For solo Cello Timpani and Strings.Popule Meus was commissioned through the Magnum Opus project: Kathryn Gould founding patron and commissioner and Meet the Composer project manager.It was first performed on 6thFebruary 2010 by Yuri Hooker (cello) and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Micklethwate. Composer's Notes 'Popule Meus is a meditation on the Judaic and Christian text ?O my People whathave I done to you?? but itis also a Universalist contemplation of the wholesale rejection of God by modern man. However much manrejects God he cannot escape Him and indeed he is condemned to the supernatural by his deiformnature. InHindu terms he is the Absolute Ayam Atma Brahma (The Self is the Absolute).In this work the solo cello is the All-Compassionate One while the timpani represent man in his vain andpointless rejection. Although the solocello and strings and the timpani share the same material (four ideas aregradually revealed and they revolve four times during the piece) the timpani music is violent and becomesincreasingly frenzied and contracted while thecello and strings remain still and serene.So even in winning the Darkness loses and even in losing the Light wins. Passion Resurrection andRedemption; or in Hindu terms Atma (The Absolute) alone is real Maya (The Relative) ismerely illusion.'

Work for Solo Cello and Orchestral Cello Section. Premiered by Yo Yo Ma.Quoting Tavener: It was while pondering these traditional dicta that I began to write the opening solo melody for the cello. It is in fact a palindromebecause waking and dying are like two sides of a piece of paper. If you wake up spiritually then you will die to all that is not of God. In the middle section which is also a palindrome the orchestral cellos join in theparadoxical meditation providing a platform as it were while the cello line takes on a much more melismatic and decorative character.In fact the whole work is a series of intellectual contradictions realised by thesimplest of musical metaphysics. Dying life life dying waking up in order to die the solo cello always represents the individual mind dying and the individual mind waking up.Then of a sudden just before the end thesolo chant begins again only to be cut off by a distant sentimental memory the memory of 'the blues' reminding us of ordinary human emotion and of our fallen state. The very end suggests a waking up into a kind of peace (notsoul slumber since after death the soul becomes more intensely alive); but we know nothing of that so the music fades beyond our ears.