At the end of 2007 John Tavener completed a piece for four string quartets and a Tibetan bowl, fulfilling a long-standing promise to the leader of the Medici Quartet, Paul Robertson. The premiere was scheduled for the following summer, but then Tavener was taken ill, and hasn't been able to compose since.
Towards Silence was eventually heard in New York this April, and the Medici Quartet, together with three younger groups (the Harpham and Finzi Quartets, and the Collective), presented the British premiere as the final event in Winchester's Art and Mind festival. Tavener describes the 35-minute piece as a meditation on "the different states of dying" and on the four states of self-awareness in Hindu philosophy, moving progressively from the waking state to "that which is beyond".
It is music designed for a vast space, with the quartets seated separately above the audience, and with the Tibetan bowl higher still. Winchester Cathedral seems the ideal venue, but all four quartets were close together at ground level so there was little sense of music passing from one group to another.
The musical scheme is one of progressive etiolation. The chiming of the bowl marks the passing of time, as the music – thrummed pizzicatos, winding melodies, quietly sustained chords – steadily withdraws into itself, contracting into string chords. Eventually they cease, and all that's left is the sound of the bowl, now a sustained sound rather than chimes, and gradually fading, too. For some in the audience it might have been a great spiritual experience, hard to separate from Tavener's own condition, though the presence of five cameras recording the performance took the edge from any sense of spirituality.
