The effort to find simplicity

In the late 1960s, John Tavener was famous for his collage-like works, The Whale and Celtic Requiem. The Whale featured in the first concert by the ground-breaking London Sinfonietta, and both works were taken up by The Beatles and issued on their Apple label, writes Michael Dervan

The music he's most famous for these days is altogether smoother in character, coloured by the music of the Russian Orthodox Church (he converted in 1977). He scored a huge success at the 1989 Proms and later on CD with The Protecting Veil for cello and strings. His music featured at Princess Diana's funeral and the opening of London's Millennium Dome.

Much of his music has won him a wide following at the same time as it has raised certain critical hackles. But the religious and mystical concerns permeate his output, no matter how different the works may seem on the surface, and there's a stillness, a stasis even, that provides a common reflective thread even in works where levels of activity are high.

The greatest interest in the Belfast Festival's focus on Tavener and his music will be his new, 50-minute work, Hymn of Dawn, which is to be premiered on Sunday, November 7th, by the Ulster Orchestra under Stephen Layton with Patricia Rozario (soprano) and Andrew Rupp (baritone).

When I met up with the composer at his home in Dorset, an idyllic retreat impinged on by visitors like myself, a busy phone line and the daily routines of family life (including interruptions from a meter-reader while I was there), I asked him first about the new Hymn of Dawn. He warned me the answer would be a long one.

"It came to me in a very strange way. I hadn't been sleeping at all well, my nights were very disturbed. I think being very tired made certain things happen during the composition of it that certainly made it a very extraordinary experience for me to write it.

"You know, often in life, something happens at the right time, you get given the right book, or you see the right poem. The text seemed to be, as it were, revealed to me. I don't mean that it came down in an envelope, but I seemed to be seeing what I needed to see at the right times. It draws from Sufi, American Indian, Christian, Jewish, and Hindu sources, and it's also in different languages - English, Sioux Indian, Hindu, Sanskrit, Persian Sufi, Arabic from The Koran, Latin and Greek.

"I conceived it, really, as a kind of mystical love song. It's not a large orchestra - strings with harp and percussion, with a huge American Indian powwow drum right in the middle which, gradually throughout the piece, beats out some rhythms connected to the five different religions.

"The two soloists represent the mystical lovers, and there is a flute that goes with the feminine, and a violin that plays always with the baritone voice.

"I found that many of the ideas came to me while I was walking in nature, around this area in Dorset, and also in Greece. I would come back and scribble down the various fragments, and then, at a much later stage, begin to put these fragments together. So I suppose in a way, it appeared that the ideas were coming from elsewhere - or from deep within myself is what I really mean.

"I suppose the whole manner of the composition had a kind of supernatural birth. I was exceptionally tired, getting only about two hours sleep every night while writing it. And therefore, I think, all my antennae were extremely receptive and extremely open during the period. I just hope that some things will come across in the music. You can have a very intense experience in writing something, but it doesn't necessarily communicate to a large number of people. As to whether it will communicate this, I don't know until I hear it myself."

At the time Tavener was thinking about the piece rather than actually writing it, he experienced an unusual and totally unexpected intervention. "I'd asked someone I knew, who took part in some of the sun dance ceremonies in America, if she could find a powwow drum for me. Then one day she just rang me up, I think from Exeter, said she was near (because she lives in Scotland), and asked could she come along and show me an example of the drum."

Not only did she come with the promised drum, but also in the company of an Apache medicine man, bearing the drum as a gift. "One could feel a certain gravitas about him, and he had hair down to about here(his waist)and my wife fell completely in love with him, because he was very beautiful to look at.

"He played the drum, but he didn't play without first thanking the four-leggeds for the gift of the elk-skin. We had supper, and he made a grace by holding his hand up, and he again thanked the four-leggeds and the earth for the gift of food and all the rest of it. Which was rather wonderful.

"He also said to me that the drum would bring about a unity. I never understood what he meant. But the piece does, I suppose, at the level of mystical love, attempt to bring about some kind of unity, through the various texts that are used, and the beating of the drum - which, as I say, in the end is striking up four or five different rhythms, which are connected to the different religions. So there was an awful lot of strange background to this piece, unusually so."

Tavener is well-known for the strong views he holds on a wide range of music. Mostly he's quoted about 20th-century developments. But he's also written: "Perhaps Victoria is the only Renaissance composer that I can stand." And that, "from Beethoven (who called Handel 'the greatest composer of all - I kneel at his tomb') to Wagner (who said 'Handel draws blood'), and on to Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg, humanism was going rapidly downhill." Introducing the topic into our conversation, he says: "I think music has gone too far in the realms of abstraction and has become so abstract it's lost any connection with people. I'm very criticised by many critics for, I don't know what, for being too simplistic . . . Well, what can I say? Except that that's the way I hear things, that's the way things happen. It cost me a considerable effort to find that simplicity."

After he was received into the Russian Orthodox Church, Tavener became greatly concerned with the idea of writing music that could be placed within a tradition. Before that, he says, he was using "the language of my own ego". But there's been a more recent change, which he says happened through the writing of The Veil of the Temple, a seven-hour, all-night vigil or, in the composer's words, "a journey towards God".

"I felt I was being somehow liberated from strictly adhering to tradition. I then understood that, for me anyway, the language of one's own soul is perhaps more important." He points to the dangers of tradition. "When I'm in Greece, I can see nuns or monks, and they are literally copying an original icon by putting tracing paper over it. It becomes a bit of a tyranny. But I think one must know what tradition is before one branches from it to try to find what the music is within one's soul.

"In the last resort, the tradition is something that a Western composer can't fully embrace. There was a time when I couldn't listen to, for instance, a Mozart mass. But now I'm very happy to listen to a Mozart mass, because I regard Mozart - not in his religious music, strangely enough, but in the operas - as perhaps the most sacred of all Western composers. This comes from an extraordinary gift. He's the most inexplicable one."

In elaborating on tradition, he talks with a kind of awe of the improvisation of Indian classical musicians, and tells a story about the Irish singer Nóirín Ní Riain. He sent her the score of his Mary of Egypt, which he first calls an opera before correcting himself: "It's a kind of Christian Byzantine Noh-play."

She sent back the score with a tape, and "she'd really made a kind of improvisation on the whole piece. It actually was very good, but in noway could she be used in the opera, because she needed always to have the drone instrument. It would also not be my opera any more, it would be her improvisation on it. But it was very interesting to hear, and very beautifully done."

Tavener expects his music to surprise him. "If it doesn't, then I think it's not worth doing. In a way, every piece of music has got to be new, and in a sort of way I've got to destroy or begin to hate the piece that I've just written so that the thing becomes new again. I always feel at the beginning of a piece of music I'm like a beginner, or a baby learning to walk. Every time I have to re-learn."

He clearly still retains a lot of affection for his now rarely-heard early works. It's not that he's uncritical of them, but he "wouldn't change anything, because that was how I saw things then, so there wouldn't be any point. The next piece will show how I see things now." His least favourite of his own works are "the ones that get performed far too often, the Song for Athene, The Lamb, etc, etc. I can see they're good pieces, but they're done so often, and I've written so much. One would rather other pieces were done more often - and longer ones."

He lists the characteristics that are very important to him - beauty, the child-like and the feminine - as qualities that are to be found in his earlier as well as his more recent pieces. And it's their freshness, he says, that explains his ongoing fondness for his early works.

"I was an angry young man, and in a sense I think I still am, not exactly angry, but at odds with modernism. And I was at odds with modernism in the 1960s, with a very great kind of po-faced serialism which was coming out of Manchester and Darmstadt. And I'm still totally at odds with it. I heard some early Maxwell Davies again recently and I just wondered: 'What's the point of this?'" Having heard so much of Tavener's musical dislikes, and prompted by the unexpected reference he once made to "Tchaikovsky, all of whose works I love," I ask what he likes in the music of the last hundred or so years.

He speaks respectfully of that high-priest of complexity, Brian Ferneyhough ("Brian really has a vision"), and he thinks they have in common the fact that they're both "totally uncompromising". Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa was a piece that "stopped me in my tracks, in the same way that Indian music or any great traditional music tended to hit me." He regards Stockhausen's Stimmung as "a remarkable piece, one of the best pieces Stockhausen ever wrote". He also speaks highly of one of his teachers, David Lumsdaine.

Thomas Adès he finds astonishing (brimming with talent), although he pauses to wonder "whether it will become an individual voice".

He also mentions James MacMillan: "I've been impressed very much by some of his choral music." More surprisingly, he says: "I respect Harrison Birtwistle hugely. He's a phenomenal technician. I think of him in the same breath I think of Francis Bacon."

He has written a piece for Björk, about whom he says: "Her music is actually very good. She played that piano there, and she improvised, and she improvised like a composer. An awful lot of contemporary composers haven't a clue how to improvise." But above them all he places a most surprising name, somebody who shares a certain rigour, and what he sees as mysticism, with much of the music he regards most highly: Webern.

Tavener is anything but the otherworldly individual many people imagine him to be (having two children possibly helps keep him grounded). He says he is, however, otherworldly when composing.

"If somebody came in while I was writing and asked do I know God exists, I could say: Yes, I know God exists.' But if I was out having drinks with some friends and they asked me, I wouldn't be able to answer. I just don't know anything then."

He responds easily to a question about what he would choose as the achievement he would most like to be remembered for. "That I had brought some kind of healing to some people's lives at a time when there's not much to rejoice about. That I had been able to communicate with a wider group of listeners than some of my contemporaries."

However, he struggles through long pauses when I ask what he most wants to do or experience musically that he hasn't done or experienced yet. He finally manages to condense his ultimate musical ambition into a single phrase: "To write something that got near to both Bach's Art of Fugue and Mozart's Magic Flute, the two Western masterpieces."

The Belfast Festival at Queen's opens tonight (www.belfastfestival.com). The John Tavener events in the festival take place from Friday-Sunday, November 5th-7th