[wvns] Composer Inspired by Allah's Beautiful Names
Christian Composer, Inspired by Allah's 99 Names
By MICHAEL WHITE
CHILDE OKEFORD, England
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/arts/music/17whit.html
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.
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