The music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt may sound simple, but it's a simplicity borne from years of hard labour and precise refinement. Martin Adamsexplores the reasons for Pärt's singular success.
It is unlikely that any art music of the past 100 years has achieved, within the lifetime of its composer, such widespread exposure and popularity as that of Arvo Pärt. This is not base popularity - his music commands unusual respect from the musical public, the general public, and professional musicians, even from professionals who are not fans. You might not like it; but it resists dismissal.
In Ireland, Pärt's music is played on radio stations as varied as Newstalk, Radio 2 and Lyric FM; it regularly occurs on request programmes, and few living composers are so frequently featured in concerts. It has been used in at least 50 films, and far more people, from all walks of life and of all ages, have been struck by works such as Spiegel im Spiegel (1978) for violin (or cello) and piano, and the orchestral Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977-80), than would know the name of the composer.
Some of the music's appeal lies in its seeming simplicity. However, like all great simplicity, this was won not by divine inspiration, but by the hard labour of refinement. That labour took many years; and like so much artistic labour, it involved a long process of experimentation, and far more rejection than acceptance.
Arvo Pärt was born in Estonia, and studied music from the age of seven. In 1963 he graduated from the composition class of Heino Eller (1887-1970) at the Tallinn Conservatory. For about 10 years from 1957 he worked for Estonian Radio as a recording engineer, which helped to hone his fine ear for instrumental colour and precise pitch operation.
Throughout the 1960s he juggled his interests in modernistic techniques such as serialism and collage, with an interest in music of the past. This artistic high-wire act culminated in a work that is central to his development. Credo, written in 1968 and scored for SATB choir, piano and orchestra, pillages material from Bach's famous Prelude in C from Book 1 of the "48" to create ideas that manage to be at once local and, via a much more slowly moving version, hold the entire work together.
It created a stir, not so much for its modernism as its openly Christian ethos. One doubts that his choice of the same Bach prelude Gounod had used 100 years earlier, to provide the accompaniment for his melody Ave Maria, was entirely coincidental.
BY THE LATE 1960s, Pärt's blending of concentrated modern techniques and older textures had driven him into a corner. He had explored just about every atonal device available, but had come to the conclusion that atonality was a "sterile democracy between the notes [ that] has killed in us every lively feeling".
For about seven years he studied more than he composed, and was especially absorbed in medieval and early Renaissance music, in the disciplined simplicity of Gregorian chant and organum, as well as in such masters as Machaut, Ockeghem, Obrecht and Josquin. From these studies he developed the astonishingly disciplined method of pitch organisation that he calls "tintinnabuli". The word comes from the Latin for a small bell, and refers to the bell-like sonorities that result when voices or instrumental parts are combined in a triad.
Pärt's first work on what he described as "a new plateau" was the 1976 miniature for piano, Für Alina. Within the next two years he wrote the works that made his international name, Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten for strings and single bell, Fratres (which the composer has now issued in 12 arrangements for various combinations of instruments), Summa and Tabula rasa.
This was not the sort of music that the Soviet authorities wished to see admired in the West. It did not conform to their view of socialist music, and was altogether too religious. In 1980 Pärt and his family moved to Austria and then settled in Berlin.
By then Pärt was attracting the attention of the reductionists who think they understand a work of art when they classify it. Thus he was pigeon-holed into the same "holy minimalist" box as John Tavener (b 1944), Henryk Górecki (b 1933) and Giya Kancheli (b 1935). This does him, and most of the others, a disservice, though not such a serious disservice as another appellation to which his name has been attached - "new simplicity."
The surface of Pärt's tintinnabulation works might sound simple; but the compositional thinking is anything but. As Paul Hillier has demonstrated in the only full-length book on this composer (Arvo Pärt, OUP 1997), the technique often involves extraordinarily subtle mathematical patterns.
Not everyone likes Pärt's simplicity and repetition: it has been likened to a musical equivalent of Chinese water torture. But even his detractors cannot deny the rigour of thought and practice. Nor can they deny that he has created an utterly distinctive sound.
Pärt's deep thinking and compositional discipline is especially apparent in a steady stream of choral music that he produced after his move to Berlin. It includes some of his most widely admired choral works, such as the 7 Magnificat- Antiphonen (1988) and the Kanon Pokajanen (1997).
This music's grip on sonority is remarkable by any standards. Take the St John Passion, or Passio, (1982) in which tight organisation of pitch is combined with an equally tight rhythmic scheme. It looks back to older passion settings by composers such as Obrecht (1457-1505), in which music characterises the individuals - the Evangelist, Pilate, Christ and so on - by representative and symbolic means that have little to do with the personal expression one associates with a Bach passion.
In the Passio, Pärt translates those methods so that characters are represented by differently pitched tintinnabuli collections. Shifts from one collection to another are audible, especially given this composer's characteristic, high levels of repetition. However, this musical personification is unconcerned with personality. It is impersonal, but it is not depersonalised. Characters rise above their individuality to become what they represent in the grand scheme of redemption. Therein lies a clue to the remarkable appeal of this music - the instrumental as well as the choral. Pärt's technique of tintinnabulation seems to distil out everything inessential to the most fundamental things of music, even the personal expression of the artist.
WHY SHOULD SO many people be drawn to music that seems to exclude personal expression - the very thing on which so much of western culture depends, from Enlightenment philosophy to the television show Friends? And why should music so popular be music in which there is so much silence? Because this music is the antithesis of all these things, it seems to offer relief from the chaotic energy of modern life, and from the isolating consequences of postmodernism.
In a world in which everything is relative, in which each personality has to construct meaning for themselves (like the characters in Friends), it appeals to the universal desire for transcendence by seeming to rise above self-expression and aspire to something more universal, yet humane. Its echoes of old sacred music intensify its religious qualities; but unlike so much religion of the past, they are unthreatening because they are un-preachy. It has tranquillity, but of a kind that comes from projecting audible order. It gives us space; it gives us time to listen.
Among the composer's many memorable quotes, two of the most often-heard are especially relevant. Pärt has written that "Time and timelessness are connected. This instant and eternity are struggling within us. And this is the cause of all our contradictions, our obstinacy, our narrow-mindedness, our faith and our grief."
He has also said: "The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises - and everything that is unimportant falls away."