Arvo Pärt’s popularity is considerable, if not straight out extraordinary. With over one hundred compositions, the Estonian musician has recorded more albums than any other living art-music composer (see his complete discography). His fame often seems to be related to musical postmodernism, and he has been increasingly recognized as a major figure of this artistic movement, perhaps even more so than American minimalists such as Philip Glass, Russian composers such as Alfred Schnittke, or other North European composers. Yet, before his more renowned postmodern period marked by his very personal “tintinnabuli” style, Pärt composed other pieces of significance. One could thus categorize his career into two periods: a “modern” one (1958-1968) marked by contrasting experimentation, and a “postmodern” one (1976 to today) during which he found a style of his own, as well as a creative source of inspiration which appears to be inexhaustible.

Apart from Meloodia, a student piece inspired by Sergei Rachmaninov that Pärt wrote when he was seventeen, his first Two Sonatinas (1958) for piano are composed in the neoclassical style, which was an acceptable aesthetic in the authoritative Soviet Bloc. With its endearing ensemble, his cantata Meie aed (Our Garden) for children’s choir and orchestra, points to the economy of style and to the ingenuousness that characterizes his second period. In Nekrolog (1960) for orchestra, he tried his hand at a completely different technique and experimented with serialism, an act which was then unprecedented in Estonia. He pursued this path in Perpetuum mobile (1963) where, following the Darmstadt Summer Courses’ new watchwords, he applied the series to durations, as well as in his First “Polyphonic” Symphony (1963-1964), where he associated the musical canon with serialism.

In his following works, Pärt experimented with surprising stylistic combinations. Already in 1964 with his Collage über B-A-C-H, he contrasted a diligent and clear tonality inspired by J.S. Bach with various dissonant sections à la Igor Stravinsky, a type of collage that was rare at the time (one had to wait for Alfred Schnittke’s “poly-stylism” to see such contrasting aesthetics put together again). Furthermore, the opening section of Collage über B-A-C-H, with its dynamically repeated perfect chords, hints at a future American style of postmodernism.

Between 1966 and 1968, Pärt embraced another dialectical opposition: the tension between tonal and atonal music. By putting in contrast tonality and atonality, he established an increasingly simple discursive dynamic in his works. This is one significant merit of such a simple contrasting approach: it exemplifies and synthesizes, in a pedagogical way, the aesthetic tensions of a whole century. For example, while the first aggregate of his cello concerto Pro et contra (1966) is a major chord, the second one is a particularly violent and deliberately ear-splitting cluster. According to the conductor Paul Hillier, it is then that Pärt started to consider — in parallel to a growing mysticism in his life — the opposition between a “past” tonality and a “present” atonality in terms of conflict between good and evil.

This turf war broke out definitively in Credo (1968), Pärt’s last masterpiece from this first period. At the center of this concerto for piano, choir, and orchestra, repeated dissonant aggregates of the utmost violence are meant to destabilize a simple unison played in the low strings. This piece says it all: what is the use of atonality if it represents evil?

Around the time of the Credo and in an almost symbolic coincidence, Pärt started experiencing health problems. A crossing of the desert began and would last eight years. To heal from his pain (both physical and aesthetic), Pärt immersed himself in early music, from the monody of Gregorian chant to two-voice counterpoint. In this dry period, he only composed his Third Symphony (1971) and his cantata Laul armastatule (1973). Both pieces reveal his new, yet still irresolute, need for purity and tonality. In 1976, light appeared at the end of the tunnel, and this highly creative year was crowned with a revelation: the development of tintinnabuli.

Für Alina (1976), for piano, embraces the tintinnabuli composition process. In this type of work, two voices (and two types of voices in later, more polyphonic works) each have a specific function. In the simple tintinnabuli of Für Alina, both voices evolve in homorhythm, somewhat like Pérotin’s first note-against-note counterpoint. One of the voices is melodic and revolves around a center (called the melodic center). This center can be the point of departure or arrival of — usually diatonic — ascending or descending scales. The other voice has a harmonic “tintinnabuli” function: like a bell, it repeats one note and its harmonics, meaning that it arpeggiates the notes of a minor or major chord. When there are two or more melodic voices, they often move in parallel thirds or sixths, recalling the early-fifteenth-century English fauxbourdon found in, for example, John Dunstable’s works. Be it medieval counterpoint, Renaissance fauxbourdons (which are echoed in Mozart’s parallel thirds and sixths), Baroque symmetry, Romantic resonance, or modern Stravinskian ostinatos, Pärt takes choice techniques from each era and incorporates them in his works, creating a sort of flattening of music history.

Pärt’s works are diatonic and thus tonal. As per the precept of musical postmodernism, his music is willingly naïve, immobile (through ostinato), and monolithic. His parallel melodies evolve slowly around a melodic center and are put in contrast with sections of contrary-motion counterpoint. The tempo is slow, the sense of time is static, and the texture is made resonant through the tintinnabuli technique. Yet, contrary to American experimentalism, or any other type of postmodernism for that matter, Pärt welcomes semi- and whole-tone intervals between the melodic voice and the tintinnabuli voice, thus creating a friction against the latter’s arpeggios. A tonal and lyrical tension emerges and creates music that is seemingly both immobile and eternally varied: music that follows a divine principle dear to the fervently Orthodox composer.

With Fratres (1977), Pärt takes the tintinnabuli technique further. He experiments with seemingly naïve — and somewhat brutal — relations between the melodic and tintinnabuli voices. The voices are respectively written in modes built on the natural minor and harmonic minor scales with the same tonic. Starting each scale on the dominant results in a Phrygian dominant mode and an adapted version of it, so that the voices superpose a sharp and a natural third degree. Of course, in 1977, such writing was not revolutionary. Yet, the drastic simplicity of the “abstract tonality,” to use the words of Paul Hillier, reveals relations of dissonance in a new and crude light.

The pieces Pärt wrote in the short time around the year 1977, from Für Alina to Tabula rasa, are often cited as his masterpieces. However, even if they are often grouped together, one must take the time to understand their differences. Although Pärt used the same technique to generate these works, they do not sound the same. Each is written for contrasting instruments, as if he wished to experiment with the same creative recipe applied to different types of ensembles. He used a simple, deeply resonating piano in Für Alina, a string orchestra and a bell (symbolizing tintinnabuli) in Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977), an a cappella choir in Summa (1977), voice and organ in both Missa syllabica (1977) and Sarah Was 90 Years Old (1977), and a double concerto for two violins, orchestra, and prepared piano in Tabula rasa. Regarding the piece Fratres, its original wind ensemble has had less impact than the four subsequent arrangements, especially the famous ones for string orchestra and percussion, as well as the one for violin and piano.

These various instruments — be they a resonating piano, or a peaceful choir or string ensemble — lend themselves to Pärt’s romantic work on echo: he often creates a seemingly immobile and ecstatic New Age atmosphere, meaning that the mood of his pieces is not only mystical but also exotic. As scholar Oliver Kautny argues, the way he seems to suspend time in his pieces and his use of tonality — often considered naïve in the Western art music world — bring oriental music to mind.¹ In other words, many elements in his works can be summarized in the tintinnabuli principle: a static, non-functional harmony (meaning chord progressions that do not respond to the binary pattern of tension and resolution); ostinato; a general economy of means (or minimalism in a broad sense);² an assertive awkwardness; and a preference for slowness, resonance, strings, bourdon-like pedals (which are sometimes doubled, like in Fratres), open fifths, small ambitus, and joint melodies. In 1977 and almost on his own, Pärt drew the contours of European postmodernism, which are romantic and resonant in texture. Such postmodernism can be distinguished from American minimalism, with its flashy rhythms, pop influences, melodic arpeggios, and more conservative theme and variation-type structure. While both American and European minimalism put forth nonfunctional harmonies and ostinatos, Americans generally prefer a throbbing pulse, and Europeans a static sense of time.

In Spiegel im Spiegel (1978), for viola and piano, Pärt pushed even further his work on the expression of innocence, and applied this value to his choice of instruments. To create a deliberately amateur effect, he treats the violin as if it were a child’s instrument. The result is in line with the paradigm exposed by the English postmodern musician Michael Nyman: a “naïve, innocent, and simple-minded” music, true to the aesthetic zeitgeist of the Reagan era.³

In the 1980s, Pärt systematically developed a new style, mainly in his vocal works, which were by then more ambitious in their duration and instrumentation. His art of tintinnabuli is already present in the St. John Passion (1982), where he weaves together various tintinnabuli melodic centers and perfect chords based on the D-A-E-B cycle of fifths. By then very devout, he often borrowed from earlier liturgical genres: De profundis (1977-1980), Te deum (1984-1985), Stabat mater (1985), Miserere (1989), Magnificat (1989), (Berliner messe, 1990-1991), Salve regina (2002), Da pacem Domine (2005), Veni Creator (2006), Alleluia-tropus (2008), and Missa brevis (2009). He also wrote pieces inspired by Orthodox liturgy (of which he was an assiduous follower), such as Bogoroditse Djévo (1990), and Protestantism, with English titles such as Silouans Song: “My Soul Yearns after the Lord” (1991) or German ones such as Mein Weg hat Gipfel und Wellentäler (My road has its crest and its groundswell) (1989).

Pärt, like Olivier Messiaen and Krzysztof Penderecki who were also devout, built his own liturgical genre, commenting on passages from the Bible and borrowing from other traditional religious topics. He embodies the “theologian-composer” as described by Pastor Constantin Gröhn⁴ or, in the words of Kautny, the “clericalist.”⁵ A minority of his pieces have profane titles (though more since the 2000s). Pärt is a leader — and perhaps the only follower — of what Americans have called “mystic minimalism,” thereby classifying the Estonian in a subcategory of minimalism, somewhere under the general (and supposedly more important) American minimalism.

In this vein, the questions of language in the previous section of this text are highly important. Pärt uses non-Latin titles partly to reach out to the Anglophones and Germanophones with whom he often interacts. Indeed, he created a vocal tintinnabuli that is different from the 1976-1977 style (which was, in retrospect, generally instrumental) by taking into consideration text. In this modified tintinnabuli, the center of the melodic line is more intimately related to the text. As Hillier has demonstrated, the tonic accent of each word seems to point to these melodic centers. Pärt perfected this new approach in pieces from the St. John Passion (1982) to Litany (1994).

A musical prosody thus emerges, intimately linked to the combination of music and a particular language. English, for example, with its words of few syllables, gives rise to melodic lines that have a stable center. The English-texted melodic lines are consequently less accented and more “litany-like,” to use Hillier’s words once more. This result may seem paradoxical to a phonologist. Yet, Pärt’s goal was not to heighten speech intonations through music, as was done by other composers of the 1990s such as Pascal Dusapin or Georges Aperghis. Rather, his focus went beyond pronunciation as he aimed to magnify the transcendent qualities of religious meaning in the text, as well as the power of the Word in the Holy Scripture. He recenters and melodically isolates each word, thus clarifying the message and the syntax of the text. This, along with other vocal techniques, reinforces the text’s coherence and expressivity, as was inherent to the tintinnabuli style even in its first instrumental versions.

What is Pärt’s style today? Besides the aforementioned close ties between melodic material and the meaning of the text, he has undergone a few — but unfortunately undefined — experiments. In Symphony No. 4 (2008), he seems to come back to the roots of his style, and in the first part of the last Seven Magnificat-Antiphons (1988), he opts for a chromatic (rather than the usual diatonic) progression: the major chord A–C-sharp–E in the harmonic voice is superposed against accidentals in the melodic voice. All twelve tones are eventually spelled out, in a language that could be labeled tonal-chromatic, even if dissonances are only used sparingly. Each time a dissonance appears, it forms a semitone friction with the sounding chord.

In a few works from the 2000s, Pärt briefly ventures away from tintinnabuli, as if he wished to reestablish a dialectic: to break the constancy of his style. Contrasting elements follow one another in these pieces, somewhat like his stylistically changing works from 1966 to 1968, though in a more moderate fashion. It is as if the duality including “evil” and “good” (to use the earlier terms) had resurfaced during this later period in his career. Upon hearing these pieces, the impression of a lost paradise is felt vividly. Perhaps Pärt also felt it, since, in most sections of these works, he seems to have taken shelter from “evil” passages in his dear, monolithic tintinnabuli.

In Lamentate (2002), the opening brass section briefly ventures out of tintinnabuli, sometimes by way of simple parallel thirds. Then, the whole orchestra plays a chromatic crescendo reminiscent of the devilish surges in the atonal sections of the Credo, breaking with Pärt’s postmodernism. Yet, this stylistic break happens only briefly, in a clear and symbolic gesture, and the resonating style reappears immediately after. Such a process is in line with the general twenty-first-century “centrist” tendency to put tonality and atonality in dialogue. One may think, for example, of the ex-hyper-modernist composer Brian Ferneyhough’s piece In nomine a 3 (2001).

In more recent years, Pärt has experimented with compositions in which his older style has completely disappeared. Such is the case, for example, in Estonian Lullaby (2019) or Vater unser (2019). An economy of means is still more or less at work in the general unhurriedness and rare harmonies. Yet, without a new and elaborated composition process to structure this minimalism, these pieces remain brief. The vocal works usually last two or three minutes — the basic length of a popular song. Vater unser, for its part, is orchestrated (through choir, piano, strings…) with the romantic depth of film music or a simplified Gabriel Fauré.

Another — still minimalist — attempt by Pärt to move away from the tintinnabuli style consists in revisiting and rewriting works by past masters. In Mozart’s Adagio (2017), one recognizes Pärt’s signature resonance, interleaved as it usually is with sections of silence. Pieces like Mozart’s Adagio echo the postmodernism of composers such as Max Richter in his famous recomposition of Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, for example. Pärt, who was once a pioneer of musical postmodernism, seems to follow suit.

Close examination of some of Pärt’s previous work sheds light on his recent interest in past masters. For example, in the beginning of the finale of Symphony No. 4, composed nine years before Mozart’s Adagio, he undertook romantic common-tone modulations: a G-sharp minor chord modulates to an E minor (with a common-tone of B), and a C-sharp minor chord modulates to A minor (common-tone E). Such harmonic gestures hark back to the third of Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder (1948) or to the darker side of Sergei Prokofiev’s harmonic universe. Moreover, in these sections of the symphony, Pärt trades his tintinnabuli for the sheer beauty of a somewhat less personal sound. These chords — which are used often in film music to evoke mystery — are followed by violin monody in the high register. This monody in itself is out of style when it comes to tintinnabuli, which requires two or more voices; yet, the violin part remains vaguely postmodern through its economy of means. Lastly, the tintinnabuli of the first movement (based on E, G-sharp, B, and the A harmonic minor scale) comes back in the finale. This return of the tintinnabuli is magnified, and some would say magnificent: its most striking elements come together in the use of the string orchestra, the harp, slowness, and a pedal on the dominant of A minor (as done earlier in the unsurpassable Fratres).

What can be understood from these closer analyses is that, as early as 2008, tintinnabuli enabled Pärt to ponder the essence of Romantic tension. He navigates these tensions through means of pleading minor chords. He does so even more simply, perhaps, than Richard Wagner who felt compelled to move from one tension to the next. John Adams had a similar aesthetic intention in “The Anfortas Wound,” the second movement of his Harmonielehre (1981), where he transforms a section of Parsifal (1882) into an ostinato loop. A term from 1980s business speak seems well suited to summarize the general postmodern take on Romanticism: Pärt and other postmodern composers somewhat “customized” the master of Bayreuth, at the least through their use of resonant strings and the harp. Pärt’s Fourth Symphony, with its opening sibylline harmonics, evokes the mysterious beginning of Lohengrin (1848). As in the years 1976 to 1977, the ostinato, through its hypnotic effect, trance qualities, and its general quest for the sacred, enables him to go beyond the nineteenth century, all the while staying true to its ethic. Lastly, the vertical counterpoint of A minor with its tintinnabuli dominant produces complex harmonic structures, which culminate in a verticalized diatonic mode. These harmonic structures answer history’s aesthetic horizon of expectations, if there is such a thing.

The emblematic Fourth Symphony also features textures Pärt holds dear: the Romantic strings (including the harp) and bells which, in addition to their dream-like qualities, are the real tintinnabuli accompanists, from the Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten to Mein weg… (1989) and Lamentate (2002).

Another important textural element is silence. In Pärt’s general oeuvre, not only does silence secure the place of his music in the mystical minimalist genre, but it also represents the counterpart — the opposite, the resting point — of the lengthy monolithic resonances. An extremely distilled dialectic remains between the tintinnabuli and silence. Typically in Pärt’s works, the silence can be interrupted by solo percussion. Used as a spiritual instrument, such percussion incursions are meant as a call to, and as a rhythm of, prayer. Like the bell that marks the beginning of the sacred celebration, the two strikes of the solo timbal separate the Litany into two sections. The wood percussion in Fratres (in the string orchestra version) also divides each section, like calls to meditation heard in Asian monasteries, or like the semantron, a wooden percussion instrument that preceded bells in Balkan churches. These wood percussion instruments also recall the alluring atonal noise that Pärt produced in the 1960s, but with more minimalism and purity. The enigmatic and deeply mysterious (almost elliptical, from a musical standpoint) antithesis to silence that these instruments represent found their paroxysm in Sarah Was 90 Years Old, a piece filled with wooden silence, reminiscent of the atmosphere, and the actual matter, of the wooden Baltic or Finnish churches.

Pärt has rewritten a surprisingly large number of his pieces. Fratres is an extreme example, with its six versions for different instrumentation written between 1977 and 1992. Such editing is indicative of a flexibility in composition in which the instrumentation is secondary matter, harkening back to the instrumental relativity of the Baroque era. In the version for piano and violin (typical of the 1980s), he added virtuosic arpeggios in the violin part, giving this specific version an American rhythmic minimalism, which is completely in contrast with the static time of the other, more European, versions of the piece. In brief, the ever-surprising Fratres unites under a single title many distinct and aesthetically contrasting works. In a way, the work does not have a stable identity, and art itself bows to an ethic, to the overarching search for purity and a mystical approach.

It is mainly in this sense that Pärt is a pioneer. He is the incarnate emblem of so-called mystic minimalism and of broader European postmodernism. Particularly in Europe, there are plentiful examples of such drastic economy in composition and of minimalist processes, and they usually follow a religious or mystical inspiration or calling. If Messiaen, Dieter Schnebel, or composers of the Polish avant-garde had dedicated their atonal language to Catholicism, many more seem to address spirituality in tonal works. Faith, or at least the discourse on faith, seems to be a real and important source of inspiration in European postmodern music. Perhaps therein lies the main difference between music and other postmodern forms of art: European postmodern music is neither ironic nor heteroclite. On the contrary, it is a call for contemplation. Postmodern music — and Pärt’s music more particularly — appears humble, utilitarian, and favorable to meditation or prayer.

Links between minimalism and spirituality are present even in pieces from the 1920s by the guru George Gurdjieff and his disciple Thomas de Hartmann within a sect dedicated to meditation, gardening, and gymnastics. Similarly, the 1950s manifesto of the composer Alan Hovhaness (who could be classified as a pre-minimalist) is motivated by a deep, almost ascetic, religious faith. Later, as underlined by scholar K. Robert Schwarz, even the American minimalists practiced a Buddhist or ecumenical hippy, or New Age, spirituality.⁶ In the same vein, for the Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks, who was the son of a pastor, a return to tonality was linked, in his specific case, to the happiness of a naive childhood, as well as to the fervency of a religious childhood under the protection of a father, identified with the Father. Coming back to Pärt, his Latin titles seem monastic.⁷ The religious symbolization is put to the fore even in the way he presents himself physically, with a beard like that of an Orthodox priest. It is often thought that, toward the end of the twentieth century, a fervent, sometimes puritan, faith is more palpable in Protestantism (which is historically younger than Catholicism or Orthodoxy). This may partly explain the emergence and the easy development of postmodern practices in Protestant countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Iceland, Estonia (homeland of Pärt), and one part of Latvia. Although Catholic, Poland (homeland of Henryk Górecki and Krzysztof Penderecki), Lithuania, and the other part of Latvia, and even Schnittke’s Orthodox Russia and Giya Kancheli’s Georgia are all postmodern hubs, and were all behind the Iron Curtain at the end of the 1970s. These artistic communities claimed their fervent faith in the midst of an oppressive communist regime. Spirituality was dramatized and became the symbol of innocence fighting evil and repression.

From the perspective of a largely atheistic contemporary audience, Pärt’s postmodern music is often understood as an aestheticization of an ethic, rather than the opposite (which is the aforementioned ethic of the aesthetic). In other words, listening to Pärt with a “profane” ear enables one to hear the lost bells of a waning Christianity in the Occident. The cult is rediscovered, but without the dogma of its practice: it is aestheticized by the audience and, in a way, purified. Simultaneously, Pärt’s music celebrates a nostalgic idea of the cult, rather than the cult in and of itself. The Church as an institution and the church as a place of ceremony are both seen as abandoned romantic objects, like nineteenth-century castles, ones that could have inspired Robert Schumann and the generation of 1810. This type of Romanticism lives in the undergrowth of the tintinnabuli: its abyssal echo reminds one, as scholar Elie During has argued, that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are romantic in their persistent twilight of disenchantment.⁸

<sup>1. See: Oliver KAUTNY, “‘Alle Lander, in ihrer Verschiedenheit, sind eins…’: Der Schein des Orientalischen bei Arvo Pärt,” in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 164, no. 2, 2003, p. 24-27. ↩
2. Meaning a particularly extreme economy of means, to the point where the audience member is left with a sensation of emptiness that eventually becomes pleasant. This is not related to American minimalism as a movement and as championed by Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich between circa 1965 and 1975. ↩
3. Michael NYMAN, “Against Intellectual Complexity in Music,” in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas DOCHERTY, New York, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, p. 206. ↩
4. Constantin GRÖHN, Dieter Schnebel und Arvo Pärt: Komponisten als “Theologen,” Münster, Lit., 2006. ↩
5. Oliver KAUTNY, “‘Dem Himmel ein Stück naher’: Der neoromantische mythos Arvo Pärt,” in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 163, no. 5, 2002, p. 24-27. ↩
6. K. Robert SCHWARTZ, Minimalists, London, Phaidon, 1996. ↩
7. Werner Schubert has shown how the use of Latin titles in Pärt’s works is a common practice (“Die lateinische Sprache in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts. III: Arvo Pärt,” in International Journal of Musicology 6, 1997, p. 413-427). ↩
8. “German romanticism has theorized the paradox of the coexistence of the opposites (activity and passivity, conscience of the formal structure and unconscious expressivity). Yet, we are still living this paradox today.” (Elie DURING, “Prototypes: un nouveau statut de l’œuvre d’art,” Esthétique et société, ed. Colette TRON, L’Harmattan, 2009, p. 20.) ↩</sup>