Sir John Tavener Remembered

'The whale, marine mammal of the order Cetacea.

'They comprise three groups, one Archaeoceti,

'believed to have been derived from the Creodonta,

'the primitive fossil members of the Carnivora.

'Their teeth consist of three incisors....'

Sir John Tavener was unique.

A composer who found wide acclaim both within

and way beyond the classical world.

He had a message, somehow, for the whole world in music.

In a way, his music opens the door to the spiritual.

He just had a sense of drama, he knew how to speak to people.

In this programme, we trace his musical and spiritual odyssey,

through 40 years of BBC archive.

From his early experimental music...

..and highly individual music theatre works....

..to pieces that have become icons of contemporary British culture.

MUSIC: "Song For Athene" by John Tavener

John Tavener believed that his music was dictated directly to him by God.

It's not music that comes from the human intellect.

Not music that comes from the human heart because both are very limited.

But rather something that is revealed to me.

'It has come, literally, from the breath of God.'

Sir John Tavener died on the 12th of November 2013. He was 69 years old.

Tavener wrote music, much of it suffused with

the spirituality of the Orthodox Church and above all choral music,

that many listeners experience as a simple, haunting and consoling gift.

# Gave thee such a tender voice,

# making all the vales rejoice?

# Little lamb,

# who made thee? #

John Kenneth Tavener was born in 1944,

in Wembley Park in suburban north London, the son of a builder.

In 1957, he won a scholarship to Highgate School,

where a fellow pupil was choral composer John Rutter.

I think I first remember meeting John Tavener when he was 13

and I was 12.

He was a year ahead of me at Highgate School, in North London.

He stood out from the crowd because even then

he was well on the way to the six foot six, that he later attained.

Always had a music case in his hand

and seemed somehow to belong to another world.

There was something about him that looked a bit mystical

and intriguing and interesting, even then.

He grew up in a Scottish Presbyterian household,

where faith was fairly austere.

And I think he never wanted to abandon that faith,

but he wanted to find outlets for it, which would have more

sense of theatre and of history and not be so severe and reined in.

My father used to play the organ and my early memories of him

playing those soupy hymn tunes influenced me

in a piece like In Alium, where the

series or matrix of notes is derived from hymn-like material.

John Tavener's music takes us

on a journey far away from his Scottish Presbyterian upbringing.

CHORAL SINGING

His musical and spiritual odyssey started in the contemporary,

modernist, avant-garde style but his love of tradition

and religious ritual was there from the start.

SINGING CONTINUES

In his earliest TV appearances John is gloriously eccentric.

It's a fascinating glimpse into a composer

beginning to find his distinctive voice.

I go for months and months without composing a note.

I feel totally useless at such times.

I cannot reconcile the idea of a profession than that of a composer.

I have no sympathy with the puritanical concept of work

for its own sake, which perhaps portrays a slightly hippy bias.

I started my latest piece, Nomine Jesu, after a four month gap.

It uses five European languages and in the middle

and most complicated section, I bring in Negro and Asiatic languages.

And now, a new piece by John Tavener.

Among the English composers under 30, I think

his music is like a breath of fresh air.

It's not doctrinaire, it's emotional

and it doesn't sound like what I call "the broken biscuit school".

The piece we're going to hear today is Nomine Jesu.

John, why is it called that?

It's based on the word Jesus, the name Jesus.

Erm, which is sung in different languages, many different languages.

It's based on a single musical idea, a single chord.

The instruction I give on the score is "still and sacred"

and I mean sacred, not in a sanctimonious way,

because I believe that the word Jesus spoken in these different

languages does have a magic, sacred significance.

SINGING CONTINUES

In 1970, having been signed up to the Beatle's Apple label,

thanks to his brother, Roger, doing some building work

for Ringo Starr, Tavener was at the height of classical music cool.

Apple records released his chaotic cantata, The Whale.

'The whale, marine mammal of the order Cetacea.

'They comprise three groups, one Archaeoceti...'

The very model of happening, even hippyish British modernism.

I remember the idea of beginning it with a long, boring

commentary on whales from an encyclopaedia came to me in the bath.

I got out of the bath, went down to where my books were and pulled

out the most boring encyclopaedia I could find and looked up the whales.

That's how it started.

I decided I wanted to become a composer

when still a student at the Royal Academy.

The Whale has been more played than any of my music so far.

It's a half hour biblical fantasy based on the story of Jonah.

I finished it here in Tythe Barn,

in the middle of a heat wave, I remember.

I had suddenly had been introduced to modernism and I listened to

Boulez, I listened to Stockhausen,

I listened to Cage and I was very excited by it.

I think I've always associated a certain kind of a sound

with...erm...an element, you know?

Maybe whether it be rain whether it be a thunder storm.

It is not something now, towards the end of my life,

that I can see was an important...

I mean, the style of The Whale was not a direction

that I found eventually my music would go in.

But I loved the experience of writing it and it was a very exciting time.

Over the coming decades his highly individual life

and music would be catalogued and even catalysed by the BBC.

and music would be catalogued and even catalysed by the BBC.

The number of artists who record for the Apple company is small

but successful.

John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney, George Harrison,

Ringo Starr and a composer whose music is unique and quite

unlike the sounds of his fellow recording artists, John Tavener.

We feature a week in the life of John Tavener, his music

and his friends.

CHILDREN CHANT

A great deal of my summer is spent lying on my back in the garden.

I find that I need

a great deal of time to sit,

not necessarily to think

but things tend to grow at subconscious

and I work only in very short spurts

for very short periods of time.

Very intense periods of time but a great deal of the year is spent,

in the summer months anyway, lying on my back in this garden.

Which perhaps my puritanical forefathers

might have disapproved of.

I doubt whether they would have approved of my taste in cars.

I've driven this one for nine months.

And I use it often as a place to think about my work,

driving up and down the motorway.

There's something about the largesse of the car which allows my mind

to expand more freely than it would in a Mini.

I've no time for the romantic attitude that the artist has

to go out and starve.

This week I've been travelling backwards

and forwards to the Little Missenden Festival in Buckinghamshire.

I first became involved with the cultural life of the village

four years ago when I used the local school children in a performance

of my Celtic Requiem, commissioned by the London Sinfonietta.

Which has, incidentally,

given first performances of almost all my works to date.

This week, I'm conducting some of the players

from the London Sinfonietta in a concert for the festival.

I've written a piece for it, In Memoriam Stravinsky.

However, the requiem is the composition

I always associate with the village

and I often think of it when I come here.

Celtic Requiem is based on a liturgical mass and is

played against these children's games, which deal with death.

CHILDREN CHANT

CHURCH BELL RINGS

CHILDREN SING

I'm often surprised by reactions to my music

and by the kind of people who like it too.

I'm very pleased to find...

I usually find a considerable

cross-section of the public seem to appreciate what I'm doing.

A lot of people who like pop music seem to like it.

SOMBRE MUSIC PLAYS

LAUGHTER

The performance ultimately was more accurate than the rehearsal and the

only minor tension of day was with the hand bell ringer who was

reluctant to remove his hat.

The young Tavener was enthralled by the wildness of modernism.

Two, three...

This in turn thrilled TV producers.

This 1973 work was commissioned

especially for television performance.

Do you think composers can be free to call upon their inspiration

under these circumstances?

I wouldn't have done it unless in some degree,

whatever you call it, the angel flapped her wings, as it were.

In 1977, after a profound spiritual crisis,

Tavener turned to the Greek Orthodox Christian Church,

with its ancient traditions of icons, mysticism and sung liturgy.

And that embrace of orthodoxy was a way of letting the voice

of God speak directly through his music, as Tavener put it.

And that musical and spiritual ideal created the radical

and courageous simplicity

and directness that audiences have found so enchanting ever since.

But it was also controversial.

For Tavener's critics, he was reducing his music to

an accompaniment to candles and icons,

a commodified spiritual background music.

But that completely underestimates

and misrepresents the discipline and austerity and objectivity

of the music that Tavener would produce in the coming decades.

SHE SINGS

By the 1980s, his most important spiritual influence was

Mother Thekla, a Greek Orthodox abbess,

who inspired Tavener's work and who lived in monastery in Yorkshire.

It's strange to think that right in the middle of Yorkshire Moors

is situated a Greek Orthodox monastery.

The least expected place that you would imagine to find one.

I'm an Orthodox Christian and I come

to Yorkshire, to the monastery,

as often as I can.

In a way, it's a kind of spiritual home.

The monastery's divided into two parts.

Father Ephraim lives in one part.

He is the priest and he says the Daily Offices, beginning with Matins

at 5 o'clock in the morning, usually said alone for the glory of God.

Not very many Orthodox Christians live in North Yorkshire.

Erm, and then there's the abbess, Mother Thekla, who now lives alone.

Originally there were three.

She really has become a kind of spiritual mother to me.

I mean, we work on texts together, which I set to music.

So, it's one of those very lucky coincidences in life,

not only am I able to unburden my soul to her,

but also we have this artistic collaboration.

For your librettist you need someone who's totally selfless

and she would describe herself as dead to the world.

In 1989, the BBC commissioned him

to write his cello concerto The Protecting Veil.

The soloist was Steven Isserlis

and the piece was a huge popular success.

Here was a richly, yet austerely meditative music that

answered a deep cathartic need in its audience.

I'll try and play it now.

In complete contrast, the middle section is solo cello without

the orchestra at all and right at the bottom and muted.

A mute to make it sound even softer.

The Mother of God lamenting

and then he brings in the middle of this a hymn.

It is this very romantic piece.

It is a hymn to the Mother of God,

but it's like a love song, in a way.

John really was writing from the heart,

and so it was a genuinely touching piece.

I remember somebody wrote to me that her friend was dying of cancer

and the only thing that would comfort her was The Protecting Vale.

I was so touched by that letter.

But also, and he would always be very pleased if I mentioned this,

just from a musical, compositional point of view,

it's the most incredibly original writing for the cello.

I imagine this cello filling the Cathedral of Saint Sophia

in Constantinople.

That slowly breathing space.

One of John's frequent collaborators was the soprano Patricia Rozario.

They met when she sang the title role

in John's music theatre work, Mary Of Egypt.

He always sang his parts.

He had a curious falsetto, which went amazingly high and then

he had this robust lower part to his voice, which was quite terrifying.

HE SINGS

He always talked about the idea of the voice being primordial,

you know, to connect with that emotion and space.

He often wanted the performer to be slightly removed.

So, it didn't allow you to be over-indulgent, he didn't like that.

He would often pick you up and say, you know, "Cut it out.

"Don't try and interpret my music, let it come through you".

You had to get to that level when it just flowed out of you and it was

almost like you were standing back

and letting that mixture of balanced emotion

and sound come through you.

It's about an orthodox saint, Mary of Egypt.

She went into the desert to shed herself

of all the physical experiences

that she had lived in her youth as a prostitute.

And she meets the priest, Zossima.

Although he was a priest and you'd expect him to be very close to God,

I think he was arid inside him.

His spiritual life had reached a very low, dry ebb.

He finds himself in the desert, searching for renewed life.

I think when he meets her, she actually is able

to spark that in him.

to spark that in him.

He is drawn to her as a person, but she sort of rejects him

and makes him aware that it's the spiritual that brings them together,

not the physical.

The music is ecstatic, but it's also quite wild.

There are many layers that you have to go through within yourself

to be released and to be able to sing it the way that he wanted to hear it.

These orthodox-inspired works embody the paradox of Tavener's music.

It's through its rigorous simplicity that it achieves

a genuine sense of ecstasy, of otherworldly being and feeling.

I tried to make an icon of light.

And I framed it with Greek words like phos, which means light.

# Phos... #

I used the string trio to represent the human soul, yearning for God.

# Phos

# Phos

# Phos

# Phos

# Phos. #

In 1997, Tavener's music was nominated for that year's

Mercury Music Prize, including a work called Svyati for solo cello -

Steven Isserlis again - and choir,

singing the words of the Orthodox funeral service.

THEY SING

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

It was also in 1997 that John's music achieved its most iconic moment in global culture

when his Song For Athene was performed at the end of the funeral

of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Good evening. It's been a day like no other.

A day for the people stunned by the news of Diana's death.

And a day that rewrote the rules

about how a grieving nation should react.

More than a million lined the streets of the capital.

A heartfelt and emotional goodbye from her family

and the British people.

John's music voiced with uncanny, empathetic power

the feelings of grief of millions watching the service.

'As the coffin is raised and slowly carried to the Great West Door,

'preceded by the Dean's verger, the Dean and the ivory cross,

'we hear John Tavener's haunting setting of words

'from William Shakespeare's Hamlet with the Orthodox funeral service.

' "Alleluia. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

' "Remember me, O Lord, when you come into your kingdom". '

# Alleluia

# Alleluia

# Remember me

# O Lord

# When you come

# into your kingdom

# Alleluia

# Alleluia

# Give rest

# O Lord

# To your handmaid

# Who has fallen asleep

# Alleluia

# The choir of saints

# Have found the well spring of life

# And door of paradise

# Alleluia

# Life

# A shadow

# And a dream

# Alleluia

# Weeping at the grave

# Creates the song

# Alleluia

# Come

# Enjoy rewards

# Enjoy rewards

# And crowns

# I have

# Prepared

# For you. #

It moves me that that music, which is very simple

It moves me that that music, which is very simple

and very transparent, can have an effect on so many people.

It came about when a friend of my family's -

I didn't know her very well - Athene Hariades,

was killed in a cycling accident.

And I went to her funeral in the Russian Orthodox Church.

And I felt somehow that,

as I've felt often before,

a person, when they die, leaves some kind of gift.

You said something very striking in one of the media interviews you did.

You referred to the one for whom it was originally written - the Princess of Wales -

and you said, "A song written for two women who died prematurely."

Then you paused and said, "Apparently prematurely." What did you mean that that?

I think because I don't believe anything happens by accident,

I think that our death is known already by God.

We don't know this master plan.

It's not for us to know either.

But I don't think death is an accident.

This raises a particularly stark question in terms of your own life,

because you've several times...faced the possibility of death. Yes.

So when you faced, for example, the heart surgery,

you say that you accept that

the time of our death is decided by God. Yes.

Were you totally accepting or were you frightened?

No, I wasn't frightened. Erm...

I mean, I thought I was probably... as Mother Thekla put it,

"You're far too evil to die, darling."

I felt in a sense I'd been given another chance.

Mark Lawson, interviewing the composer in 1998.

Choral music was something intimate, personal,

and above all, accessible for John Tavener.

He wanted his music to be sung by amateur choirs

and to be enjoyed by everybody.

# Many years

# Many

# Years. #

I do feel that as a litmus test for a composer,

if he's a true composer, then he should be able to write music

that amateur choirs should be able to sing.

THEY SING

I think whenever he wrote for choir, he probably felt that he was in

a sense returning home to his early roots,

where he'd been a keen member of the Highgate School Choir.

There's a sense of the voices becoming a family

and becoming spiritual, really.

There's a kind of simplicity that taps into the depth of plain chant

and Russian and Greek Orthodox music.

John had the gift to be simple, which is why his music has always

reached out to such a large public,

of what you might call "ordinary music lovers".

APPLAUSE

Another important moment came with the performance of a new work

in the celebrations in the Millennium Dome,

right on the threshold of the year 2000.

# Let there be respect

# For the Earth

# O, Lord

# Peace for Your people

# O, Lord

# Love in our lives

# Delight in the good

# O, Lord

# Forgiveness for past wrongs

# O, Lord. #

So Tavener's music became the last to be heard

and televised in the old millennium,

but it was also among the first to consecrate the next 1,000 years.

His epic cantata, Fall And Resurrection, was

premiered at St Paul's cathedral on the 4th of January in the year 2000.

It was an attempt,

as the newly knighted Sir John Tavener explained,

to encompass in brief glimpses the events that had taken place

since the beginning of time and before time.

A typically universal ambition.

The music is quite challenging.

It really is difficult and it was one of those pieces where the

soprano part, he really uses the whole range of my voice.

He uses elements of Indian music,

as well as taking it up into the stratosphere in a Western way.

In fact, in the score, there were sections which went unbelievably

low and in rehearsal, he changed his mind, and I was so relieved!

CHURCH BELLS RING

APPLAUSE

'The bells of St Paul's Cathedral ringing out

'and will continue for several hours and in a sense, the music goes on.'

That was quite an amazing experience,

especially being at St Paul's, in the presence of the Prince of Wales.

I think John really believed that his composition was a gift from God.

In 2010, in BBC Four's Sacred Music series, Simon Russell Beale

and the virtuoso choir The Sixteen undertook a major

exploration of Sir John's music.

# In You

# O Woman full of Grace

# The angelic choirs

# And the human race

# All creation rejoices! #

John, can we start with the word "tradition" -

because everything I've read about your music, the word

"tradition" comes up, but I think you mean something quite specific.

I do mean it in a broader sense, in so far as I think the reason

sacred music continues is because people have a thirst for tradition.

They want to see some continuity and I had to become

so soaked in tradition, in Orthodox tradition, I learned a bit about

Indian music, I learned a bit about Arabic music, and various traditions,

to understand how they worked, and then tried to create a style.

Every time we perform John's music,

we have to enter almost into his soul, into his way of thinking.

His music is very still, it's very difficult to sing, actually.

He stretches the limits of each voice,

he takes the basses incredibly low

and the top voice is taken very high, in a very celestial...

Everything is mirroring, basically, the world and heaven and hell.

# And praise be

# To You. #

That leads me on to what this music is for. Who is it for?

Is it for the performers themselves, as an act of worship? Is it for God?

I wouldn't actually be able to go through the act of composing

if I didn't think it was finally for God

that I was doing it, although probably now, sitting

here on the sofa, I think that's probably rather quite naive of me.

THEY SING

Ritual has always been important to me, ever since my father,

when I was three, I remember, brought home pamphlets of cars and as

a three-year-old, I stamped on them,

"Big car, little car, big car, little car, big car, little car, big car,

"little car, big car, little car,"

and I did a ritual dance.

The importance of sacred, was already important to me at three.

# Kyrie eleison

# Kyrie eleison... #

In the mid-1990s,

John's spiritual journey reached out beyond Orthodox Christianity

and he began to explore through his music ideas drawn from Islam,

and he began to explore through his music ideas drawn from Islam,

from Hinduism and from Buddhism.

I think the Orthodox Church points towards the East

and I was born more drawn towards the East and I thought there was

a possibility through music to bring about some kind of unity.

# Shunya

# Shunya

# Shunya. #

Shunya was composed in 2004.

John has said that his intention was to express

a little of the inexpressible and the Sanskrit word "Shunya",

which means void or nothingness, is repeatedly intoned as the piece

unfolds, like a Buddhist ritual over the course of 20 minutes.

# Shunya

# Shunya. #

That really was an idea, to try, in music, rather than in silence,

to represent the idea of nothingness

cos it doesn't go anywhere, Shunya. No, no.

It stands still. That's about the Buddhist concept, really, of nirvana.

So I think I was always journeying towards this.

I don't see any point in writing a silent piece of music,

but I do see a point in the journey towards it.

SINGING CONTINUES

One of the most powerful influences in my life,

and I've not spoken about this before,

was a Presbyterian minister and he told me,

"Life is a creeping tragedy - that's why I must be cheerful," and I

only now at the end of my life begin to understand what he meant by it.

You know, that life is tragic, but there is the other dimension.

The brilliance of Tavener's music is that for so many listeners,

it seems to leave the world permanently, unforgettably altered.

There was a sense in which he was always

searching for a spiritual realm, which he would find through music.

One of the things that we're all hardwired to want is

something spiritual.

And he realised that, I think, at an early age and the spirituality

that has always lain at the heart of his work is profound.

I think his music has a meditative element to it and yet,

he has the ability to make it relevant.

In fact, he said to me, "My music is being played by young

"people at rave parties." He found that quite amusing.

As a composer and as a man, he had an extraordinary effect.

I knew him from the late '80s.

We had our ups and downs, in friendship, definitely.

But then, God, when he died...

You just realise how much he meant to everybody who knew him, really.

You couldn't know him and not care about him.