John Tavener RIP

Where some obituary's tend to simply be a recitation of facts and received critical opinion, the Guardian's obituary of Sir John Tavener seemed to me to be written from the perspective of someone who knew and understood both Tavener's real achievements and what he was seeking to achieve in and through his music:

'... once he had acquired a broadly based audience, his universalist focus continued to result in wonderful works, such as the mass Sollemnitas in Conceptione Immaculata Beatae Mariae Virginis (2006) and the Requiem (2008) for cello, soloists, chorus and orchestra, premiered in Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. Drawing its texts from Sufi poetry, the Catholic Mass, the Koran and Hindu words from the Upanishad, Tavener explained that "the essence of the Requiem is contained in the words 'Our glory lies where we cease to exist'". Like practically all of Tavener's music, it is a story about a "journey" and becoming "one with God".'

In my co-authored book The Secret Chord, Peter Banks and I discuss the popularity of Tavener, Pärt and Górecki in terms of the contrast between movement and stasis noting Martha Ainsworth's argument that 'they reject values typically associated with contemporary classical music.' In traditional classical music the development of musical ideas is expected with this development moving to a climactic denouement. By contrast, the music of these holy minimalists seems not to go anywhere because its overall purpose is contemplation.

Similarly, Nico Muhly writes in The Guardian: 'To study Tavener's music is to immerse oneself in the subtle vocabulary of stillness and slow change.'

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John Tavener - Eternity's Sunrise.

The Rest Is Noise: Politics and Spirituality

After Stalin’s death in 1953, life behind the Iron Curtain slowly began to change – and by the 1970s the Soviet Union under Brezhnev was beginning to modernise. Symbols of the West such as jeans and rock music became popular in Soviet Russia, signalling anew era of cautious thawing of Cold War relations. In the West, the 1970s and ’80s were fast-paced decades – first a recession then economic boom years, where advertising and communications technology rapidly accelerated the pace of modern life.

To counter this materialism, some composers offered a return to spiritual values, and others resorted to overtly political music.

Much of this religious music came from the Soviet Union and its satellite states, where religious belief had been marginalised under the official state atheism. More surprising were the commercial possibilities in this sacred music. The simple, consonant songs of lamentation in Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony unexpectedly sold over a million copies when it was released to commemorate victims of the Holocaust.

No composer exemplified this turn to the sacred more than Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, whose work conveys an intense and profound spirituality. Hans Werner Henze gave voice to oppressed peoples and political radicals such as Cornelius Cardew who tried to sweep aside the bourgeois norms of the musical establishment.

Politics and Spirituality events at the Southbank Centre include:

• Author Karen Armstrong looks back at the global religious landscape of the 1970s and '80s. This period saw increasing secularism in the West and a return to the spiritual in the Communist bloc.
• Author Alain de Botton investigates how spirituality fitted into an increasingly consumerist world.
• Layla Alexander-Garrett, who worked as Andrei Tarkovsky’s translator on set, discusses the work and vision of the great Russian filmmaker with chair Gareth Evans, writer and film curator’
• Composer and presenter John Browne leads a fun and informal workshop on Sofia Gubaidulina's Offertorium on Sunday.
• Gubaidulina's String Quartets Nos.3 & 4 performed by the Ligeti String Quartet.
• Extracts from Cornelius Cardew's Paragraph 5 of The Great Learning by the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and James Weeks.
• Excerpts from Hans Werner Henze's Voices by musicians from the Royal College of Music.
• Film screenings including Solaris, Tarkovsky's psychological space-race drama and Dekalog.

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Sofia Gubaidulina - Offertorium.