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The Temple Church is a fine 13th century building: soundly designed, and vested in the legal grandeur of the Bar. The lawyers of the Inner and Middle Temple raised almost half a million pounds to commission an epic, The Veil of the Temple, from Sir John Tavener, one of our most renowned but musically obscure composers.

A lot pops into your noddle when you sit in the dark for seven hours. Perhaps that explains why, halfway through John Tavener's The Veil of the Temple, I found myself pondering the numbing predictability of musical life in modern Britain.

For John Tavener, music isn't just about music. It's a way of stilling the mind, so as to focus on the emptiness that the mystics tell us is the essence of the Divine.

Once in a while even the most heartless hack must cast aside professional scepticism and gush like a groupie. Perhaps it's the heat, or perhaps it's the fact that i have gone 26 hours on a bacon buttie and two bars of chocolate, but I feel one of those simpering, whimpering raves coming on.

The Round Church of the Temple, its floor littered with effigies of knights ready to kill to defend their religion, dates from the time of the Crusades. Given that the aftershocks of that holy war still reverberate, what better site for John Tavener's The Veil of the Temple, a work embodying the composer's hope for an end to religious strife?

Check out the listing for John Tavener's all-night vigil.

Tucked away from the incessant pace of Fleet Street, some of London's finest lawyers work in the private haven of Inner and Middle Temple, a maze of cobbled alleyways leading from one magnificent building to another around the Inns of Court.