Sir John Tavener died last month.  I was lucky enough to have met him  in April.

My father sings in the City Choir of Washington, led by Robert Shafer.   These pictures were taken at a reception following the world premier of "Three Hymns by George Herbert".  The City Choir partnered with  Legatum  (some oddball think tank, I don't know) to commission and perform  music ostensibly as part of a trans-atlantic celebration of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in 2012.  Here's a rare shot of the both of us together - me and my Dad, not me and the Queen.  Don't be distracted by the awesome Lincoln chin strap I was sporting.  

Sir John had been quite ill for quite some time, and the trip must have wiped him out.  But he was generous with all of us in the handshake line and  I tell everyone that when we met,  he spoke of angels and ecstasy.  The reality is prosaic, more to do with  ambient background noise and misunderstanding where Pittsburgh is.  But there you go, worked for me. 

Anne Midgette wrote a good review for the Washington Post, describing the music 

"The “Three Hymns,” though, were the main focus. The first, “Heaven,” made some simply ravishing sounds; each line was sung out in a shining arc and left suspended in the air, punctuated by an echo from the chorus in the balcony and then nudged by the gentle plosive chimes of bells. The final hymn, “Life,” was touched with a bittersweet hint of dissonance, like frost petals. It ended with a postlude in which instruments tangled, slightly chaotically, at a distance, perhaps to evoke the withered bouquet of flowers the poem describes — though again, that comparison is more facile than the music sounded."

She makes the point throughout her review that the simplicity of Tavener's writing - especially these later pieces - shouldn't let the listener of the hook for attending to some pretty rigorous composition.

Shortly after Tavener died, Bob Shafer sent out a note to the choir members with a link to a recent radio broadcast by Andrew Marr on the works of George Herbert.  Sir John appears in the interview. 

Andrew Marr, who I always confuse with Johnny Marr.  In the same way I confuse Lord Bragg (Melvyn) with Bragg (Billy).  And I suppose other inexcusable conflations.  

So let's listen to some music.  Check out  The Whale, Tavener's  first big piece, which was famously picked up by John Lennon and published on the Apple label.  Even is this early, angrier music, there's a  spaciousness created by select textures (voice, bell, breathy drone).

A lifetime later, Tavener's  music is distilled to an essence.  The Protecting Veil  is good to start with, but check out some of his more orthodox pieces as well.

I can't say that I'm influenced as a composer  by Tavener his music.  I have too much twitchiness in my fingers.  But I am powerfully motivated by his thoughts on sound as a religious mechanism

In notes on The Moon Ikon, I wrote that the piece was the poetry of the moon exposed  by sound.  This is heavily influenced by what Tavener has written elsewhere:

"To me, [the icon] is the most transcendent form of art that exists in the west  - that is, if you call it art in the conventional sense.  Whether you can write music that is truly like an ikon, whether you can prostrate in front of a piece of music, I simply do not know.  I suppose the closest you get to it is in the chant that goes with the ikonography of the church.  I might also say that an ikon dissects us, and I think truly sacred music should do the same."

George Butterworth was a British composer,  famous for a setting of Houseman's poems from  A Shropshire Lad   His formal musical career never took off in the way he had hoped, and  he died at the Somme.  I also wrote some songs with text from Houseman, but don't mistake correlation for causation:  my formal musical career also never took off in the way I had hoped, and I've never been anywhere near the Somme.

 I feel like I know Butterworth only through the ephemera, through the unintended remains.  He found something in the folk music movement, with fellows like Cecil Sharpe and Ralph Vaughn Williams collecting songs from rural England.  He destroyed many scores before enlisting, leaving us only with a few gorgeous rhapsodies, and the Houseman songs.   The trench he died in was named The Butterworth Trench, but his body was never found.  You can see on this map that the Butterworth Trench is next to the Lancs Trench, referring to a regiment from Lancashire.  Butterworth actually enlisted in the Durham regiment.  These are fine counties, with a noble tradition of first class cricket.  

Check this out.  The full collection of video  includes dances with the Karpeles sisters, and also with Cecil Sharpe.  I've extracted George Butterworth in a solo.  

The kinora was an early form of home entertainment.  If you've ever marked the corners of a book, then flipped through the pages to watch your doodles come to life - that's essentially how a kinora worked.  One person at a time looked through viewing lenses at a stack of cards which were moved with a hand crank.  That's the mechanism for viewing the original of this film.  Those cards are somewhere in the archives of the English Folk Dance and Song society, which is surely an excuse for a road trip.    

I could add music to the video.  

I won't.  

I will sit after a few too many drinks and play along, sloppy and maudlin, at the piano.  

But I won't do that.  

We know the dance (Molly Oxford) and could easily synchronize sound and action.  Don't you think that trivializes the artefact?  I do.  There's a Tolkien poem, Beren and Luthien, where he sets the scene  with this first stanza:

The leaves were long, the grass was green,
The hemlock-umbels tall and fair,
And in the glade a light was seen
Of stars in shadow shimmering.
Tinúviel was dancing there
To music of a pipe unseen,
And light of stars was in her hair,
And in her raiment glimmering.

I love that unseen pipe.  I adore the unheard accordian in the Butterworth Kinora films.  It is the most extraordinary sensation, to know that this sound is unhearable.  Peering from behind those enormous edwardian bushes.  I'm assuming it was an accordian, I suppose it could have been a tin whistle or a fiddle.  And for sure, there were the jangle of the Morris Bells.  

An  adumbrated outline is painted in the same colour as the background on a heraldic shield, and can represent things like a family who has lost their title, or a lineage that no longer exists.  

There's a distinct feeling to the adumbrated object.  Absence evokes a wierd kind of presence.  which I think is what I mean when I talk about Quiddity.  It is the absolute most precise distillation of the object.  The material that exists just before the object arises.  This is also he last material that exists just before an object vanishes.   The taste of chewing granite, the realisation that you have forgotten something.  

So there you have it.  Butterworth, the adumbrated dancer. 

The longevity mantra goes like this:  " So Drum Ah Khar Mu La Ting Nam Od Du Mu Ye Se Ne Dza"   The mantra is the binding element of soul retrieval. 

The soul perhaps means something different in Bon practice than what I would usually mean in conversation, here in Pittsburgh.  In Pittsburgh, we tend to think of the soul as some kind of distillation of our essence, the purest form of our personality.  We think this when we watch the trains trundle through the South Side, and we think this when we see the Monongahela river reflected in glass.  Soul retrieval sounds like it would mean bringing back fragments of the personality,   assimilating trauma,  considering long forgotten insights, remembering previous incarnations:  that kind of thing.

The Bon soul retrieval ritual is an elemental one, meaning it is a ritual to balance the 5 elements of earth, air, fire, water ,and space.

There is Tsa; there is the Lung;  there is  the Ra...these are the life force (Tsa), the life expectancy (Lung) and the soul (Ra).  The  soul (Ra) binds the life force  (Tsa) to the body for the duration of the life expectancy (Lung).

So you see, your natural life expectancy may be 110 years, but due to karmic traces perhaps your soul weakens at 45.  Good practice could  strengthen the soul, perhaps but  maybe not back up to your potential, but certainly longer than before.  The Soul Retrieval ritual is Good Practice.

The soul retrieval ritual can last for days.  I sat in a shortened version, 2 days.  The mechanism for all of this  is  prayer, chant and visualisation led by the lama (teacher) to strengthen and balance our elements.  This naturally strengthens the Tsa by removing the afflictions of ignorance, desired attachment and anger which all combine to weaken the life force.

There are 10 Torma created for each participant.  They are small clay objects made in the form of the physical body, holding  representation of the body fluids, charged with our negative karmic traces, and ultimately offered up as sacrifice.  

The soul is represented as a totem animal.  In Tibet, each family would have a specific animal, but the generic totem for all is the deer.   A beautiful clay deer rests on a plate on the altar throughout the preceding rituals

.  

A cauldron of saffron infused milk is given a good stir, and the deer is floated on the spinning surface.  We are all now chanting, watching the deer slowly come to rest.  Chanting.  

If you've ever watched a pendulum come to rest, you will know that what 'rest' means changes after 40 minutes staring at smaller but still measurable deviation.  Perhaps it will never stop, and you will be left there, sitting in half-lotus , screaming knees for ever.  

If the deer stops facing the sangha, then the ritual has been accepted, the mechanics have been executed correctly.  If the deer stops facing away from the sangha, then the spinning has to start again.  I think you get three spinning starts before you have to go back to the beginning, which  in our case was only yesterday but in the full ritual would be 5 days ago.  

The longevity mantra distills all of the soul retrieval practice.  Mantras can be used in a lot of different ways.  Repetition of a mantra by itself is beneficial and accumulates merit.  With visualisation, the mantra becomes a vehicle for energy transfer with deity. I sometimes wear a banner embroidered with the syllables of the longevity mantra.  It is wrapped over my shoulder like  a boy scout merit badge sash while I meditate.  These kinds of things I find useful reminders to stabilize and strengthen the practice.  I don't want anyone to think that I'm saying only with this merit badge sash can the practice be effective. My mind is prone to wandering, and sign posts along the way help to keep focused.

So now, in the mornings at the YMCA, when I run on the treadmill.  The first 5 minutes are solid misery.  It has always been this way, even when I was training to run marathons and the run would be lasting 300 minutes.  But at a certain point now I start to stand a bit straighter, I start to sweat a bit and I get an even breath pattern.  I follow a rhythmic breathing pattern, two steps exhale 3 steps inhale.  I heard this is effective for oxygen intake, but that it  also evenly distributes stress across the body because the pattern offsets an alternating  foot strike with the inhale.

I start to feel loose, limber and graceful.  I always run like a moose, so take that as a directional statement rather than a description. I run like a moose with diarrhea, barely stifling a heart-rending bellow.  But then I start running through the mantra, with each step a syllable.  If I start the mantra on the right foot, the next repetition will begin on the left foot, that's just that way it works.  Like this.  Right foot  start " So Drum Ah Khar Mu La Ting Nam Od Du Mu Ye Se Ne Dza"  Left Foot  start " So Drum Ah Khar Mu La Ting Nam Od Du Mu Ye Se Ne Dza"  

Then I become aware of my hands loosely jogging by the side of my waist.  When I start the first mantra on the right foot, I fold down the thumb on my right hand.  When I start the second repetition, with the left foot, I fold down the thumb on my left hand.  Then I alternate fingers on each hand with each repetition, until all 5 fingers on each hand are folder in to a loose fist.   On the next repetition, I let the pinky on my right hand come out of the fist, because I will have started the mantra on my right foot.  Then the pinky on my left hand and so on until I'm back with two loosely held hands.  20 repetitions of the mantra. 

While I'm doing that, I become aware of the central channels supported by my breathing.  This is a very purifying sensation,  breathing  in negative, expelling transformed positive.  Breathing in stiffness, idleness; breathing out vitality, optimism.

Each footstep strikes the ground , and as they do  a lotus emerges.  In the lotus is the seed syllable of the mantra.  It's a lot like a video game where you drive a car around and hit power points.  The treadmill extends off into the distance  and every footstep is a mantra-filled lotus waiting to burst open with my stride.

I'm trying to get back into marathon running shape.  I think it would be a wonderful experience to run 26.2 miles each step reciting the longevity mantra.  Not just for my own decrepit body, but as a healing force for everyone who shares the same course that day.

I wrote something yesterday where I was talking about the intimacy of an unheard, only imagined piece of music.  What did I mean by intimate?  I meant that the imagined music is a present companion to thoughts and experiences, it is an unheard guide to the shaping of experience.  Looking at reflections of light on water, I am surrounded by the memory of Ravel, and the memories around those thoughts.  Which of these  is the experience I'm having now?   My senses are gently instructed in the viewing of that light by the emanating record of the sound-memory/ memory-sound. 

I also enjoy, but that's different, yes, from looking out the window with my iPod playing. But I've heard the Ravel Jeau d'eaux.  I've mangled my fingers through the score at the piano a couple of times.  In those ways, I already know the piece - although each listening is in counterpoint with the time and place.

But what I was talking about mostly yesterday was a piece of music I had never heard, may never hear, have only been informed about by second hand.  I'd like to hear Symphony of Sirens, composed for the factories, shipyards, artillery and sirens of the port of Baku in 1922.  When I go out for walkies with my dogs in the early morning light, I can hear the sound of trains moving along different lines in each direction, crossing through Pittsburgh.  I imagine what it would be like to shape those sounds, to create a symphony that generates this same response.  Distance, time, persepctive.  I've never heard the piece - I think there's a reconstruction recording available and I imagine with some excellent sampling and a big enough performance space you could put together something  impressive enough.  But Symphony of Sirens exists only in my imagination, only in the quiet time between dog sniffs and pooh where I can feel the sinews of my body reconstruct the quotidien traffic sounds into a musical structure of  breath, body, environment, idea, memory, anticipation.  

Sometimes it is good to remember something. 

I do the same thing:  I plug my head into an ipod and I listen.  Even to music I know very well, I pull out a recording.  It's fine, really.  It's a great blessing to have complete access.  When I was a student, let's say 25 years ago, I could only have heard the recording linked above via Youtube if someone I knew had a recording.  and they only had that recording if the store they knew had included in the catalog.  

I'm not going to say that it's better to have to struggle to find a score, or to never actually hear a recording of a piece you've heard about all your life.  But I do think two things.  First, I think it's good to fetishize.  To really imagine a life where this one score is the only artifact available for study.   I'm thinking in particular of the Messiaen Quartet for the End of Time.  Do you want to hear some music, someone would say.  And you'd say yes, and they would reach for the Messiaen score.  It's why you come over here, really..his company is off-putting.  But lord, that score.  

Second (is that two, or have I gone over?), I think it's OK to imagine, rather than to know.  John Tavener died a few weeks ago, and many people wrote about his piece The Protecting Veil, a piece I don't know.  It would have been OK to spend the rest of my life  knowing only  of this piece, that this piece has been.  It would have been a psychic artifact, one that could accrue meaning as I lived alongside the fantasy.  I've deprived myself of that pleasure, that intimate companion.  I'm using Spotify to stream a performance that I'm listening to even right now.  And I will play the recording again later, with a splash of something over ice.  

Outside my window at work, I see the Pittsburgh Plate and Glass building  (PPG).  It surprises all the time that in the building I can see the Monongahela River (take a look at the full size picture, it's really quite lovely).  When the sun is right, I can see the water.  Or rather I can see the light reflected off the water.  Or even more, I can see the reflection  of the light on the water reflected off the glass of the building.  I don't see how the river can be reflected in this wall across the street, because the river is behind my building.   Like there needs to be another big glass wall somewhere in between to account  for the  angle of reflection.

If I sit, and if I remember Ravel, the motion  of the light stops.  The  distinction between black and white on the water stabilizes into  larger forms, sharp shapes etched in the air a few inches above the fluid surface.  I could reach out and touch, but would leave a finger or two behind.  

When I remember Ravel, I am remembering a friend who said that whenever he saw light like this, he thought of the Ravel Jeau d'eaux, a piece I did not know. We had caught each other looking out at the pond, and he  said that to be listening to  Ravel was like watching the most beautiful gem from behind a distant plane of glass.   Listening, hearing, remembering, thinking about.