Arvo Pärt
“I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played.”
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Those close to him ⏳🌊
- TeacherHeino Eller
The founding figure of modern Estonian composition, who taught him at the Tallinn Conservatory without ever stifling his student's individuality.
- FamilyNora Pärt
His wife, married in 1972, who supported his work more closely than anyone and led the founding of the Arvo Pärt Centre.
- ReverenceBenjamin Britten
A composer he lost before they could ever meet; drawn to the purity of his music, Pärt dedicated “Cantus” to him.
- FriendshipAlfred Schnittke
A colleague and friend from the Soviet years, he played the prepared piano at the premiere of “Tabula Rasa.”
- FriendshipGidon Kremer
The violinist who premiered “Tabula Rasa” and introduced the violin version of “Fratres” to the West.
- PatronageManfred Eicher
The ECM producer who brought his music to the world, beginning with the 1984 album “Tabula Rasa.”
I. The boy from Rakvere · 1935–1954 (age 0–19)
(Birth) He was born in September 1935 in Paide, Estonia. The date was the 11th, during the brief years when Estonia was an independent republic. He moved with his mother to Rakvere, a small town in the north, and grew up there. Little has come down to us about his parents and siblings. (Upheaval) His childhood passed amid war and occupation. In 1940 the Soviet Union annexed Estonia, and the following year German troops marched in. In 1944 the Soviet regime returned. The country he grew up in would remain a Soviet republic for nearly half a century. From beginning to end, his musical life could not be separated from this political landscape. (Piano) The old piano at home, it is said, had keys in the middle register that would not sound properly. The boy amused himself improvising on the keys that still worked, at the very top and the very bottom. In time he took formal piano lessons at the local music school, and already as a teenager he was trying his hand at short pieces. (Radio) On the square in Rakvere stood a pole with a loudspeaker that broadcast the radio. The story goes that he loved listening to the music pouring from the loudspeaker on the square. In an age when scores and records were scarce, his first textbook was sound that came to him out of the air. (A caution) Later he would write music with extraordinarily few notes. And so the fact that he grew up at a piano with only a limited range of usable keys is often brought up. Yet there is no basis for treating it as the cause of his style. It is more accurate to leave it as a scene from his childhood.
II. The Tallinn modernist · 1954–1968 (age 19–33)
(Studies) In 1954 he entered the Tallinn Music School, but he was soon drafted into the Soviet army. In the military band he played oboe and percussion. After his discharge he enrolled at the Tallinn Conservatory in 1957 and studied composition with Heino Eller. Eller was the teacher who laid the foundations of modern Estonian composition, and he is remembered as someone who never stifled his students' individuality. (Broadcasting) From his student days until around 1967 he worked at Estonian Radio as a recording engineer and music producer. The job paid the bills, but it was also a time of sharpening his ear, handling sound before the microphone day after day. He steadily wrote music for theater and film as well, adding to his income. (Serialism) His 1960 orchestral work “Nekrolog” is regarded as the first Estonian work to use the twelve-tone technique. It was dedicated to the victims of fascism. But for adopting the techniques of the Western avant-garde, it was publicly criticized by Tikhon Khrennikov of the Union of Soviet Composers. Yet in 1962 he took first prize in the All-Union Young Composers' Competition with works including the children's cantata “Our Garden.” He found himself criticized and recognized at the same time. (Bach) In his 1964 “Collage on B-A-C-H,” he set a motif spelling out Bach's name in notes, along with Bach-like phrases, against modern sonorities. In 1966 he wrote the cello concerto “Pro et Contra.” The way he made old and new music collide in these years was also a way of asking where he himself ought to stand. (Credo) The 1968 “Credo” was both the climax of that question and its catastrophe. The piece bore as its banner the Latin confession 'I believe in Jesus Christ.' Musically, it quoted Bach's Prelude in C major. It was premiered under Neeme Järvi, but its public profession of faith drew the authorities' disapproval. For a long time afterward the piece could not be performed in the Soviet Union.
Setting a Bach prelude against twelve-tone chaos and raising a confession of faith, this work brought his avant-garde period to a close and ushered in a long silence.
- In the opening, after the chorus cries out 'Credo,' the piano lays out the C major Prelude from Book I of Bach's “Well-Tempered Clavier.” You hear, intact, the broken chords (arpeggios) that unfold familiar harmonies one note at a time.
- When the line from Matthew, 'an eye for an eye' (oculum pro oculo), arrives, the music collapses into the twelve-tone technique, which uses all twelve notes evenly. In passages where the performers play with a degree of freedom, it swells into a mass bordering on noise.
- Once the chaos reaches its peak, Bach's C major returns. This homecoming sounds like a musical answer to the words that follow, 'resist not evil.'
- The whole piece begins in C major and ends in C major. How violently the collision in between is handled varies from conductor to conductor, so it rewards comparing the volume and tempo of the chaotic passage.
III. Silence · 1968–1976 (age 33–41)
(Dead end) After “Credo” he felt that the musical language he had been using had reached a dead end. Neither twelve-tone technique nor collage gave him anything more to say. Over the following eight years or so, about the only major work he produced was the Symphony No. 3 of 1971. (Copying) He pored over medieval·Renaissance music such as Gregorian chant, the Notre Dame school, Machaut, Ockeghem and Josquin, and copied it out by hand. It was an exercise in following by hand how a single line of melody breathes and moves. In the Symphony No. 3 this exploration surfaces in medieval-style melodies and sonorities. Yet he did not feel he had found the answer. (Orthodoxy) Around this time he joined the Russian Orthodox Church. For someone raised in a country with a strong Lutheran tradition, the Orthodox traditions of prayer and silence became a new center. From then on, faith in his music was less a subject than the very attitude in which he composed. (Nora) In 1972 he married Nora. Nora Pärt is known to have worked closely alongside the composer from then on. Later, Nora also took the lead in founding the Arvo Pärt Centre. (Livelihood) What sustained him through the years of silence was film music. He wrote a great deal of music for Estonian feature films and animation. Even when new works under his own name rarely reached the official stage, his hands as a composer never rested. (Alina) In 1976 came “Für Alina,” a piano piece of just over two minutes. In it there first appeared the technique he called 'tintinnabuli.' It was a way of letting the notes of a triad ring like bells. Looking back on this period later, he said he had discovered that it is enough for a single note to be beautifully played. Eight years of silence were distilled into these few notes.
A piano piece of just over two minutes that emerged after nearly eight years of silence, it marks the first appearance of tintinnabuli.
- At the very start, a B sounds once in octaves in the lowest register. The pedal sustains it to the very end. The whole piece floats on this single stroke, so follow its resonance all the way as it fades.
- The opening marking in the score is in German and means 'calmly, exaltedly, listening inwardly.' What it records is not a tempo but a state of mind.
- The right hand is a melody moving one note at a time. The left hand touches only the notes of the B minor triad (B·D·F#). Listen to what each hand is doing separately, and the principle of tintinnabuli becomes visible to the ear.
- Because note lengths are not strictly fixed, the breathing varies greatly from performer to performer. The 1999 ECM album “Alina” includes versions in which Alexander Malter plays the piece several times over at length.
IV. The year of bells · 1976–1980 (age 41–45)
(Outpouring) With a new method in hand, works came pouring out. In 1977 alone came “Fratres,” “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten,” “Tabula Rasa” and “Summa.” The next year “Spiegel im Spiegel” followed. After the long silence, he wrote pieces of utterly different character on almost the same principle. (Principle) The principle of tintinnabuli was simple. One voice takes a melody that moves stepwise, one note at a time. The other picks out only the notes of a reference triad and sets them beside that melody. He sometimes wrote '1+1=1,' meaning that these two voices are one. If the melody is an individual's footsteps, the notes of the triad are the bells that hold those steps steady. (Britten) Benjamin Britten died on December 4, 1976. Pärt said that he had only recently come to know Britten's music and had been drawn to its rare purity. He also spoke of his regret that they had never met. Written in that spirit, “Cantus” is a canon in which several voices follow the same descending scale at different speeds. A bell accompanies the piece. (Premiere) “Tabula Rasa” was premiered in Tallinn in 1977. Gidon Kremer and Tatiana Grindenko were the solo violinists. The prepared piano was played by his friend Alfred Schnittke. As its title, a blank slate, suggests, the piece was received as a declaration that he had begun to write anew from scratch. (Pressure) But the religious coloring of his work and the interest it drew from the West heightened tensions with the Soviet authorities. His room to work narrowed. In January 1980 he obtained permission to emigrate and left Estonia with his family. There was no guarantee that he would ever be able to return.
Meaning 'brothers,' this piece was written in 1977 for an early-music ensemble and has since been reborn in countless scorings. It shows how many different faces tintinnabuli can wear.
- Down low, two notes, A and E, sound unbroken throughout the piece. A single note sustained at length like this to lay a foundation is called a sustained tone (drone). Above it, the same melodic group repeats, shifting in pitch.
- Between each group, a brief percussive rhythm or detached chords break in. These rest-like moments, marking off the sections like bells, are the piece's breath.
- The 1980 version for violin and piano opens with the violin flinging out rapid broken chords (arpeggios) across the strings. Its brilliance is the very opposite of the tranquil original, so the two versions are worth hearing side by side.
- The 1984 ECM album “Tabula Rasa” includes both the violin·piano version by Gidon Kremer and Keith Jarrett and a version for cello ensemble. It is a good way to compare how much the same piece changes with its scoring.
Pärt had only just come to know Britten's music and was falling under its spell when he heard of the composer's death; this lament of little more than 6 minutes is his offering to a man he never got to meet.
- The piece begins not with a sound but with a rest, that is, with silence. Then a bell rings alone. Its tolling carries on like a pulse measuring out the time of the whole piece.
- The strings all play the same melody, running down the A minor scale from top to bottom (descending). But each part moves at half the speed of the one above it. Listen as the fast and slow voices overlap and become a waterfall of ever-thicker resonance.
- The volume swells gradually from beginning to end. At its fullest, every voice arrives on a low A and stops.
- Once the strings fall silent, only the bell's resonance remains, fading away. Hearing these final seconds through to the end, without cutting them off, is how this piece is meant to be heard.
A double concerto premiered by Kremer and Grindenko, with Schnittke at the prepared piano. Its title, 'blank slate,' reads like a composer's declaration that he is beginning again.
- The first movement, 'Ludus' (play), opens with the two violins sounding a forceful A, followed by a long silence. Follow how the silences shorten, the sounds multiply, and the music grows ever faster and fiercer.
- The prepared piano, with screws and bits of metal wedged between its strings, rings like bells or small gongs. These sounds, dropping one by one onto the flow of the strings, set the color of the piece.
- The second movement, 'Silentium' (silence), is slow music in which several voices unfold the same melody at different speeds. A solo violin drifts above them.
- At the close, the low strings drop out one by one and the sound vanishes into silence. It is a moment when the line between where the music ends and the silence begins grows blurred.
V. A monk in Berlin · 1980–2000 (age 45–65)
(Vienna) His first home was Vienna. He took Austrian citizenship, and the Viennese publisher Universal Edition took on his scores. The following year a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) brought him to West Berlin, where he would live for some 30 years. (The record) The turning point was a record. Manfred Eicher, the producer at ECM, is said to have sought him out after hearing Tabula rasa on the radio while driving. In 1984 the album Tabula rasa, featuring that piece along with Fratres and others, became the first release of the ECM New Series. Through it his name reached listeners far beyond the classical world. (The Word) In the West he leaned more and more on biblical and liturgical texts. So came the St John Passion, Passio (1982), Te Deum (1984–85), Stabat Mater (1985) and Miserere (1989). He drew the lengths of his notes from the syllable counts and stresses of the words. In Te Deum three choirs pass the Word among themselves above a low sustained tone, over a bed of prerecorded aeolian harp. (Labels) Critics often grouped him with Steve Reich and Philip Glass under the banner of minimalism. Alongside religious composers from Eastern Europe of the same period, he was also gathered under the name 'holy minimalism.' But if the music of Reich and Glass moves forward on a repeating pulse, Pärt's breathes through pauses and open space. He himself kept his distance from such labels. (Independence) In 1991 Estonia regained its independence, and he began traveling back to his homeland again. In the Berliner Messe of 1990 and in Kanon Pokajanen of 1997, written for the 750th anniversary of Cologne Cathedral, his Orthodox prayer grew longer and deeper.
A major work from the years after he settled in Berlin and went deep into liturgical texts. It slowly unfolds the ancient Latin hymn of praise to God above a low sustained tone.
- In the opening, the prerecorded sound of an aeolian harp (an instrument sounded by the wind brushing its strings) lies at the very edge of hearing. Turn the volume up generously and listen from the first moment.
- A women's choir, a men's choir and a mixed choir sing in alternation. The passage recalls the way two choirs answered each other in Gregorian chant.
- A low sustained tone (drone) centered on D runs through the whole piece. Above it the harmonies brighten and darken, and that shifting is the work's great arc.
- The syllables and stresses of the sacred words set the lengths of the notes. Keep the text beside you and follow how the words stretch and contract, and the music comes into much sharper focus.
VI. Homecoming to the forest · 2000–2026 (age 65–91)
(Mourning) In 2002 he wrote Lamentate after seeing Anish Kapoor's colossal sculpture Marsyas at Tate Modern in London. In 2004 Da pacem Domine was written for the victims of the Madrid train bombings, and it has since been performed in Spain every year in their memory. More and more, his music became a prayer answering the wounds of the world. (Witness) He was a composer of silence, but not a silent citizen. He dedicated every performance of his 2006–07 season to Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist murdered in 2006. His Symphony No. 4, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2008, he dedicated to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then imprisoned in Russia. It was the choice of a man who knew what Credo had cost him in the Soviet years. (Homecoming) Around 2010 he came back to settle in Laulasmaa, a seaside forest village near Tallinn. That same year his family founded the Arvo Pärt Centre to preserve his scores and papers. In 2018 the centre's new building opened in a pine forest. (Lament) In 2010 Adam's Lament set the writings of St Silouan, a monk of Mount Athos. It portrays the weeping of Adam, who lost paradise, as the grief of all humankind. Premiered in Istanbul, it won the Grammy for best choral performance in 2014. Mixing harsher dissonance than before into the clear ring of tintinnabuli, it showed that the music of old age is never simply serene. (Today) For years running he was named the most performed living composer in the tallies of the concert-statistics site Bachtrack. For his ninetieth birthday in 2025, celebratory concerts were held in Estonia and around the world. The few notes of the boy who once listened to music beneath the loudspeaker in the square at Rakvere still ring out today in churches and concert halls across the world.
Written to texts by St Silouan around the time he returned to the forests of home, this piece shows how fiercely the aging Pärt could embrace the sorrow of humanity cast out of paradise.
- The words come from the writings of St Silouan, a monk of Mount Athos, sung in Church Slavonic. Follow along with the text as the scene of Adam weeping on leaving paradise widens into the weeping of all humankind.
- Choir and strings alternate, carrying on as if in dialogue. The interludes for strings alone sound like sighs after the words have stopped.
- Compared with the clear harmonies of early tintinnabuli, there is far more grating dissonance. The difference is plainest in the loud, erupting passages of outcry.
- The recording that won the Grammy in 2014 is by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under Tõnu Kaljuste. It is widely regarded as the benchmark for Pärt's choral music.
Lesser-known stories
(Film) In the 1960s and '70s Pärt wrote scores for dozens of Estonian feature films and animations. During his silent period, when there was almost no official new work, this was what kept him afloat. But as his reputation settled into that of a composer of sacred music in the West, this work went long unnoticed. Only now, as the Arvo Pärt Centre organizes its archives, is its full extent coming to light. (Alina) Für Alina, the starting point of tintinnabuli, is dedicated to Alina, the daughter of a friend. (Sophrony) He visited the Orthodox monastery in Essex, England, and met its archimandrite, Sophrony, many times. Sophrony was a disciple of St Silouan of Mount Athos and the man who brought his writings to the world. That both Silouan's Song of 1991 and Adam's Lament of 2010 grew out of Silouan's writings is bound up with these meetings. Because Pärt seldom speaks of his personal faith, this connection is often left out of program notes. (The score) His scores are more open than one might think. Für Alina leaves the note lengths to the performer. On the 1999 ECM album Alina, the pianist Alexander Malter, with the composer looking on, played this short piece several times over at length. Contrary to his image as a composer of strict rules, he entrusted a great deal to the performer's breath.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
12-tone technique
(Literal meaning) It is also called eumnyeol (音列, 'tone row'), meaning tones (音) set out in a row (列). (In music) A method of composition codified by Arnold Schoenberg in the 1920s. First you fix an order in which each of the twelve notes within an octave is used once. Then you build the whole piece by inverting that order or reading it backward. Because no single note serves as a center, there is none of the comfort of coming home to 'do' at the end; the sound is strange and tense. It is like a class of twelve friends who fix an order for presentations, with the rule that no one may go twice until everyone has gone once. The result is a classroom with no particular 'class president.'
Tintinnabuli
(Literal meaning) The Latin tintinnabulum means 'little bell.' Pärt took the name from the way a bell's tones linger and overlap in the air after it has rung. (In music) A method of composition Pärt devised around 1976. Two voices form a pair. One moves a step at a time, as if climbing up and down stairs, singing the melody. The other picks just one of the three notes of a predetermined triad (for example, la·do·mi) and sets it beside that melody. One friend walks freely along a stream. The friend beside them steps only on three fixed stepping stones, always choosing the stone closest to the first. Picture the two of them walking together like this. Pärt wrote '1+1=1' to say that the two voices are, in the end, one.
Gregorian chant
(Literal meaning) It bears the name of Pope Gregory I, of the late 6th century. But the idea that he composed these songs himself is a legend that arose later. (In music) Song in which the Latin prayers of the medieval Catholic Church are sung unaccompanied on a single melodic line. There is no harmony, and the rhythm is not strictly fixed. The melody rises and falls with the flow of the words and the breath. It is like a whole class reciting a poem together on one pitch, but lifting and lowering it slightly to follow the commas and emphases of each sentence. During his years of silence, Pärt copied out these chants by hand and learned how a melody breathes.
Canon
(Literal meaning) The Greek kanōn means 'ruler' or 'rule.' The name comes from having one melody followed by another according to a fixed rule. (In music) A form in which one voice repeats, at a set interval, exactly the melody another voice has sung. In a round, when the first group sings a line and the second comes in behind it with the same tune, that is a canon. Pärt's Cantus goes a step further, as a canon in which the following voices sing the same melody twice and four times as slowly. So a fast song and slow songs are heard overlapping all at once. (Elsewhere) The English canon also refers, in religion, to the officially recognized list of scriptures, and among fans of novels and comics, to a work's 'official lore.'
Triad
(In music) A chord built by stacking three notes, skipping one step of the scale between each. Do·mi·sol is the classic example. It is the most fundamental sonority in Western music, and comes in two forms: the bright major triad and the darker minor triad. Strike do·mi·sol together on a xylophone and you hear a clear, harmonious sound — that is a triad. In Pärt's tintinnabuli, these three notes serve as the tolling bell that holds an entire piece together.
Prepared piano
(Meaning) The English word prepared means 'made ready.' The name comes from the practice of adjusting, or 'preparing,' the piano before a performance. (In music) A piano whose timbre has been altered by wedging objects such as screws, bolts, rubber or paper between its strings. The American composer John Cage brought it to wide attention. Press a key and, instead of an ordinary piano tone, you hear something like a small bell, a gong or a drum. It works on the same principle as slipping a piece of paper under a guitar's strings and hearing a different, 'tick-tick' sound when you play. In “Tabula Rasa,” this piano falls like the sound of bells over the strings.
Drone (sustained tone)
(Meaning) The English word drone originally meant a male bee. The musical term comes from the low, unbroken buzz a bee makes. (In music) One or two notes sounded without a break throughout a piece, or for a long stretch, laying down a foundation over which other melodies move. The low, continuous sound of the bagpipes is the classic example. It is much like choir practice, when one person keeps humming the same note — 'mmm—' — so that the others can sing over it and find their pitch. Pärt's “Fratres” and “Te Deum” are built upon such drones. (Elsewhere) Today the word 'drone' is more commonly used for a remotely piloted unmanned aircraft.