THE CAT DECIDES : The music of John Tavener.

British composer John Tavener, fifty-six, is one of the most remarkable classical music success stories in recent years. His 1989 work for cello and orchestra, The Protecting Veil, inspired by the Orthodox feast of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God, has become an international chart-topper, with over six CD recordings to date. His elegiac Song for Athene was performed at the funeral service of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. Now Tavener's book, The Music of Silence: A Composer's Testament, has been published by Faber & Faber, describing the unexpected trajectory of his life and work.

A prodigy pianist, young Tavener also studied conducting, and was accomplished enough to lead performances of Verdi's Il Trovatore at London's Covent Garden at age twenty-four. But composition was always his main love. He created a number of avant-garde works, involving taped children's voices and other devices, which were admired by 1960s Londoners, including the Beatles, who released some of his music on their Apple Records label. An early opera, Therese (1979), was an impressionistic view of the significance of Saint Therese of Lisieux, which juxtaposed the Little Flower with her contemporary, the French poet Rimbaud. In 1976 Tavener had entered the Russian Orthodox church--although he has since lived part of each year in Greece and considers himself closer to Greek Orthodoxy. His subsequent works reflect this decisive change.

Tavener began to call his works musical icons, and he's said that the "voice of God" spoke in them. The "icons" poured out in great volume, with total ease. Instead of the plethora of ideas in his earlier works, Tavener scaled back to a minimalist-style repetition of very few ideas and a static-sounding musical texture. Although his latter-day works have been compared to those of Arvo Part and Henryk Gorecki, both best-selling minimalists, Tavener's music is different because of its immediate sweet-sounding appeal. On a recent recording for Cala, the BBC Singers perform choral works like The Lamb and The Tiger--both written to poems by William Blake--and the hit Song for Athene. All are soothing and tension-free, with a lulling effect that is perilously close to easy-listening. New Yorker critic Andrew Porter, usually a strong booster of modern music, decried Tavener's "Mantovani string sonorities," calling him more sentimental than Massenet. Porter pointed to an essential paradox: if a composer feels his music is dictated by the divine, how can much-needed self-criticism ever occur? Tavener's Music of Silence addresses this question in its own way.

As quirky and confounding a British eccentric as any composer since the late Michael Tippett, Tavener disarms criticism by stating that he can tell if one of his works-in-progress is not developing well "by looking at the cat." His domestic feline reveals any imbalance in the cosmos that a note out of place might signify. He adds: "There is something deeply mysterious about cats. I think they 'know' things we don't have access to."

Furry friends apart, Tavener's book also expresses his loathing for bugaboos like "the angry, tortured face" of Arnold Schoenberg as well as that composer's "rotting humanism and his humanly contrived techniques." A more disquieting anger is expressed in his mention of a vocal setting, at age fifteen, of Donne's "Spit in my face you Jewes, and pierce my side,/Buffet, and scoffe, scourge, and crucifie me." Although describing this as a "very severe text for somebody of fifteen to be attracted to," Tavener does not reflect on its anti-Semitic implications. Indeed, in a new choral work, Total Eclipse, to be released next spring by Harmonia Mundi records, a rudely blaring saxophone represents the villainous "Synagogue," according to the composer, still oblivious to anti-Semitic metaphor years after his Donne setting.

Apart from the ideological risks of assuming a mantle of ancient belief, there is the question of aesthetic results. When performed plainly and unassumingly, as by the BBC singers or by the Scottish Ensemble (on Linn), Tavener's work can make appealing listening. Precise artists like cellist Yo-Yo Ma and conductor David Zinman have made a lucid concert-hall recording of The Protecting Veil (Sony) that avoids many of the work's sentimental pitfalls. But Tavener has expressed the wish that his work be performed in cathedrals, where the soupier acoustics do not flatter his already vague-sounding, facile harmonies. Thus a whole program of vocal works performed in Westminster Abbey (Sony) makes one understand how music critic Andrew Porter can compare listening to Tavener to enjoying "a good old wallow." Whether one believes the widespread journalistic praise of Tavener--one British headline boosted him as a "Rebel with a Medieval Cause"--there is evidence that his musical gifts remain intact. If there are some quibbles about how he chooses to exercise them at the moment, there is always hope that his cat may speak up and correct any current excesses.

Benjamin Ivry is author of biographies of Ravel (Welcome Rain), Poulenc (Phaidon), and Rimbaud (Absolute Press). His poetry collection, Paradise for the Portuguese Queen, was published by Orchises Press.