John Tavener is likely the most uncompromisingly religious composer of at least the past three centuries. A convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, Tavener seeks to embody the spirituality of that tradition in his music. that eschews most of the musical language that has been used for religious purposes, including everything produced by Western Civilization.

One of Tavener's characteristics is use of the ison, a drone--usually pitched very low--that sounds throughout a piece, even at the risk of wearying a performer who is assigned this task. Tavener refers to this as the "eternity note," the note that attests to the presence of God. This note does not anchor a piece the way a tonic note does by exerting a gravitational pull on the other notes. Rather, the drone offers a sense of underlying stability that allows other musical voices to move all over the place without becoming unhinged. Theologically, the drone portrays God's sustenance of creation without God exerting a suffocating control over it. That is, God does not pull creatures to the Godhead, God holds all of them in being. But for all this freedom of movement, there is no escape from the underlying divine presence. A particular exciting example of this effect of the drone can be heard in My Gaze is ever upon You for violin and tape. A double bass plays the one-note drone to support the tape playing a pre-recorded violin part while the live violinist plays ecstatic outbursts around the other two parts. Occasionally, Tavener will cut off the ison in the middle of a piece because he wants "to symbolically represent an apparent void." The result he seems to expect for the listener is severe dismay, even panic

Rich in triadic harmonies, Tavener's music is mostly consonant, but not invariably so. Dissonance, even sharp dissonance plays a part. In his well-known Hymn to the Mother of God, two choirs, sing thick, block chords in canon where the inevitable dissonance is allowed to occur as it will. With Tavener, dissonance is not usually resolved into a cadence. Rather, the dissonance exists side-by-side with consonant chords in such a way that their relationship to each other creates a greater whole. God radically transcends distinctions such as that between consonance and dissonance.

The use of ancient modes preserved by the Eastern Church and even modes preserved from the ancient Vedic tradition makes Tavener's music, in its own way, as foreign to traditional Western classical music as twelve-tone composition, if not more so. In the Kontakion sections of the Akathist of Thanksgiving, the florid oriental lines move all over the place without getting anywhere in particular, especially in the counter-tenor solos. Between the turgid discord in the chorus and the sul ponticello bowing in the strings, Kontakion 8 ("Across he frozen chains of centuries/I sense the warmth of your breath divine") comes close to beating Pierre Boulez at his own game of avant-garde expression.

To say the Tavener's music makes use of repetition is to state to obvious for anyone who has listened to his music. However, this is one of his fundamental techniques and thus requires some examination. Although some developments in Western music might lead one to think otherwise, repetition is arguably among the fundamental characteristics of music. Folk songs usually are strophic with refrains. Religious chanting almost always uses a small musical figure that is repeated over and over again so as to clear the mind of its characteristic strenuous activity and open it to a glimpse of transcendent reality. Writing highly repetitious music without being hopelessly boring is quite a challenge and verdicts are mixed as to the success of composers like Tavener, Arvo Pärt or Philip Glass. The musical figure must be simple enough for the ear to take it in readily and yet rich enough to bear up to many re-listenings. More important, the musical figure must catch the listener up into the repeated phrase so that it supports a deeper communing with the Divine. Such is the effect of the movement "The Dormition of Mary" in The Protecting Veil for cello and string orchestra. Tavener uses a hymn for the Dormition of Mary that he had composed earlier, which is built on three musical phrases that are repeated several times. In The Protecting Veil, these same phrases are repeated many, many, times, but with the effect of leading the listener to rest in God as Mary herself fell asleep in God. The Advent Hymn Fear and Rejoice repeats one phrase over and over again, allowing the fast tempo to build up momentum as the phrase begins in the lowest register of the basses and gradually moves up to the highest register of the sopranos. Then the this whole process is repeated a second time.

Actually, Tavener often manages to give the effect of repetition while, at the same time, varying his figures considerably in small but highly significant ways. Sometimes Tavener accomplishes this simply by varying the register. In his setting of the Magnificat, he includes the refrain used in Orthodox worship after each verse. The music itself is the same, but sometimes it is pitched to the lower voices, sometimes the highest, sometimes somewhere in the middle. Each verse of the Magnificat itself is built on the same chant-like figure but, again, the register varies, the drone is pitched differently, and the riotous counter-melodies are similar but different. The use of varied repetition is particularly powerful in the large-scale Akathist of Thanksgiving. The work is divided into ten sections and each section is, in turn, divided between a Kontakion and an Ikos. Each section begins with the same exclamation of Slava Tebie, Bojhe! (Glory to you, O Lord!) Starting with a drone in the basses and building up the chord through the middle voice with the first sopranos coming in last. The Ikos that follows each Kontakion serves as a doxological refrain. Because the same basic figure is used each time, it sounds like a repeated refrain, but actually, it is not that. The pitching is always in the upper voices (while each Kontakion is primarily scored for lower voices) but the register is not exactly the same and the harmony and underlying rhythm changes considerably each time. The final section lacks an Ikos and the Kontakion is truncated, giving the effect of stretching the expanded beginning into infinity.

What makes the repetition in Tavener's music work with so much power is that it creates an ambience or, better stated, it allows the listener to hear the music as surrounded by its ambience. By ambience, I am referring to a quality that cannot be heard but can be sensed in the hearing of the music. When there is an ambience there is a sense space enfolded around the music like a cocoon. The ambience does not in any way restrict the music, of course. On the contrary, the ambience is capable of infinite expansion to give the music room to grow and move and have its being. Ambience is a quality that I hear often in Plain chant and Renaissance sacred music, very rarely in any music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but more often again in twentieth-century music (e.g. Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, Canticum Sacrum, and Frank Martin's 8-part mass). This is to suggest that tonal music, whatever its strengths, is not generally conducive to creating an ambience, while modal music is and atonal music or music with highly attenuated tonality can be. Beethoven's great slow movement in the String Quartet in A Minor has ambience, but it is cast in the Dorian mode. (The ambience is lost when the livelier, tonal, second subject makes its appearances.) The first movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata B-flat is a rare example of a tonal work where an ambience can be sensed, at least at times. The examples just given suggest that it is music written with a religious intent that is most likely to create this ambience. (Note that Beethoven gave the string quartet movement a religious veneer by calling it a Hymn of Thanksgiving). Ambience, in a mysterious way, creates a whole greater than the sum of the notes. One of its effects is that repetition is not so repetitious because the space folded around the notes adds depth even to phrases that, in themselves are quite simple. (Especially if the phrases are simple!) In a good performance, the music for each verse of Allegri's Miserere continues to sound as if it is being sung for the first time.

Repetition and ambience are both indications that the music at hand is not composed and performed for its own sake but it placed in a broader context. When music is regarded as a world unto itself, much is demanded of it if people are going to find it interesting enough to explore. Much of Tavener's music is intended for liturgical use, so that it is intended to be part of a greater whole. Even the music Tavener has composed for concert performances (but not in concert halls!) is still intended to inspire the religious passions of the listener. For Tavener, the conversation is not must between music and its human listeners; it is between music, its human listeners and God. The music is not designed to interest a listener in itself for its own sake.

Tavener's spare, austere style has no room for normal human emotions. Tavener is especially adamant that even the slightest whiff if angst should be excised from music. Music of this sort can seem to portray a spare, austere God. In Thunder entered Her, depicting the Holy Spirit's overshadowing Mary at the Incarnation, the encounter with the Spirit cannot possibly be confused with having the country parson over for tea. The movement that depicts the death of Christ in The Protecting Veil is solemn but there is not a hint of anguish. In the rare moments where Tavener depicts human sinfulness and its effects, the grinding discords, devoid of any passion, make evil altogether foreign to true humanity. Also foreign to normal human experience are the bursts of Glory in Tavener's music The Hymn to the Trinity begins as an unemotional liturgical chant in the lower voices, then breaks open into wide-ranging harmony whose range is extreme at both ends. The middle section is warmer still, featuring a trio of solo sopranos singing over a flowing background. In the opening and closing movements of The Protecting Veil, the sinuous cello line not only sounds like the embrace of love enfolding the universe, it is the embrace of love enfolding the universe. In the Hymns of Paradise, treble voices and a small ensemble of violins, celebrate the formerly lame leaping and dancing in heaven.

In 1993, a young actress named Athene Hariades was killed in a cycling accident. Although Tavener never knew the young woman himself, he was deeply touched by the grief of close friends of his who knew her well and he attended Athena's funeral with them. Tavener, who says that he has received many gifts from the dead, was inspired to write a moving elegy in Athena's memory, a work that stops time so as to hold all of us in the presence of Eternity. So it was that Divine Providence had already brought about a work that was needed to console a whole nation in its grief when a very special person was killed in an automobile accident.