This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Song for Athene, composed by John Tavener in 1993 out of the explicitly religious musical language his 1977 conversion to Orthodox Christianity had given him, was performed at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in September 1997, carrying a work written in the vocabulary Tavener himself called icons in sound to one of the most watched televised funerals of the twentieth century, an occasion far beyond the concert and liturgical settings the piece had been written for.
That single performance placed a composition rooted in Orthodox devotional practice before a global audience far larger than the concert hall and church settings his other religious works ordinarily reached, a documented instance of explicitly liturgical music reaching a mass secular occasion rather than remaining within its original devotional context, and one that made Song for Athene by far the best known of his works to listeners outside his existing audience.
Tavener's wider honors followed in the years after, a knighthood in 2000 and the Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition in 2003, recognition that arrived across the decade following Song for Athene's use at a funeral watched around the world, formal acknowledgment of a body of work whose composer had described his own purpose in explicitly religious terms since his 1977 conversion and had continued composing in that same vocabulary until his death in November 2013.