at least, to become more universalist: to take in other colors, other languages.”

It was a gradual process in which his devotion to the East as the true source of God-centered art began to absorb elements of Hinduism, Islam, even Shamanism. But it was specifically during composition of “The Veil of the Temple” — his 2003 all-night vigil, first performed at the Temple Church in London before a reduced version at the Lincoln Center Festival — that a defining event occurred.

Mr. Tavener had, he says, a vision. And in the same unremarkable way that he talks about his brother the Sufi, he explains that his vision involved a visit from an Apache medicine man. “I’d been looking everywhere for this big powwow drum, a wonderfully primordial sound, to use in ‘The Veil,’ and a friend rang me up to say she’d found one and would bring it over. When she came, she brought the medicine man too. I think he’d been performing healing ceremonies at Stonehenge or something like that. And after he’d gone, I had a visionary dream, which I’m told is common after contact with such people who have a purity and intensity that Western man has lost.”

The dream, Mr. Tavener said, was a visitation, from the spirit of the mystical philosopher Frithjof Schuon. And what Schuon told Mr. Tavener was, in two words, loosen up. Be open, musically at least, to other possibilities.

A simpler, more straightforward reading of what happened might just be that here was a composer in his 60s softening with age. When I suggested this, he smiled good-naturedly and said, “It’s possible.” During his hard-line years he faced successive crises: serious illness, serious drinking, serious demons. Now his life is settled, brought to order by a lovingly no-nonsense, younger wife, his second, and the arrival of a third child. “I’ve become a peaceful family man,” he said. “It helps.”

Whatever the reason, he is no longer “dramatically” Orthodox or anti-Western. He listens to Bach with pleasure. He plays it on the organ of the church next door, which he happily tells you is the instrument on which Arthur Sullivan composed “Onward Christian Soldiers.” And primordial tradition?

“Well, it’s important,” Mr. Tavener said, “but you have to find a way of honoring it that communicates with modern man. It used to be a sort of tyranny for me. Now I feel free to wander further, so long as it makes metaphysical sense.”

His wandering into the Koran has taken time. According to the score “The Beautiful Names” was written several years ago. Has he been sitting on it, hesitating while political events unfolded?

No, he says. It has simply taken that long to fit together the large forces the piece requires, which include the Westminster Cathedral Choir, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (strategically placed in different parts of the building), the baritone soloist John Mark Ainsley and of course the powwow drum, which is ceremonially struck every 99 beats: one beat for every name.

Essential now to Mr. Tavener’s sound world, the drum will also surface in his next big work: an orchestral “Mass of the Immaculate Conception” that has its premiere in Zurich in December and travels to St. Thomas Church in Manhattan next spring. Congregants may be surprised to hear invocations to Hindu goddesses inserted into the Latin text. “A bit of a stir,” Mr. Tavener predicted.

So far there are no plans for the drum in what he is working on now: a comparatively modest hymn for the queen, intended, he says, to address the dearth of good new hymns since Ralph Vaughan Williams but also signaling his close connection with the royal family.

That Prince Charles was eager to commission “The Beautiful Names” is understandable in someone who has spiritual interests at least as exotic (some would say eccentric) as Mr. Tavener’s, and the prince has floated the idea of changing his monarchic title Defender of the Faith to the subtly more inclusive Defender of Faith. The two men have much in common: not least, a maverick, mockable sincerity that people laugh at from a distance but find curiously compelling face to face.

But the prince doesn’t put his money where his heart is. When I brazenly asked Mr. Tavener how much he had been paid for the commission, the answer was ... nothing. “That’s not how it works,” he said. “He gets somebody else to write the check. For this it was a lady from Japan, but I forget her name.”

Presumably it is beautiful.