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The Veil of the Temple Note by Brian Keeble The Veil of the Temple, commissioned for the Round Church of the Temple in London, and conceived and executed on an unprecedented scale, will last for some eight hours. It is not liturgy, although it has a liturgical dimension, neither is it concert music. That is in the sense of being a work of art designed as an end in itself and meant to express and flatter merely human qualities. The reasons for art do not lie within art itself, which must always strive to connect with what transcends the human as such. The purpose of The Veil is to awaken, through music, some realisation of what is meant by man’s being created in the Divine Image. The performance of The Veil is a musical journey using voices and instruments, moving through eight cycles. The performance takes place at night in a sacred space, and the object of the journey is to make effective an heightened state of being of the listener through a symbolic unveiling from darkness towards light. At the beginning there is soundless darkness; a silent breath that contains the seed-form of all the cycles to come. Just as at the heart of the primordial darkness that is the world, void and without form, God resides in His profoundest interiority, so there is in the human heart a recollection of the light – the mystery that is the Divine Spark, the logos in the human soul. At the first sound it is awakened and energised to make the journey towards the Divine Itself through the Christian logos – the Trinity unmanifest. Hence, paradoxically, the soul’s vocation is to become that which it always is – its life is to journey towards that which is its life. The soul’s journey is to move from the existential darkness of temporal duration – time – towards the Glory of the Divine instantaneity, the ever-abiding light of the Eternal. It is also, for the symbolic themes are threaded and interwoven throughout the music’s unfolding, at the beginning in the absence of light, a waiting at the tomb of Christ for the Light of the Resurrection. The listener should be aware at the outset of two features of the conception of The Veil which act as important non-auditory aspects of the music’s performance. The first feature might be said to form the seminal idea (archetype) of the whole work. It is the idea that any claim to an exclusive possession of Truth by any sacred tradition is equivalent to placing a limitation of the infinitude of the Divine which must, by definition, encompass everything. Whatever symbols, words, characterisation used to define or express the nature of God and His relationship to man must, in the final analysis, be seen inevitably as an accommodation to man’s earthly state. In order to embrace the infinitude of God, all forms have to be shattered – even that of The Veil. In the religious context of the music this means all models of a manifest Temple of Jerusalem must finally be discarded in the Face of the Divine Presence. The second non-auditory aspect of The Veil ’s conception is closely related to the first, and underscores the whole work. God is nothing, in the sense that God is no thing. The unfolding of the eight cycles is in a sense a musical reiteration of the need to dissociate the notion of God from any finite representation. This reiteration is, in the music, like a cumulative denial of the possibility of the Divine as being in any way exclusive in its infinity. The reiteration grows less emphatic as the cycles progress, as approach to the Divine makes it increasingly evident that God, in his plenitude, in being no thing, far from being diminished or impoverished is, on the contrary, the very womb and cause of all things. The eighth cycle represents this idea impelled to its fullest and final implication. The discourse-cummeditation that is The Veil’s trajectory is completed by the seventh cycle, having fully articulated the Divine from the Christian perspective. In the eighth cycle the veil that is the exclusivity of the Christian perspective is lifted – “the veil has become light – and indeed there is no longer any veil”, in the words of Frithjof Schuon – in a musical gnosis that embraces all religions as being Christian in so far as they are manifestations of the logos. Thus it can be seen that the first seven cycles all contain, at their still centre, the last Dialogue of Christ with his disciples until, at the end of the seventh cycle, the music assumes a cosmic and universal significance. The movement of the first seven cycles can be likened to the turning of a prayer wheel – started by the solo soprano – representing the journey of the Self. This is the movement of the Divine Eros through a series of spasms ever expanding and ever rising towards extinction in the Divine Infinity, until, in the seventh cycle, unannounced, there is a sudden transformation that removes all traces of darkness. By the eighth cycle the awakened soul has moved from darkness to light until a point is reached, with the intensification of the light, that there is a sudden explosion of light. This is the rending of the Veil. Light can no longer be denied. In metaphysical terms the Divine nature of the Real becomes blindingly obvious. Light is known by light, as the spark of the logos in the soul gradually transforms the soul into the light of the Divine that is its eternal nature. There is no longer any division between transcendent and immanent, inner and outer worlds. There is the realisation that the soul is light from the beginning.