Tavener – God is with us (1989)

John Tavener, contemporary student of John Rutter at Highgate School, friend of King Charles III, friend of The Beatles, said his desire to compose was awoken in him by hearing Stravinsky’s Canticum Sacrum when aged 12. He studied at the Royal Academy, giving up piano to compose.

His first major work was a cantata called The Whale, composed when 24, which was released on The Beatles’ Apple label. In 1977 he converted to the Orthodox Church, and from this point there is a clear influence in his works such as chant, drones, and microtonal ornaments. He combined this with other compositional techniques such as inversion and retrograde as seen in his works Song for Athene and The Lamb.

Later in his life he moved away from the Orthodox Church to a more universalist stance, leading to his monumental all-night work The Veil of the Temple, and in 2004 The Prayer of the Heart performed by the singer Bjork and the Brodsky String Quartet, which features a sample of his very slow heartbeat.

One of his more well known works is the 1989 Christmas work God is with us, which alternates chant, repetitive choral refrains, a contrapuntal large choral section, and then surprisingly when the palindromic nature of the work makes you think it’s finished, in comes a refrain of ‘Christ is born!’, followed by even more surprisingly by a full organ chord in the ‘wrong’ key, which happens again, and then finally in Epic Huge G major.