by Montie Meyer
As college freshmen, my friend and I were asked to accompany a mezzo-soprano on viola and violin, for her senior recital, in a song called Es sang vor langen Jahren. The composer, Arvo Pärt, I had never heard of. It is a testimony to the startlingly distinctive quality of the piece that I recall it clearly, over 25 years later. (Or maybe I just remember it because the recital was on “green key weekend,” when normal kids were hanging out on frat row instead of in a church). The Es Sang text, depicting the lonely tedium of a pining lover, spoke to some relevant facts of my life at the time, surely shared by other romantically inclined 18-year-olds. More notable was the sparse, desolate yet poignant melodic material - which corresponded perfectly emotionally. In fact, the song pairs verse by Clemens Brentano, a major figure of German Romanticism, with a musical style that has been described as holy minimalism or neo-romanticism—a style employed by certain 20th century composers, hearkening back to the lyricism of the 19th century.
This could explain Pärt's appeal to me and other fans of entirely dead Romantic composers, yet Pärt is entirely alive, aged 87, and currently the most performed living composer in the world. Born in Estonia in 1935, Pärt witnessed the deportation of extended family members from Estonia to Siberia during the Stalin regime, completed compulsory service in the Soviet Army (1954–1956) playing oboe and piano/percussion in the military band, and then worked as a sound engineer at the Estonian Radio (1958-1967). He began his career by composing neoclassical piano music and progressed to write works exemplifying dodecaphony, sonorism (e.g. discovering new types of sounds from traditional instruments), and collage technique (e.g. combining fragments of the works of different composers to create a new piece).
Pärt’s characteristic musical language developed after a prolonged period of personal tumult -- spurred both by the censure of the Soviet authorities who banned his work “Credo’ (for its open affirmation of Christian faith), and disenchantment with serialism and the other 20th century compositional techniques he had previously explored. Years later, he recalled: "I didn't know at the time that I was going to be able to compose at all in the future. Those years of study were no conscious break, but life and death agonizing inner conflict. I had lost my inner compass and I didn't know anymore, what an interval or a key meant." From 1968-1976, while composing mainly Soviet film music to earn a living, Pärt married for the second time (to Nora, a musicologist), converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy, and extensively studied Renaissance and other choral music in search of his own expressive idiom. From this grew a style he termed tintinnabulation (from the Latin for “small tinkling bells”), music built from one voice arpeggiating a tonic triad and another voice moving diatonically in stepwise fashion. Tintinnabulation is usually also characterized by slow tempi, stretches of silence, medieval tonal and rhythmic structures, and controlled dissonances.
Pärt’s works after his 1980 emigration from Estonia to Vienna and then Berlin, returning to Estonia in 2010, reflect the novel tintinnabular style. His four symphonies (written in 1963, 1966, 1971 and 2008) mark his creative journey, with the first and second featuring dodecaphony and compression, and the third showing signs of the transition to melodic writing and tintinnabulation that fully characterizes the fourth.
Relatively reclusive, Pärt largely avoids the media, and prefers to let his music stand on its own, once saying to a journalist: “I have nothing to say…music says what I need to say.” Yet, elsewhere (to Hermann Conen, in the essay White Light) he describes his music rather poetically: "I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.”
In Loaded Dice, we hope to engage this spirit, by presenting a varied palate of Pärt across time:
Solfeggio (1963): his first work for a cappella choir; text consists only of syllable names of the notes: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si; minimalist structure based on a C major scale
Magnificat (1989): tintinnabulation exemplified; drones provide a tonal center from which controlled dissonances emerge; sharp dynamic and textural contrasts
Bogoróditse Djévo (1990): Exuberant, joyful work, text in Church Slavonic reflecting Russian Orthodox church traditions; lasting about a minute, Pärt’s shortest piece
Da Pacem Domine (2004): Based on a 9th century Gregorian antiphon; written in memory of the 2004 Madrid train bombing victims
The Boston Cecilia chorus will present 𝙇𝙤𝙖𝙙𝙚𝙙 𝘿𝙞𝙘𝙚: 𝙈𝙪𝙨𝙞𝙘 𝘿𝙚𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙙 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙄𝙢𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙫𝙞𝙨𝙚𝙙, which will contrast the highly structured works of Arvo Pärt, Brahms, Byrd, Dufay, and Lassus with the improvisatory music of Pauline Oliveros, an influential LGBTQ composer.
The concert will be held on May 13th at 4:00 pm at the MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA.
General admission: $35 (Student $15).
After the concert join us for our Gala: On a Roll with The Boston Cecilia
(Tickets: $125 for Concert & Gala)