Top 13 John Tavener Quotes

Words matter. These are the best John Tavener Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

My consultant keeps telling me sudden death could come

My consultant keeps telling me sudden death could come at any moment.
John Tavener
When I talk of primordial innocence, I hear it in Sufi music with the nay flute. I see it in Coptic icons, in most traditional art, particularly art of the American Indian. I find the texts extraordinarily beautiful and very childlike and very simple. I’ve been particularly interested in American Indian texts.
John Tavener
I don’t think Beethoven expresses religious truth. He expresses a human truth.
John Tavener
The music is something outside myself that’s also inside myself… Music and a sense of another presence always went hand in hand. Even when I was three, I would improvise music, and my maternal grandfather would act as an audience and used to applaud. I would imitate things like thunder and rain.
John Tavener
‘Canticum Sacrum’ is wonderfully archaic. What Stravinsky does is extraordinary. It takes you on a journey from Gregorian chant right through to the modernism of Webern – and all in 17 minutes.
John Tavener
The thing I regret most about my life are those inane photos of me with icons. They used to come down here and dress me up, and I just tolerated it. It’s my fault. But I shouldn’t have done it. They literally brought down costumes, candles, and icons! It was unbelievable stupidity.
John Tavener
I’ve written a very long piece of music recently, the ‘Veil of the Temple,’ which lasts about seven hours. It’s really a kind of vigil. It takes place during the night, waiting for the resurrection of Christ.
John Tavener
We seem to have lost our contact with the primordial: the idea of – call it divine revelation as opposed to something that’s learned by the human intellect – something that, if you lay yourself completely open, and you just open your heart completely, something will actually come into it.
John Tavener
In his late quartets, Beethoven introduces an element that shouldn’t be there, that should be left for meditation, though I love them. I can see that through them came Wagner and Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg. And then came Tracey Emin. And I can see it all as one downward path.
John Tavener
I used to think there was something dirty about being paid for something which is a sacred thing to do. I can’t disconnect the act of writing music from the act of prayer. If anyone tries to stop me working, it feels like someone is trying to stop me from taking communion.
John Tavener
Every time I have a hit, I buy a Rolls.
John Tavener
I’ve always been aware of mortality because I’ve always had ill health most of my life.
John Tavener
The path I follow is still an Orthodox path. You have to follow a path; otherwise, it becomes a little bit new-age, a bit of this, a bit of that.
John Tavener