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A guide to John Tavener's music

In tribute to John Tavener, who has died aged 69, here's a brief guide to his music, in a piece
originally published earlier this year
Tom Service
Tuesday 19 February 2013 16.15GMT

Whatever you think about works such as the tragically popular (in the sense of its baleful
use at the most famous royal funeral of recent memory) Song for Athene, or his cello
concerto The Protecting Veil, which Steven Isserlis made one of the most beloved
contemporary pieces of the late 20th century, John Tavener's music is not reducible to
one-dimensional labels such as "holy minimalism".
That kind of categorisation suggests that Tavener's work is only ever an escape from the
modern world and a retreat from and rejection of the achievements and sounds of
musical modernism. If you've only heard Song for Athene, you might not think that its
composer would be much of a fan of Anton Webern or Elliott Carter. But after Carter's
death Tavener wrote in these pages: "He did something no other modernist has ever
achieved. He, in the last 10 years of his life, seemed to rid modernism of all its angst,
creating sparkling edifices of joy and beauty, like the Flute Concerto and Dialogues for
Piano and Chamber Orchestra. From a composer's point of view, he was an absolute
master - and he did it better than any of us." In Webern, Tavener hears a crystalline
meditation on musical material that transcends the composer's ego; qualities he has
found also in the lucid music of Stravinsky's late, serial period, as well as the radiant
musical spirit of Olivier Messiaen.
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What all of these enthusiasms have in common, from Tavener's point of view, is an
attempt to find a musical objectivity, a sense of letting the material achieve a life that has
its own internal energy, something outside the composer's subjectivity or "angst". That's
Tavener's main critique of some 20th century music (indeed, music in general): he
identifies a morbid, decadent subjectivity as the driving force behind much of the avantgarde and the expressionism that preceded it. There's a parallel with Tavener's spiritual
life in this essential view: for much of his life an Orthodox Christian (although he has
recently spoken of every religion being as "senile as one another"), his ideal relationship
with his spirituality as it's expressed in his music is that he should be a channel through
which the music flows, with as little impediment from the predilections of his own
personality as possible. "I wanted to produce music that was the sound of God. That's
what I have always tried to do." That's language that's liable to alienate non-religious
listeners, but what it's really about is a striving to release his music from the mundanities
of his own consciousness. You hear the results of that attempt on the grandest and
gentlest scale in The Veil of The Temple from 2003, a seven-hour-long cycle for choir
that's a combination of liturgical vigil and spiritual epic, as well as a test of stamina for
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the singers, the players, and the posteriors of the audience.

Compare that piece to the music that shot Tavener to fame in the late 1960s, and you
might think they're by different composers. In his mid-20s, Tavener symbolised what
must have seemed like a visionary coming-together of the pop and classical musical
avant-gardes. In 1968, his gleefully postmodernist cantata The Whale was the first piece
played by the-then young turks of new-music performance, the London Sinfonietta, and
it was then released in 1970 on The Beatles' Apple record label. ("I was less surprised at
John Lennon's enthusiasm, but I was surprised at Ringo's".) The piece is a riotous
recreation of the story of Jonah and the Whale. There's a narrator, there are electronic
sounds, there's bestial - or rather cetacean - improvisation from the choir, there are
football rattles and a whip, there's serialism, crunching dissonance, and loud-hailers.
"The Whale is a piece written by an angry young man", Tavener said in 2004. "I was
angry because the world didn't see the cosmos in metaphysical terms. I was also angry
because what I saw of so-called classical music in those days was very po-faced. I wrote
The Whale as a reaction in a way. The piece is very fantastical." Tavener's musical
maximalism continued throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, in pieces such as Celtic
Requiem, with its Irish folk tunes, electric guitars, and children's songs, and his opera for
the Covent Garden, Thrse.
What's surprising when you hear pieces like The Whale or Ultimos Ritos, a sprawling
fresco of the "last rites" is not just the sounds they make, it's their aesthetic of openeared inclusion that's so striking. It's all markedly different from a choral piece such as
The Lamb, which like so many of Tavener's dozens of choral pieces, seems to embody an
aesthetic of excluding any superfluous sound and fury in its simplicity, its slowness and
stillness, and above all, its harmonic attractiveness and consonance. For some, that turn
to the musical terra cognita of diatonic harmony (one without the novel structural
underpinning of a technique such as Arvo Prt's tintinnabulation) makes Tavener a
pseudo-spiritual sell-out, writing music whose "transcendence" is nothing of the sort,
but rather a cheaply achieved audience manipulation.
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But it's not that straightforward, and certainly not in the music that Tavever has written
in recent years. At its most affecting, Tavener's work isn't about trying to fill your ears
and your body with a cynically achieved ethereality, it's about giving the listener the
space to create his or her own sense of private contemplation. That's still not going to
work for some listeners, who still hear Tavener only as a badge of that which makes us
most wretched; that's to say, humanity's belief in its own wretchedness, as if the human
condition were something we had to escape rather than celebrate.
Yet Tavener's recent music has accommodated both a greater range of thinking than his
Orthodox-inspired works of the 1980s and 1990s (The Beautiful Names, for example, is a
setting of the 99 names for Allah that are found in the Koran), and a renewed interest in a
more modernist style of dissonance and conflict. And as you'll find in The Protecting Veil
there's more in this music than merely a rapt penitential radiance. In fact, there's a
numinous wildness in Tavener's stratospheric writing for the solo cello, and the blazing
intensity of the textures he finds from the string orchestra. As a composer who
genuinely became a major cultural figure in the country's consciousness, Tavener is
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unique in the story of post-war British music; his music deserves and repays hearing and
re-hearing with ears and minds as open as his have always been.

Five key links

The Whale
The Protecting Veil
The Lamb
Funeral Canticle
Eternity's Sunrise
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