Arvo Part

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

by

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, …

Read more

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

by

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 …

Read more

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

by

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 …

Read more

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

by

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 …

Read more

Arvo Pärt’s “The Beatitudes”: Meditative Minimalism

by

“Time has a deep meaning, but it is temporary, like our lives. Only eternity is timeless.” -Arvo Pärt Sound, silence, and time are mystical properties in the music of the Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt (b. 1935). Pärt’s early music inhabited the complex, twelve-tone world of twentieth century modernism. Then, in the late 1960s, he entered eight years of compositional silence, creating little more than musical fragments jotted in a notebook. When Pärt began …

Read more

Musical Cryptograms: Five Scores that Contain Hidden Messages

by

Imagine transmitting a secret message by using the pitches (from A to G) that are embedded in a musical score. It’s been the subject of mystery novels and television shows as well as Philip Thicknesse’s 1772 book, A Treatise on the Art of Deciphering, and of Writing in Cypher: with an Harmonic Alphabet. During the Second World War, codebreakers considered the possibility that German and Japanese spies might use musical notes as a …

Read more

Exploring the Prolation Canon

by

There is an interesting passage about four and a half minutes into the first movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15 which may have caught your ear if you dropped by for Wednesday’s post: Did you hear that wandering, chromatic line which begins in the violins? Two additional lower string voices enter in succession with the same line at consecutively slower rates of speed. For a moment, before the episode is cut off by the …

Read more