In a spare, simple room, an old Estonian man sits at an unremarkable upright piano. He is composing, and occasionally marks a large score before him.
On top of the piano sits a wide-eyed ceramic owl, its head tilted quizzically, next to a candelabra and a large icon of the Mother of God. When the man plays, the music is not complex, but it suggests depths that its simplicity belies. The man pauses and marks the score again. He is Arvo Pärt, the most frequently performed composer alive.
He is also the first musician to win the Ratzinger Prize, awarded every year for the promotion of theology in the spirit of Joseph Ratzinger, because his music is richly and inescapably theological. “If anybody wishes to understand me,” Pärt writes, “they must listen to my music; if anybody wishes to know my philosophy, then they can read any of the Church Fathers.”
Listening to Pärt for the first time, one can hear a resemblance between him and minimalist composers. “Holy minimalism” was a term some journalists coined to describe his music – Philip Glass does Orthodox Church music. The music unfolds through small intervals and unexpected chords. But Pärt resembles earlier sacred composers as well. Like the masters of Renaissance polyphony, his music has a purity and a simplicity that allows its notes and chords to resonate and shine. Like Bach, his music is a prayer and, more significantly, he has created his own musical language. But where Bach used his language to create towering edifices of complexity, Pärt uses his to map silences.
Bells have always played an important role in Christian worship. They are inscribed with prayers, given names and treated almost as if they were alive. That sense of life comes, in large part, from the harmonics at work. When you strike a bell, it emits a dominant note, but as the bell continues to resonate it produces a rich tapestry of overtones and chords that grow and shrink until the frequencies audible to the human ear cease. Pärt’s music resembles that striking of a bell. A note is played, then followed by another note. Tight chords slowly open and close, resolving in unexpected ways.
Pärt began composing in this style after a long period of stagnation near the beginning of his career. He calls it Tintinnabuli, after the word for the ringing or sounding of bells. By way of explanation of the name, Pärt writes: “I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuse me, and I must search for unity. [With Tintinnabuli] I am alone with silence. I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements – with one voice, with two voices. I build with the most primitive elements – with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of the triad are like bells. And that is why I called it Tintinnabulation.”
Tintinnabuli is not only a matter of musical taste; the language also has rich, theological significance. Pärt describes how the melodic line signifies human beings, “and the second voice is ‘Without me, you can do nothing.’ Nothing.” Elsewhere he writes: “This is the whole secret of Tintinnabuli. The two lines. One line is who we are, and the other line is who is holding and takes care of us. Sometimes I say … that the melodic line is our reality, our sins. But the other line is forgiving the sins.”
Für Alina was the first piece Pärt composed in the style – its title a reference to Beethoven’s famous Für Elise and, like that small masterpiece, for solo piano. It begins with a low chord, followed by slight ascending notes in the upper register. The intervals are small and the notes evenly spaced, almost repetitive. A student could play it without difficulty. But the music has a powerful effect. It evokes night in a snowy field, the silence that is left when light and noise are stripped away.
More than evoking, Pärt’s music pierces. It is like looking at an icon. Indeed, Paul Hillier, a noted conductor of early and contemporary music who has written a book on Pärt, describes his pieces as “sounding icons”. The significance of icons in Christian worship lies not so much in what they depict as in the effect they have on the viewer. Icons are more liturgy than art. They are not only a work; they also work on you.
Consider the famous depiction of Christ from the monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai, with half Christ’s face in judgment and half in mercy. The eye in judgment confronts its viewer. It opens you like a scalpel, leaving you exposed, stunned and silent. Pärt’s music has the same effect.
I heard the Tallis Scholars, the world’s premiere polyphonic choral group, sing Pärt’s setting of the O Antiphons two years ago. When they swelled to full volume, their voices were like a blinding light that filled every pore of the room (and wrung a sob from me). The words became a brilliant wave of prayer on which I was carried along.
The antiphons were originally written for use in the liturgy, but Pärt has not intended his setting for liturgical use. They are grouped together in a set as a concert piece.
Some critics and listeners find this alarming. The religious nature of Pärt’s work cannot be explained as a relic of the past or as unsophisticated piety. The sceptics assume a dissonance between contemporary music written for performance in public concerts and deeply religious music. Pärt rejects the dichotomy, allowing the sacred to permeate his music as it has permeated his life. After all, Hillier notes, this is the norm across the world: “In almost every culture except our own, the spiritual nature of music, of its sacred power, is taken for granted. Even to raise the issue already presumes a specific position on the relationship between music and spirituality – one that sees them, falsely, as intrinsically separate entities.”
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Though charged with Christian ideas, Pärt’s work is much beloved by those who otherwise have little regard for Christianity. His music may have theological roots and influences, but it is not simply a means to a theological or apologetic end. The music’s excellence is its own end and can be appreciated in its own right.
This, in turn, allows it to serve as a place for the secular world of culture to encounter Christian ideas in a way it does not expect. Peter Bouteneff, an Orthodox scholar of Pärt, recounts how a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art spoke to Pärt after his piece Adam’s Lament was performed in Carnegie Hall: “You devastated all of us! … You projected that text, and because it was set to this amazing music, we could let it in – we were defenceless … It cuts through all the cynicism, the ‘meta’ of the 21st-century listener, for whom every interaction has to be mediated. That existential dread, the feeling of being a wretch – that feeling is actually at the core of the postmodern noise, and coming face to face with it, without a place to hide – this was unspeakably powerful.”
My favourite piece of Pärt’s is one of his most curious. Most readers of the Bible overlook lengthy genealogies, but Which Was the Son Of sets Luke’s genealogy of Jesus to music. Since it was commissioned by the city of Reykjavík, Pärt uses it to satirise the way Icelandic family names are organised and the way Icelanders pronounce their “r”. But the piece is more than a musical joke. The first names come in little spurts, true to the style of Tintinnabuli. Then the list cascades in wheels, with crisp, clear soprano notes shining like spotlights behind them.
We have a sense of moving across the unfolding of salvation history. The music swells as we go through the Patriarchs – until it slows and shrinks as we reach Adam, “which was the son of” – the word comes in a tight, low chord – “God”. As the peals of “Amen” burst out, we realise that Pärt has created a meditation on the Incarnation and the way in which the majesty of salvation history is manifest through the ordinary succession of generations: David, Jesse, Obed, Abraham. Jesus, the Son of God, comes from Adam, the son of God, for the redemption of the sons of men. The beginning and end of the journey is the One who is simplicity itself, the silence that Pärt’s music endlessly sketches.
Nathaniel Peters is the executive director of the Morningside Institute and a lecturer at Columbia University
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