It’s inspired by something Tavener and McGregor have in common – the heart

It’s inspired by something Tavener and McGregor have in common – the heart. Kilner secured essential funding from the Wellcome Trust and has been instrumental in pumping information into the project.Given the weakness of his central organ, Tavener’s heart is probably never far from his mind. “I find the purely scientific approach to the human heart a little analytical and dehumanising,” he admits. “An artistic dimension, involving music and dance, takes you on to another level of understanding.”Tavener hadn’t ever considered writing for dance. “I had sketched out a small amount of Laila, probably late in 2002, before the suggestion of it being danced arose. I was very taken by this idea since opera seemed too literal a direction for the piece, while choreographed movement was the ideal, subtle medium in which to convey the metaphysical ideas contained in the music.”Laila takes as its starting point a mystic poem by the Sufi saint Sheikh Ahmad al-Alawi. The tale of Majnun and Laila is a great love story, the Romeo and Juliet of the Arabian world,” explains Tavener.

“Majnun, a mad poet, wanders from place to place looking for Laila who leads him in his travels through the seven stations of the heart. When he eventually finds her again, he doesn’t recognise her, because he has interioralised her to such an extent that her physical presence is no longer needed.”As in so many of Tavener’s works, the solo soprano part is written for his muse, Patricia Rozario; there are also parts for a tenor, chorus of five bass singers and chamber orchestra. Although Laila provides the soundscape for McGregor’s Amu, it can also stand alone as a concert piece. Listeners will find the style of music harmonically rich, unmistakeably Tavener’s own, refracted through the development of his spiritual philosophy. The rhythmic contractions of the hollow four-chambered organ that pumps blood through our vessels is present in the resonant boom of the pow-wow drum, and Tavener adds the distinctive sound of Tibetan temple bowls.”The words are minimal: Laila, who represents God, is restricted to the call of the Sufi: ‘La illaha illa llah’ (‘There is no God but God; nothing exists but existence’). Near the very end where Majnun dies, the pre-recorded sound of a real heartbeat is heard, dropped down two octaves, along with the sound of breathing. Unlike some of my other works, Laila has a certain ecstatic momentum, moving fairly fast at times as a pulse rate might, getting quicker and quicker.

I’ve drawn inspiration from the whirling dervishes, the Sufi mystics of Turkey and Persia for whom whirling is a mode of worship. Laila whirls to an ecstatic point, a little like Ravel’s Bol?, at which explosive point the tenor asks in Arabic: ‘Waman ana, ya ana, illa ana?’ (‘Who am I, oh I but I?’).”Tavener hasn’t seen anything by Random so he has no notions of what McGregor’s work is like But, he says, “I will attend all the performances of Amu. I have no picture in my mind of how it will look but I suspect I am rather naively imagining it all rather more literally than Wayne. The painter Nicholas Horsfield was one of the most influential figures in the arts in the North-West.