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….

When she doesn't show up

I liked her book; Jeanne didn’t.

“I found it indulgent,” she said. “I mean, it may just be me, but very few women have the resources to go off to three parts of the world for four months at a time and then come home and write about it….”

So you’ll have guessed, I’m talking about Elizabeth Gilbert, whose book Eat, Pray, Love was a mega hit. How mega, you ask? Well, according to Gilbert’s website, the book sold over 10 million copies, and was translated into over 30 languages. For all of that, Time made her one of the 100 most influential people of the year. Oh, and Julia Roberts starred in the movie.

So that presented a problem: what in God’s name do you write after that? And people started coming up to her and asking, “aren’t you afraid that your next book will flop?”

Which made Gilbert question—what’s with the myth of the fucked-up artist? More, why do we buy in to it so much that many of us are, in fact, fucked up?

Well, you can hear Gilberts thoughts on the subject below—and yes, she’s bright and funny and articulate. More to the point, she may be right.

It comes down to this—anybody who has every done anything creative has felt that chilling feeling: “who’s writing this? Who’s playing this? Am I writing or taking dictation? Am I dancing or being danced?”

I felt it first, and strongest, on 4 January 2011; I had written, or rather rewritten, the epilogue of my book, and I was in a fever of creative sweat. Taí, here at the time, was supervising the computer guy, who needed my MacBook to check about something on my iTunes. I passed the computer over and raced to a spare laptop, repeating the last line I had written so that I could go on.

I felt it various times since then. Some days the muse comes, some days I am a journeyman; the post yesterday was good, today’s less so. OK—it was somebody else’s turn to get the muse—there are other writers, you know.

And I also like what Gilbert says—if we are just scribes, that takes a lot of pressure off. The book bombed? The post stank? Not entirely all my fault….

Curiously, this notion seems to be akin to the preoccupation of another writer, though he may consider himself a singer. Ian Bostridge is fascinated with the hundred years or so when rational, intelligent thinkers went from believing in witches, demons, succubae, and the devil to not believing in any of that. People knew no more than they had previously; there was no test or technology or philosophical argument that had disproved the existence of the paranormal world.

People had simply decided to invest in another theory—the rational world. The cow died in the village—it was no longer a witch who had entered the cow and poisoned her; it was something in the air, something she ate, some physical illness that, if we didn’t know now, one day we would.

Bostridge wonders, first, why? What prompted this sea change of thinking? He also wonders whether it’s rational. And, in fact, not all of us have bought on—it was usual for my Evangelical students to tell me that so-and-so had a demon: that was the reason the guy had shot up the movie house, or blasted the kids into infinity in the school.

Conversely, there are any number of people who are convinced: angels are all around us. And even some very rational people believe in them. Once, my philosopher friend Harry was taking his 18-year old daughter to be interviewed for admission at the Art Institute of Chicago. They were late, they were lost, and they were trying to orient themselves, when a woman showed up, as if out of nowhere.

“Where do you need to go,” she said, and Harry said her speech was pressured, the words spilling out. She was looking at them with a peculiar intensity, her upper body pressed in slightly toward them.

“Here, I’ll take you,” she said rapidly, and grabbed Chris’s hand. She almost ran with them to the Institute, and then disappeared as fast, and as mysteriously, as she had appeared.

“She was an angel,” said Harry to his daughter, and he meant it.

There are also the documented cases of spirit possession in Haiti in the Voodoo (Vodou) rituals. Actually, aren’t there cases of spirit possession in all religions? People whirling into ecstasy, people talking in tongues, people seeing visions—not much normal goes on in the religious world….

Lastly, I think it’s the very randomness of the process that make the case for there being a muse. I was just as rested, just as focused, working just as hard on Sunday, when she came as I was today, when she was off somewhere else. She’s promiscuous, that lady who is now caressing some other writer’s ear, who has chosen another body to dance in. Which may be a good thing. If she stayed all the time, would I get bored with her? Could I sustain the pressure of working non-stop, batting out her words? Isn’t that the definition of mania?

Everybody needs just an average day.