Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten

Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten: Sound and Silence

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“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 …

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Exploring the Prolation Canon

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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 …

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