John Tavener has made a career of attempting to give voice to the unutterable and the ineffable. His works take on otherworldly subjects and celestial themes, challenging the dimensional constraints of linear time through meditative, non-trajectorial structures and slowly evolving patterns and shapes—parallels, palindromes, and symmetries. The composer's own religiosity is not one in which philosophical ruminations are a mortal pastime; rather, Tavener's faith in the Orthodox Church reflects his very real and very literal ideas about the metaphysical world. Likewise, his Song of the Angel (1995) does not just imagine cherubic voices, but seems to actually aspire to heavenly spheres.

Composed on commission for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, Song of the Angels is a short piece for soprano soloist and string accompaniment. Its structure is quite simple: three Alleluia sections are followed by a short string coda. The Alleluia sections are characterized by a sparse and spacious texture in which lush melodies are suspended high above omnipresent drones. The first two sections feature the soloist singing a long, sinewy line whose turns and occasional ornaments follow a great and dramatic arc. The soprano soloist is joined by a solo violin who, in turns, follows her in unison, then in parallel motion, and then, as the singer approaches the apex of her arc, with the gentle and fervent punctuation of prolonged trills. As these points of climax arrive, the string texture thickens as well and the zenith is met with an effulgent and overpowering cadence. The third section utilizes a similar texture, except that here there is no melodic denouement; the melody ascends heavenward and remains there.

The coda is a curious feature, one that suggests the presence but conceals the explanation of abundant symbolisms. It consists of a short trill figure in the strings, beginning in the upper-middle range of the violins. It is then repeated an octave lower, then lower still, moving downward through the ranges of the various instruments by turns and of the string section as a whole, until the fifth and last iteration emerges from the lowest depths of the contrabass range.

Tavener's own notes to the piece leave it shrouded in mystery. "The music should be sung and played with restrained ecstasy," he instructs. "It should not bring pounding of the heart, nor should it lead to melancholy." The composer then defers to the words of Ananda Kentish Coomarasworthy: "Like all music of the East, it should reveal in tranquility an eternal, angelic, ecstatic breath which liberates and humanizes." This idea presages the purifying and deifying nature of Petra: A Ritual Dream, composed the following year. In that work as well as in Song of the Angel, the subject at hand is the channel of access opened up between heaven and earth.

Perhaps only Arvo Pärt, who shares Tavener's devout Russian Orthodox faith, compares with Tavener in creating this kind of "angelic, ecstatic breath." However, while Pärt created a sense of cosmic calm through his elegantly simple and gracefully constructed "tintinnabula" processes, Tavener does so through less stringent but similarly spartan means. In Song of the Angel, the vast distances outlined—on one axis between the soloist and the drone, and on the other between the ancient and the modern (it is no accident that the premiere recording near the end of the twentieth century utilized instruments from the eighteenth)—leave infinite space in which acoustic as well as semantic and metaphysical resonances can echo.



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