“How we live depends on our relationship with death: how we make music depends on our relationship to silence,” writes Paul Hillier in his biography of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935).
Sound and silence meet in Pärt’s Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, scored for string orchestra and a single bell, sounding on the pitch of A. Composed in 1977, the work employs Pärt’s tintinnabulation style, rooted in Gregorian chant. It is a rejection of the dissonance and complexity of much of 20th century music. The composer explained,
I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements—with one voice, two voices,…primitive materials, with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells. And that is why I call it ‘tintinnabulation.’
The Cantus begins with three tolling bells, followed by a descending A minor scale which emerges in the highest register of the violins. The work unfolds as a gradual, tension-building descent. The scale enters in new voices at slower rates of speed to form a vast prolation canon. A dichotomy forms between the scales and hovering pitches which outline an A minor chord. In the final moments, the moving lines converge in a cosmic chord. A final bell tone fades into silence, its overtones delivering a transcendent shift to A major.
Arvo Pärt was finishing the elegiac work when he learned of the death of the famous English composer. He writes,
Why did the date of Benjamin Britten’s death – 4 December 1976 – touch such a chord in me? During this time I was obviously at the point where I could recognise the magnitude of such a loss. Inexplicable feelings of guilt, more than that even, arose in me. I had just discovered Britten for myself. Just before his death I began to appreciate the unusual purity of his music – I had had the impression of the same kind of purity in the ballads of Guillaume de Machaut. And besides, for a long time I had wanted to meet Britten personally – and now it would not come to that.
Recordings
- Pärt: Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, Dennis Russell Davies, Staatsorchester Stuttgart Amazon