Death of a Composer

He was one of those lapses—one of those guys I was supposed to listen to one day, one of the composers I was going to get around to hearing. Because for much of the last two or three decades, there wasn’t much time for music, and when there was, it was generally after a dinner with Raf. Not the time you want to be experimenting with music you may or may not like; time instead for music you know will go with the second bottle of wine and the cigar.

So I managed only recently to hear another composer, Henryk Gorécki, whose third symphony everyone—including those normally chilly to classical music—loves. And yes, I had heard Arvo Pärt, especially his Passio; in fact, so mesmerizing or so narcotic is the music that, after a performance, rushing to get to a night shift, I missed the subway train I had taken for years and ended up not at Rush Presbyterian but on the South Side of Chicago.

OK—I’ll toy with you no more: the guy I’m talking about in those first two paragraphs is John Tavener, often lumped with the Estonian Arvo Pärt and the Polish Henryk Gorécki. Why? Because their music has this slow, ethereal, spiritual side that makes you long to be in a student apartment with cheap wine and a joint in your hand. And Tavener fit the bill, since the Beatles featured him on an album. Here’s what The Guardian had to say:

The music Tavener was famous for in the 60s was tumultuous, chaotic, modernist, and radical – another world from the Orthodox-inspired spirituality of his later works. His wacky cantata The Whale was the piece that inaugurated the new-music firebrands of the London Sinfonietta in 1968, and it was also his first release on Apple a couple of years later, with its mix of electronics, football rattles, serialism, crunching dissonance, and even a whip.

It may be the whip, but the description alone had me running for Mozart. And then Tavener got religion, this time in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church. So then the music changed; here, from The New York Times, is his account of what happened:

“I stopped composing,” he said, “and I listened to Indian music, Persian music, all music from the Middle East. I listened to American Indian music. I listened to any music that was based on traditional ideas. That’s when I started to question what on earth happened to this Western civilization and why the sacred seems to have been pushed out gradually by the domination of the ego.”

In fact, Tavener’s disinclination for this music dominated by the ego extended to Johann Sebastian Bach for a time, though by 2007 he was back to playing Bach. And he had had popular success—composing The Protecting Veil in 1988, when cellist Stephen Isserlis performed it at the Proms. Then there was the Song for Athene, sung in 1997 for the funeral of Princess Diana.

And as usual, the more that the general population embraced him, the more the critics sniffed. Here’s Mark Swed, chief music critic of the LA Times, in a generally favorable tribute that still manages to get the headline John Tavener: Composer, Showman, and Spiritual Guide (disclaimer—in the old days, the journalist didn’t write headlines, and so Swed would be off the hook. Now? Who knows?)

That is Tavener's 1987 cello concerto in which the solo part seems to hang in the air, going nowhere and in no hurry for 50 minutes or more, depending on how much the cellist cares to milk the ethereal mystery.

OK—I’m listening to the concerto, called The Protecting Veil, and yeah, I see what Swed means. It’s disjointed loveliness, and that may be the point; Swed says it himself, the essence of Tavener’s work is “seduction.”

And there is something of a showman in a composer who can write and or stage an all night affair called the Veil of the Temple, performed overnight at the Temple Church in London—yes, the same one that figures in The da Vinci Code. Here’s what Swed has to say:

Beginning with a "Mystical Love Song of the Sufis," Tavener made room in "Veil of the Temple" not only for the traditional Christian Trinity but also Mary Theotokos, St. Isaac the Syrian and the Upanishads. Besides vocal soloists and the Temple's large choir, the instruments included the church organ, an Indian harmonium, a duduk (an ancient Armenian flute), Tibetan temple bells, a deep-honking Tibetan horn and a Western brass band.

It was a magnificent night, ending with the dawn illuminating the church's stained-glass windows. The audience roamed the church, found a pew to snuggle in and sleep on or went outside for coffee. Tavener seemed to be enjoying himself greatly, chatting with people, hanging out. It wasn't a party, but it wasn't an overly solemn occasion, either. One went to be amazed, not preached to. It was — again, that word that I thinks fits Tavener's music better than any other — seductive.

Well, Tavener was felled by Marfan syndrome, which I knew about because at one time Abraham Lincoln was thought to have suffered it. And it seemed likely—Marfan sufferers are unusually tall, with long limbs and bony fingers. And they’re prone to at least thirty generally horrible conditions, among which is that you may have sudden cardiac arrest at any time. In short, you’re a time bomb, which does have some psychological consequences; here’s what he told the Times:

“It attacks the main valve to the heart, it attacks the eyes, it attacks the mind — there isn’t much it doesn’t attack,” he told a Times interviewer during one of his rare visits to the United States. “And the big danger of Marfan is that you can suffer a rupture at any time, and you go quickly. So I suppose I live with the thought of death very much in front of me, and this may well have a bearing on the way I think generally.”

Right—I can see that. And now the life is over, and the critics are wondering: where shall we put him? Top drawer? Showman? Hack? Celebrated for the wrong reasons? Mystic minimalist?

Where does he go?

Nor is it the case that history will judge, since history has a way of being rewritten, revised, reworked. Bach was forgotten until Mendelssohn came along. Vivaldi soared in the 70s and has fallen since. And some worthy composers are routinely neglected.

But the conundrum to me is that old one: the separation of popular and serious. Is it always the case that music that is accessible to the masses and loved by them is necessarily inferior? Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Copland’s Appalachian Spring—can anyone deny their musical worth? Yet even these masterpieces have just a little tarnish on them—the serious listener should be listening to Barber’s Essay for Orchestra, or Copland’s Third Symphony. What if Tavener’s music was great and popular?

Or what, perhaps, would happen if we stopped worrying about great? A man of the cloth in a Davies novel defends “bad” religious art—the sweet, androgynous Jesus with his bleeding heart exposed. Right, it’s not a Tintoretto, but if all the Marías and Josefas and Pilars love him and come to Christ through him…well? Isn’t there a place in the world for bad art, of which there is a lot more than good art? Shouldn’t we leave our snobbery at the door, as we welcome the common folk in? Tavener’s music appealed to people. Punto. So get over it….

I once saw a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, which made a gazillion dollars and was a major motion picture starring Julia Roberts and was translated into every language included Bushman Click and three languages invented just for the purpose. Oh, and NASA shot copies of the book into all corners of the universe, so amazing and so successful it was. I exaggerate, but that’s how it must have felt to her. And then what was she supposed to do? How do you top that? I imagine her sitting down to write her next book, and starting out with the first word, “the….” Instantly a chorus of disapproval swells up: “a disappointment,” “not on the same level as…,” “after her first book….”

So Tavener’s music will live or die, and that’s as much as he or any of us will know about what we spend our lives doing. We go on for a time, Gentle Reader, and then?

That’s it….