{"id":1393,"date":"2007-06-18T00:42:50","date_gmt":"2007-06-18T00:42:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/06\/tavener-still-orthodox.html"},"modified":"2007-06-18T00:42:50","modified_gmt":"2007-06-18T00:42:50","slug":"tavener-still-orthodox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/06\/tavener-still-orthodox.html","title":{"rendered":"Tavener: Still Orthodox"},"content":{"rendered":"

As blogged before, Sir John Tavener’s piece The Beautiful Names<\/em>, will premiere at Westminster Cathedral in London on Tuesday. The piece is a subject of controversy, although as I wrote before, after reading descriptions of the piece<\/a>, no matter what objections you might have regarding its performance in a Catholic church, it doesn’t strike me at all as any kind of pandering to Islam. In fact it seems as if some Muslims would not be thrilled with the piece at all. <\/p>\n

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The Beautiful Names came to me as a vision. I contemplated the meaning of each of the 99 names, as well as the sacred sound of the Arabic, and the music appeared to me spontaneously. The music that came to me was neither chaotic or random but seemed always to have an inner logic, that related often to \u201ccosmic music\u201d or Music of the Spheres. I decided quite early on to base the structure of the work on the sevenfold constitution of man, as taught by Hindu philosophy. This causes the main sections of the work to be arranged on three conjunct triads.<\/p>\n

1. D ATMA The Absolute
2. B BUDDHA Being
3. G MANUS Matter
4. E KAMA RUPA Life
5. C LINGA SHARIRA Soul
6. A PRANA Life
7. F SHULA SHARIRA Matter
8. D ATMA The Absolute
9. D ATMA The Absolute<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Today, the NYTimes ran a piece on Tavener, correcting the impression left by some previous articles that he had moved beyond Orthodoxy. Apparently not, but his vision is certainly unique. <\/a><\/p>\n

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As \u201cThe Beautiful Names\u201d makes clear, Mr. Tavener has changed. He hasn\u2019t abandoned Orthodoxy. He remains devotedly Christian. But his mind and ears have opened out.<\/p>\n

\u201cI reached a point where everything I wrote was terribly austere and hidebound by the tonal system of the Orthodox Church,\u201d he said, \u201cand I felt the need, in my music at least, to become more universalist: to take in other colors, other languages.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cThe Veil of the Temple\u201d \u2014 his 2003 all-night vigil, first performed at the Temple Church in London before a reduced version at the Lincoln Center<\/a> Festival \u2014 that a defining event occurred.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI\u2019d been looking everywhere for this big powwow drum, a wonderfully primordial sound, to use in \u2018The Veil,\u2019 and a friend rang me up to say she\u2019d found one and would bring it over. When she came, she brought the medicine man too. I think he\u2019d been performing healing ceremonies at Stonehenge or something like that. And after he\u2019d gone, I had a visionary dream, which I\u2019m told is common after contact with such people who have a purity and intensity that Western man has lost.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cIt\u2019s possible.\u201d 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. \u201cI\u2019ve become a peaceful family man,\u201d he said. \u201cIt helps.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whatever the reason, he is no longer \u201cdramatically\u201d 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 \u201cOnward Christian Soldiers.\u201d And primordial tradition?<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, it\u2019s important,\u201d Mr. Tavener said, \u201cbut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

His wandering into the Koran has taken time. According to the score \u201cThe Beautiful Names\u201d was written several years ago. Has he been sitting on it, hesitating while political events unfolded?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Essential now to Mr. Tavener\u2019s sound world, the drum will also surface in his next big work: an orchestral \u201cMass of the Immaculate Conception\u201d that has its premiere in Zurich in December and travels to St. Thomas Church in Manhattan (Episcopal) <\/em>next spring. Congregants may be surprised to hear invocations to Hindu goddesses inserted into the Latin text. \u201cA bit of a stir,\u201d Mr. Tavener predicted.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As blogged before, Sir John Tavener’s piece The Beautiful Names, will premiere at Westminster Cathedral in London on Tuesday. The piece is a subject of controversy, although as I wrote before, after reading descriptions of the piece, no matter what objections you might have regarding its performance in a Catholic church, it doesn’t strike me…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nTavener: Still Orthodox - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/06\/tavener-still-orthodox.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tavener: Still Orthodox - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As blogged before, Sir John Tavener’s piece The Beautiful Names, will premiere at Westminster Cathedral in London on Tuesday. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}