Arvo Part

Arvo Pärt’s “Solfeggio”: Adventures with a Diatonic Tone Row

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What happens when you treat the simple C major scale as a diatonic tone row? The answer can be heard in Solfeggio, the first a cappella choral work of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935). Composed in 1963, the same year as Pärt’s Symphony No. 1, Op. 9, “Polyphonic,” Solfeggio anticipates the composer’s later meditative tintinnabuli style. Solfeggio unfolds with a sense of cosmic timelessness. Serene clusters of sound form and dissipate as each vocal …

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Arvo Pärt’s Symphony No. 1, “Polyphonic”: An Exuberant Exploration of Counterpoint

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There is an adage that composers, as they age, write music of increasing contrapuntal complexity. The phenomenon can be heard in the music of Mahler and John Adams, but Estonian minimalist Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) followed a decidedly different path. In his youth, Pärt embraced the prevailing modernism, and the 12-tone system of Arnold Schoenberg, in which the twelve notes of the chromatic scale are treated equally so as to negate the …

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Arvo Pärt’s “Silouan’s Song”: “My Soul Yearns After the Lord”

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Arvo Pärt’s Silouan’s Song, composed in 1991 for string orchestra, reveals the sacred quality of both sound and silence. Inhabiting a meditative space which taps into cosmic expanses, it unfolds with the mystical bell tones of the Estonian composer’s tintinnabulation style. Pärt’s inspiration for the piece came from a text by the Russian poet and monk, St. Silouan (1866–1938), who spent much of his life at St Panteleimon on Mount Athos. Each phrase …

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Arvo Pärt’s “In Spe”: Building With Primitive Materials

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For eight years, beginning in the late 1960s, the Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt (b. 1935), entered into a period of compositional “silence.” When Pärt resumed his work, the music which emerged was far removed from that of his earlier modernist style. Ultra-complexity and dissonance were gone, replaced with a sense of timeless, meditative serenity. Pärt embraced the sanctity of a single note, or a glowing triad. “The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, …

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Arvo Pärt’s “Da Pacem Domine”: A Timeless Meditation

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Time has a deep meaning, but it is temporary, like our lives. Only eternity is timeless. –Arvo Pärt A sense of mysticism and timelessness pervades the music of the Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt. Emerging from the currents of twentieth century minimalism, it is music which inhabits the quiet, meditative space of Gregorian chant and early polyphony. “The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity,” said Pärt, who …

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Arvo Pärt’s “Summa”: Renaud Capuçon and Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne

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In 1994, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) said, I have developed a highly formalised compositional system, which I have been using to write my music for twenty years. Summa is the most strict and enigmatic work in this series. Beginning in the 1970s, Pärt’s music represented a radical departure from the atonal modernism that was prolific during much of the twentieth century. Instead, what emerged was music which was simultaneously …

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Arvo Pärt’s “Pari intervallo”: Geometry Unfolding in Time

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Musical lines evoke strict geometry in Arvo Pärt’s brief but cosmic meditation, Pari intervallo (Latin for “in the equal distance”). Throughout the piece, two parallel voices seem to drift quietly into infinity. A continuous and inevitable process unfolds which gives rise to occasional unexpected but delicious harmonic dissonances. In the score, Pärt inscribed a quote from Romans 14:8: “For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto …

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