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John Tavener
1944 - present
John Tavener is perhaps Britain's most widely respected and successful contemporary composer, yet he has little to do with the highly conventional world of contemporary classical music.
Life and Music
- An avant-garde rebel in his youth, his work has become less and less 'modern' as the years have passed; and yet increasingly he seems to be providing a foretaste of the music of the 21st century.
- Tavener has always had a good relationship with his public, ever since his early succès de scandale, The Whale, first performed at the London Sinfonietta's inaugural concert in 1968, when the composer was only 23.
- The Protecting Veil for cello and strings spent several months at number one in the classical charts and won a Gramophone award in 1992 for best contemporary recording.
- Tavener's contribution to the funeral of Diana the Princess of Wales was Song for Athene, an exquisite short piece originally written after the death of a Greek girl in a road accident and later retitled 'Alleluia. May Flights of Angels Sing Thee to Thy Rest'. It brought him closer to 'stardom' than he'd ever come before.
- With titles like Credo (1961) and Genesis (1962) among his first works, it’s clear there was a Christian element from the start.
- In his work Fall and Resurrection, he uses a passage of ferociously complicated music, covering every stave of the manuscript score with a blizzard of notes, to symbolise Chaos. "All traditions that I know of associate complexity with evil," he says with a wry smile. Which must explain the economy of musical means of works like Innocence (1995) for soprano and cello solo, chorus and organ.
- As a student in the Sixties he listened to Messiaen and Boulez and the other fashionable eggheads of serialism, but he has little time for any of them now.
- He once hurled a volume of Beethoven piano sonatas on to the floor in frustration at the great man's godlessness. "Beethoven is perhaps the supreme example of humanism in music but it has nothing, nothing to do with Christianity," he insists.
- His connection with tradition came later, when after a personal crisis he spent time in the monasteries of Mount Athos immersing himself in the theology and music of the Orthodox Church. He describes it now as "a sensation of homecoming".
- Tavener would almost rather listen to the sacred Indian music of the druped, the trance-inducing music of the Sufis, the guttural chants of the American Indians, or the strange, stark church music of Byzantium than anything from the European classical canon.
- Tavener was born in 1944 and brought up in a big, musical North London family. It was a Presbyterian upbringing, and what he enjoyed most as a child was playing the organ for church services and family singalongs.
- Tavener had an "idyllic" childhood, just as the Taveners' own children - Theodora and Sophia.
- It is hard to believe, now that he's so much a family man and a 'success', that Tavener once contemplated retiring altogether from the materialist society of the West.
- He continues to negotiate the common ground between spirituality and sound, between the priests and people. It's a position from which he feels that he may be able to do some good.
Did you know?
In 1997 Svyati for cello and choir was nominated for a Mercury Music Prize alongside the likes of the Spice Girls and Primal Scream.
