More Spacious than the Heavens

In my essay titled "More Spacious than the Heavens: Employing artificial echo to create a musical space in John Tavener's Hymn to the Mother of God," I examined said piece to better understand the effect the echo has on the overall soundscape and the music's relation to it's topic, the "almost cosmic power of the Mother of God."[1] The analysis utilized a broad scope of techniques: from Linear Analysis, to Neo-Riemannian Transformations, to textual analysis, to set-class theory. Because of the echo, any given moment of the piece superimposes two moments at once. This creates a nuanced blending effect in the piece's timbre and harmony, and provokes a profound sense of space and time, especially during a live performance.

The text is taken from the megalynarion "All of Creation," which honors Mary for being the Mother of God. In the Orthodox Liturgy, the congregation sings this megalynarion while the presider commemorates the dead before the Blessed Sacrament. Considering that Tavener wrote this piece in memory of his departed mother, Muriel, the composer is implicitly positioned the way the presider is in this moment of the Liturgy.

"All of Creation" is as follows:

All of creation rejoices in you, O full of grace: the assembly of angels and the human race. You are a sanctified temple and a spiritual paradise, the glory from whom God was incarnate and became a child; our God, existing before all ages. He made your womb a throne, and your body more spacious than the heavens. All of creation rejoices in you, O full of grace. Glory to you.[2]

Tavener divides the megalynarion into a ternary form and omits the text relevant to Jesus' incarnation. It's debatable whether this minimizes or expands the scope of the piece. At worst, removing Jesus from the picture removes the very reason Mary is so great, and the address may fall inappropriately to figures who do not deserve such praise. At best, the omission narrows the focus, and the generalized address works to proactively honor Muriel with the praises of the Virgin Mother, precisely because Mary is the Paragon of Motherhood. The reconciling of this issue is tightly bound between Tavener's Russian Orthodox faith and new age beliefs.

The composition is for double choir, the second of which is in canon with the first offset by three beats. The result of the canon is less contrapuntal, more affective. This canon is performed at a glacially slow tempo of ♩ = c.40; when combined with the echo effect, this produces a sense of space far greater than any church in the world. The sense of space is especially evident in slower performances of this piece, such as in the commercial recordings done by the Gabrieli Consort (2008) and the Trinity Choir (2016) (See Figure 1). The incredible temporal displacement between the two choirs also evokes a supertemporal image, where the declaration "all praise to You" rings thorough all time. The Magnificat does emphasize that all generations will call Mary blessed, after all.[3]

Figure 1. A list of several commercial recordings of Hymn to the Mother of God, arranged chronologically by year of publication, comparing the tempi of the performances.

Collecting Data and Measuring the Effect

In each choir, the majority of the A sections consist of parallel thirds and fifths between voices. The lack of contrapuntal motion implies the voices are not independent of one another, but are of one accord. Plainning makes it unusual to analyze harmonic development from a Shenkerian perspective, yet there is a definite sense the dominant is reached and resolves in mm. 5, 21 (See Figure 2). By contrast, the B section operates in parsimonious four-part voicings without parallelism. What's more, it does not have a direct melodic trajectory, unlike the Dominant--Tonic motion of the A sections. Neither is the harmony teleological, cycling between Ab major to Eb major to C major. This can instead be demonstrated using the analytical tools of Neo-Riemannian analysis. These three chords are all members of an LRRPPL cycle. Put more simply, they are the outputs when L, R, or P is applied to C minor (Figure 3a&b demonstrate both versions of this cycle).

Figure 2. Choir I mm. 1-5 linear analysis; also applies to mm. 17-22. The assertion of V on the climax tone is plausible due to its structural significance.

Figure 3. Cyclical chord progression of the B section represented with Neo-Riemannian transformations. 3a displays these transformations as members of an LRRPPL cycle, whereas 3b shows these chords as members of simple transformations of a Cm triad.

The C minor center of theis cycle, in addition to several other features, allow us to speculate on the Christological centricity of the musical image despite the omission of references to Christ in the piece's text. The given premises are that in this Marian piece, the pitch C is temporally central and covertly omnipresent, and that the form of the piece compellingly resembles the platytera in which Christ is visually central and Mary's raison d'être. The conclusion would be that the pitch C must represent Christ.

In aid of the first premise, C minor operates as an origin point for the orbiting harmonies (just as Christ is the origin of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Church). The premise is reaffied at a superficial level too. If one takes the local key of the B section to be Ab major, then Ab and Eb share a tonic--dominant relationship, but the chord at the very center of the section (and the piece as a whole) is a dazzling C major chord, foreign to the local key of Ab major. Likewise, Christ's kingdom is not of this world.[4] He is set apart from mankind and the natural world while still being born of a woman and being of our likeness. Additionally, consider that the common tones between the pitch collections of the A and B sections spell a C7 chord:

Section A = C, D, E, F, G, A, Bb

Section B = C, Eb, E, G, Ab, Bb

Common tones: C, E, G, Bb

The "C-dominent-seven," having an omnipresence in the piece of music, can corrospond thematically to the "Christus Dominus" having totally filled the Blessed Virgin with grace. Lastly, when both choirs are combined, the C major/Eb major sonority (m. 12) and Ab major/C major sonority (m. 13) are the only non-diatonic collections in any of the compositions vertical sonorities, once again referencing the superhuman quality of the divine Messiah.

These Christological references are not ment to be a statement of Tavener's intensions, but rather speculative observations based on the music's similitude to Christian devotion. In this case, the platytera (Figure 4) was an especially appropriate image to compare, given that it is iconography from the Orthodox tradition and that the symetrical form corrisponds to the music's ternary form.

Figure 4. Platytera in the asp of St. Paraskevi's Church, Preveza. Photo by Nikos D. Karabelas, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

To analyze the wavering, somewhat psycadelic effect of the choirs coming in and out of sync, I measured the pitch-class sets (pc sets) of vertical sonorities on every beat (the smallest possible unit for a pitch to change in this composition). It was clear that as the choirs moved in and out of synch that the pc sets fluctuated in cardinality (that is, the number of pcs in a set) between 3--6 in the A sections and 3--5 in the B sections. The quantity of any interval class (ic) can be plotted the same way after calculating the interval class vector of each sonority. Figures 5a&b demonstrate the development of set-class cardinality and pitch-class cardinality over time in the final section of the piece. The valley found in mm. 20-21 demonstrate a moment of clarity in the piece's murky texture in which the phrase, "all praise be to You" makes a climactic declaration. Some ensembles will add a pause before the downbeat of m. 21 to further emphasize this text, such as the 1991 recording from the Cambridge Singers, conducted by John Rutter.

Figure 5a&b. Charts tracking the development of pc and ic cardinality (quantity of pcs or ics in a set) over time in the reprised A section (A'; mm. 17-24). The charts are plotted along a vertical axis displaying cardinality and a horizontal axis measuring time in two layers: the bottom displaying measure number, the top displaying beat number starting from the beginning of the section. 5a has two bars representing the set cardinality of each choir in isolation. Because they mostly sing fully-voiced triads, this number will usually be 3, except for the minor-seven chord at the beginning of the section. The combined cardinality is displayed in the colored slope. 5b shows only the ics of the choirs combined along the same cardinality/time plane.

In the realm of timbre, the vowel sounds dramatically color the soundscape and are worth analyzing with the same tools as the pcs and ics. My analysis, however, barely scratched the surface in this regard, instead using a linearized measurement of the "brightness" of five basic vowel sounds to calculate the average vowel sound during more "complex" sonorities (that is, ones whose set cardinalities are 5 or 6). The results show an observable lean towards the brighter end of the spectrum, making these sonorities easier to tune and giving them a dazzling quality (See Figure 6).

Figure 6. The average vowel index between the two choirs for every beat that the cardinatiy of a composited vertical sonority is 5 or greater. The vertical axis measures the number of instances a given mean occours, the horizontal axis is for each possible mean for the scale.
The vowel index is a scale between 1 and 5, where 5 is the brightest vowel and 1 is the darkest. Vowels were identified on the scale like so:
u ("oo") = 1o ("oh") = 2i ("ee") = 3ɛ ("eh") = 4ɑ ("ah") = 5

In summary, Hymn to the Mother of God has an ethereal musical space of almost incomprehensible measure, which results from stretching the sacred megalynarion text over long periods of time by a slow tempo and an artificial echo with a three-beat delay. In any moment, the pc set derived from the vertical sonority is somewhere between 3 (a triad) and 6 (two triads with no common tones), and the texture is constantly fluctuating between the ends of this range, creating a rippling effect throughout the piece. This rippling can be calculated by measuring the pc and ic cardinality over time.

The musical image of the Mother of God is enhanced by the piece's unusual texture in several ways. For one, non-diatonic sonorities are isolated to the very center of the composition, mirroring the placement of Christ in Mary's center in the platytera. This central section has cyclical harmony corresponding to the litany of titles uttered to the Virgin Mother. By contrast, the text of the outer sections is teleological and so is the melodic/harmonic trajectory as well. The monophonic texture of the A sections implies unified motion of voices, despite the abrasive fluctuation in the number of pcs per beat. Extra clarity is given in mm. 20-21 by breaking up the echoing texture to prepare for a clear and dramatic declaration of the end of the prayer: "all praise be to You."

These techniques create a sense of musical space of grand proportions, of a simultaneously solemn and exuberant mood, and hold many signifiers of the quintessential maternity and matriarchy of the Theotokos.

Further Considerations

Although my analysis has already been thorough and has yielded some helpful insights, there are several ways in which I intend to improve the research. For one, the cardinality of set classes and ics do not reflect the sense stability and instability as directly as an analysis based on real intervals. In the context of my article, set- and interval-classes may be too condensed to faithfully reflect the singers and listeners' experience of the motion in and out of sync. Therefore, developments in analysis of spectralist music may be a benefit to the research. Additionally, although slower performances minimize the impact of harmonic prolongation in listener experience, it is more perceptible in faster performances and therefore deserves greater consideration in the matter of the music's tension-and-release.

Secondly, this essay accounts only for the impact of artificial echo, but not for natural reverberation, which also has a significant contribution to the music's soundscape. The reverb factor is dependent on the space of the performances. Where the sound can bounce around with lots of hard surfaces (such as the dome shape and marble interior of the Pantheon in Rome), the temporally adjacent sonorities blend together and pursue the listener from all angles. In a dry space (such as a typical recording studio), the echo effect fails to make this sense of space without the contributions of reverb. The soundscape is too cozy without reverb to give a sense of the cosmic or supernatural scale which Tavener intends to convey in this music.

Figure 7. IPA Vowel Chart along a two-dimentional plot: Front--Back, Open--Close. Image by Grendelkahn and Nohat, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Thirdly, the analysis of phoneme development over time is critical for addressing timbre, an often-underrepresented variable to analysis and yet one which has significant contributions to the musical soundscape. Nevertheless, my linearization of phonemes between dark and bright vowels has more distance from reality than I am satisfied with. For starters, the International Phonetic Alphabet usually charts vowels along two dimensions: openness (brightness) and placement. My research overlooked the effect on the timbre that the placement of a vowel would have, whether in the front, center or back of the mouth. I instead assumed a positon for all vowels along a brightness scale without considering that any two vowels have equivalent openness but different placements in the mouth. To improve this part of the analysis, I would refer to the IPA vowel chart (Figure 7) and measure the space between vowels either on a Cartesian plane or counting the shortest number of steps between vowels (i.e. ɛ-ɛ=0, ɛ-u=4, etc.). The average vowel index of any sonority could be better measured by this data being plotted on a Cartesian plane, but how to quantify the data is a challenge I will need to find an answer for.

Lastly, the analytical tools developed during my study of Hymn to the Mother of God worked to answer a question particular to the unique echo effect found in this piece. However, is the use of canon to make an echo (with less regard to counterpoint) truly one-of-a-kind? If there are other instances of this effect used, they should be acknowledged. I believe it would be worth exploring with this technique to better refine the analytical tool and what questions it can answer.

This research was in partial completion of a Masters of the Arts in Music Theory from the Univerity of Minnesota, and was presented at the anual conference for the Society of Christian Scholarship in Music on February 26th, 2026.

Page Citations

John Tavener, Choral Collection (London: Chester Music, 2000), ii.
Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. “The Divine Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great - Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America,” n.d. https://www.goarch.org/-/the-divine-liturgy-of-saint-basil-the-great#divine.
Cf. Lk. 1:48.
Cf. Jn. 18:36.

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