By Charlotte Higgins - The Guardian - London, U.K.Monday, June 11, 2007
Composer John Tavener tells Charlotte Higgins how his life-changing encounter with an Apache medicine man led him to write a piece praising Allah: 'The Beautiful Names'
The Beautiful Names is premiered at Westminster Cathedral, London, on June 19 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and John-Mark Ainsley under Jiri Behlolavek.
John Tavener does not fit into his surroundings. This tall, etiolated, sunbaked 63-year-old with lanky shoulder-length blond hair, dressed in white linen trousers and shirt, looks as if he would be more appropriately placed in a setting of either John Pawson-style minimalism or byzantine, gilded splendour.
Not in a Dorset farmhouse with chickens in the garden, wellies on the bootstand, squashy sofas in the sitting room and a flatscreen telly. This is, after all, the composer of the night-long meditational piece The Veil of the Temple; and Song for Athene, which was performed at Diana's funeral and confirmed him as a household name.
He is the composer, in other words, of deeply spiritual, otherworldly, heartfelt, heartstopping music. Or bland, populist, new-age pap - depending on your point of view.
The next big moment for Tavener is the premiere of a large-scale piece for chorus and orchestra. It has been commissioned by the Prince of Wales, with whom he became friends more than a decade ago "because we share views on the importance of all religious traditions".
Again, what you will make of this one depends on your point of view. It's called The Beautiful Names, and it's a setting of the 99 names for Allah from the Qur'an. It's going to be performed in the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral next week, then a few days later in Istanbul.
Tavener is Greek Orthodox, to which he converted years ago after a Presbyterian upbringing.
You could see The Beautiful Names as a moving congruence of disparate religions in difficult times. Or then again, you could you assign it to roughly the same category as talking to your plants or having a manservant charge your toothbrush. I should be upfront here: my inclination is to go with the latter view.
Tavener, though, is fantastically disarming. When he starts talking about his music being written through divine agency and having visions brought on by chatting to Apache medicine men and what a bad idea the Enlightenment was, part of you wants to snort with derision.
The other part realises that, however batty it all sounds, he means it, and it's real for him. If a sense of conviction is a defence these days (and according to Tony Blair, it is), then at least you can say of Tavener: it's not phoney.
In recent years he has begun to broaden his spiritual horizons, he tells me over tea in the garden. "The path I follow is still an Orthodox path," he says.
"You have to follow a path, otherwise it becomes a little bit new-age, a bit of this, a bit of that ... But I suppose I had a dream vision after a visit from an Apache Indian medicine man. Many people when they've met American Indians have very strong dreams afterwards. I had a kind of vision from the Sufi Frithjof Schuon, who was a believer in the inner transcendent unity of all religions. And he seemed to be giving me permission, in a way, to work musically within other traditions. It wasn't that the Christian thing was failing me in any way, but rather that it enriched it by going into other things, particularly Hinduism and Sufism."
He is planning a choral piece called The Flood of Beauty, a setting of a 9th-century Sanskrit poem that "shows God in the feminine aspect, as beauty". There's also the premiere in Zurich this year of a Mass for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. In his note on the piece, he writes: "I have used Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, Aramaic, Greek, American Indian, German and Italian to express something of the divine effulgence of the feminine that the Mother of God has revealed to my soul."
(...)
The inspiration behind the work, behind the music, comes straight from God, Tavener believes; and it is the beauty of nature, and the world, that engenders his belief in the divine.
"When something extraordinary happens to me - or it doesn't have to be extraordinary, I mean if you see a wonderful sunset or plunge into the sea and swim - my immediate reaction has always been, and is even more so now, thank God for this.
The music is something outside myself, that's also inside myself ... Music and a sense of another presence always went hand in hand. Even when I was three, I would improvise music, and my maternal grandfather would act as an audience and used to applaud. I would imitate things like thunder and rain."
[picture: Allah is the all-inclusive Name of God;
calligraphy from:
M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen
Asma'ulHusna, The 99 Beautiful Names of Allah
The Fellowship Press, Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A.
Westminster Cathedral's bell tower;
photo from: A Pitkin Cathedral Guide
ISBN 0-85372-674-4]
Composer John Tavener tells Charlotte Higgins how his life-changing encounter with an Apache medicine man led him to write a piece praising Allah: 'The Beautiful Names'
The Beautiful Names is premiered at Westminster Cathedral, London, on June 19 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and John-Mark Ainsley under Jiri Behlolavek.
John Tavener does not fit into his surroundings. This tall, etiolated, sunbaked 63-year-old with lanky shoulder-length blond hair, dressed in white linen trousers and shirt, looks as if he would be more appropriately placed in a setting of either John Pawson-style minimalism or byzantine, gilded splendour.
Not in a Dorset farmhouse with chickens in the garden, wellies on the bootstand, squashy sofas in the sitting room and a flatscreen telly. This is, after all, the composer of the night-long meditational piece The Veil of the Temple; and Song for Athene, which was performed at Diana's funeral and confirmed him as a household name.
He is the composer, in other words, of deeply spiritual, otherworldly, heartfelt, heartstopping music. Or bland, populist, new-age pap - depending on your point of view.
The next big moment for Tavener is the premiere of a large-scale piece for chorus and orchestra. It has been commissioned by the Prince of Wales, with whom he became friends more than a decade ago "because we share views on the importance of all religious traditions".
Again, what you will make of this one depends on your point of view. It's called The Beautiful Names, and it's a setting of the 99 names for Allah from the Qur'an. It's going to be performed in the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral next week, then a few days later in Istanbul.
Tavener is Greek Orthodox, to which he converted years ago after a Presbyterian upbringing.
You could see The Beautiful Names as a moving congruence of disparate religions in difficult times. Or then again, you could you assign it to roughly the same category as talking to your plants or having a manservant charge your toothbrush. I should be upfront here: my inclination is to go with the latter view.
Tavener, though, is fantastically disarming. When he starts talking about his music being written through divine agency and having visions brought on by chatting to Apache medicine men and what a bad idea the Enlightenment was, part of you wants to snort with derision.
The other part realises that, however batty it all sounds, he means it, and it's real for him. If a sense of conviction is a defence these days (and according to Tony Blair, it is), then at least you can say of Tavener: it's not phoney.
In recent years he has begun to broaden his spiritual horizons, he tells me over tea in the garden. "The path I follow is still an Orthodox path," he says.
"You have to follow a path, otherwise it becomes a little bit new-age, a bit of this, a bit of that ... But I suppose I had a dream vision after a visit from an Apache Indian medicine man. Many people when they've met American Indians have very strong dreams afterwards. I had a kind of vision from the Sufi Frithjof Schuon, who was a believer in the inner transcendent unity of all religions. And he seemed to be giving me permission, in a way, to work musically within other traditions. It wasn't that the Christian thing was failing me in any way, but rather that it enriched it by going into other things, particularly Hinduism and Sufism."
He is planning a choral piece called The Flood of Beauty, a setting of a 9th-century Sanskrit poem that "shows God in the feminine aspect, as beauty". There's also the premiere in Zurich this year of a Mass for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. In his note on the piece, he writes: "I have used Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, Aramaic, Greek, American Indian, German and Italian to express something of the divine effulgence of the feminine that the Mother of God has revealed to my soul."
(...)
The inspiration behind the work, behind the music, comes straight from God, Tavener believes; and it is the beauty of nature, and the world, that engenders his belief in the divine.
"When something extraordinary happens to me - or it doesn't have to be extraordinary, I mean if you see a wonderful sunset or plunge into the sea and swim - my immediate reaction has always been, and is even more so now, thank God for this.
The music is something outside myself, that's also inside myself ... Music and a sense of another presence always went hand in hand. Even when I was three, I would improvise music, and my maternal grandfather would act as an audience and used to applaud. I would imitate things like thunder and rain."
[picture: Allah is the all-inclusive Name of God;
calligraphy from:
M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen
Asma'ulHusna, The 99 Beautiful Names of Allah
The Fellowship Press, Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A.
Westminster Cathedral's bell tower;
photo from: A Pitkin Cathedral Guide
ISBN 0-85372-674-4]
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