Protecting Veil / in Alium

In The Protecting Veil Tavener strives to capture some of what he considers to be the almost cosmic power of the Mother of God. The cello represents the Mother of God and never stops singing throughout and one can think of the strings as a gigantic extension of her unending song. The music falls into eight continuous sections and use is made of the eight Byzantine tones. Various Feasts inspired Tavener as he composed; the second, for instance, is related to her birth, the third to the Annunciation, the fourth to the Incarnation, the fifth (unaccompanied) to her lament at the foot of the cross, the sixth to the Resurrection, the seventh to her Dormition, and the first and last sections to her cosmic beauty and power over a shattered world. The Protecting Veil ends with a musical evocation of the tears of the Mother of God. The final section completes the palindromic effect of the work as a whole by returning to the mood of the opening, but with the recorded soprano here replacing the string orchestra and the grand organ taking over from the Hammond organ, alternating it's more and more spasmodic entries with those of the piano. The music unfolds as a canon in sixteen parts, each set of entries being introduced by bells and by glides on solo violins. Superimposed throughout are the voices of four small children saying their prayers (in Latin, French, German and English) and gradually and successively falling asleep. The canon dissolves into a thirty-two line slide (the soprano in sixteen parts with herself, together with sixteen solo violins) and the work ends as the last child falls asleep and the last of the thirty-two 'voices' resolves.