Tetragrammaton

Programme notes
The composer writes:
In everyday parlance, the English expression “four-letter word” has cheap
and vulgar connotations, but in Greek, Tetragrammaton (Greek for “fourletter
word”) is the Hellenistic term for the Hebrew name of God. The name
itself, YAHWEH, has six letters, but in old Hebrew only the consonants,
YHWH, were written down, hence the Greek name. The text of the piece is
a compilation from the Book of Job of the Old Testament, specifically from
“God’s answer to Job” (verses 38:4-18). The conclusion of the first stanza of
the selected text (“when the
morning stars sang together, as the wind announced upon the waters the
glory of the coming of man”) is not a literal translation from the Bible, but
is borrowed from Edgar Cayce, the 20th century American mystic, who has
offered this poetic rendering while in trance on a number of occasions; the
evocative and powerful character of this rendering made it impossible to
resist its inclusion here.
Before embarking on the composition of the piece and after reading
the original text several times, I read Carl G. Jung’s “Answer to Job”, a
remarkable work which Jung wrote towards the end of his life. Although
I agree with Jung that the Book of Job is a turning point in the Hebrew
concept of the Godhead and a founding stone for the subsequent advent
of Christianity, I do disagree with his description of God’s answer to Job as
pyrotechnics aimed mainly at impressing fear in Job and preventing him
from questioning the Divine. To me the verses
of the whole Book of Job and of that section in particular are
sublime and of timeless beauty: they are just as inspiring and relevant
today as when they were written. In setting these verses to music, I had
no preconceived ideas about how the music should sound or evolve; I
let the words take me wherever they wanted to go. I tried to create a
“magical” context in which they could tell their own story without too much
interference on my part.
Tetragrammaton took me an unusually long time to compose; I worked on
it on and off from May 1994 until February 1995. The years 1994 and 1995
were a “testing” period for me, a midlife crisis if you like, which affected my
work and my thinking
about music, and Tetragrammaton along with some other works of the
same period bear witness to my changing values, musical and otherwise. The
common thread that permeats these works is the investigation of a situation
where creativity is divorced from ego. In this process of soul searching, the
Book of Job became a grand metaphor for a newly defined creativity. This
book, like the parable of the Prodigal Son, is about a fundamental change
in consciousness whereby an individual does not become creative through
the solitary activity of “playing God”, but by the far more rewarding one of
“playing (or co-creating) with God”.