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 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.
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 “cosmic music” 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.
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
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 (Episcopal) 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.
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