The Pärt Sound

This chapter takes the form of an interview with Paul Hillier, author of the first monograph on Pärt and founding director of the Hilliard Ensemble—responsible for several of the standard recordings of Pärt’s works in the 1980s and ’90s. The focus of the conversation concerns issues in the performance of Pärt’s works and their effect on their resulting sound.

Arvo Pärt and the Art of Embodiment

Chapter 1, written by the book’s three co-editors, serves as the book’s introduction. It sets out the book’s genesis, its interest in sound studies, and its main themes—chiefly surrounding the function that music plays in the embodiment of ideas, dispositions, and spirituality. More specifically, it points out how several chapters of this book entail a rethinking of Arvo Pärt’s compositional odyssey, grounding (or again, embodying) it in history and in his context as an Eastern European composer of the 1960s. It also summarizes all the book’s chapters, in the manner of a typical introduction to an edited volume.

Sounding Structure, Structured Sound

The chapter addresses compositional strategies in works by Arvo Pärt unifying his different creative periods. The impetus of early Flemish polyphony, which is present in the Symphony No. 3 (1971) and in the first tintinnabuli pieces (1976) is predicted in some of his earliest compositions: Pärt sought equality between the horizontal and vertical dimensions and the maximal structural reduction of composition since his serial works in 1963. The other focus of this chapter is on the specific relation of verbal text and music. The similar mathematical method for structuring music around the accents and number of syllables in words, such as is common in Pärt’s text-based tintinnabuli compositions, is difficult to find in any other examples of composed music, but the connection is prevalent in liturgical chanting. One parallel comes from Conrad Beissel (1691–1768)—the founder of a pietistic community in Pennsylvania and the author of a singular system of harmony for his hymns.

Medieval Pärt

Supported by modernity’s desires, fantasies, and aversions toward the premodern past and a cultivated branding strategy, popular reception of Arvo Pärt commonly figures both man and music as embodiments of a kind of medieval mysticism. Taking this image as a cue for analysis, this chapter considers how the medieval, taken as a historical force that traverses chronological temporality, stands to expand our understanding of contemporary experiential encounters with Pärt’s music. The grounds of this analysis lie in the textuality and manuscript contexts of the writings of Richard Rolle of Hampole, Pärt’s musical and mystical counterpart of the English Middle Ages. Rolle’s mysticism encourages certain spiritualized styles of hearing sound and silence that, when applied to Pärt’s music in manuscript, edition, and performance, allow us recognize important qualities—medieval qualities—that otherwise go unnoticed in his music. Drawing on sound studies methodologies, the chapter thus asks not how Pärt is medieval, but what the medieval helps us hear in Pärt.

Arvo Pärt’s Tintinnabuli and the 1970s Soviet Underground

This chapter focuses on early, largely forgotten engagements between Pärt, tintinnabuli, and student culture in the 1970s Soviet Union. It documents the embrace of Pärt’s new style among students and young artists and depicts how an informal network of Soviet youth and young musicians played a crucial role in fostering and promoting his earliest tintinnabuli works between the time of the October 1976 premieres and the popular breakthrough of Tabula Rasa in the fall of 1977. While not denying the singularity of Pärt’s achievement with his new compositional language, the chapter rebuts the widespread image of Pärt as a solitary, isolated figure during the time of his greatest creative breakthrough

Christian Liturgical Chant and the Musical Reorientation of Arvo Pärt

Working in the spirit of recent scholarship that has enriched our understanding of change and continuity leading up to, across, and beyond Pärt’s nominally “silent” period of 1968–76, this chapter reconsiders Pärt’s relationship to Christian plainchant. The chapter suggests that in tintinnabuli emerged a musical system that recreates by different means some of the key organizational procedures of traditions of Latin, Byzantine, and Slavonic liturgical singing.

In the Beginning There Was Sound

This paper approaches Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli concept as a point of entry into the unity of two seemingly oppositional states that ground human existence and underline the theology of Sufism: separation from God in longing and union with God in joy. Drawing on wide range of primary sources by classical theologians and Islamic mystics such as Ibn al-Arabi, Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, and Abu Talib al Makki, this paper seeks to locate the theory of longing, the significance of hearing, and, ultimately, the meaning of music in Islamic mysticism. Finally, this chapter identifies a fundamental convergence between the expression of longing in Sufi poetry exemplified by Yunus Emre’s works and Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli technique, illuminating a closeness between the theological traditions of Orthodox Christianity and Islam.

Presence, Absence, and the Ambiguities of Ambience

This chapter seeks to contextualize the disciplinary interaction between theology and sound studies in the analysis of Pärt’s music within broader theological questions around presence, absence, and idolatry. The chapter engages both classical and postmodern theology to argue that, to the extent that Part’s music enacts an interplay between presence and absence as elucidated by sound studies, it can be a fruitful site of interaction between the two disciplines.

The Materiality of Sound and the Theology of the Incarnation in the Music of Arvo Pärt

This chapter discusses the relationship of Pärt’s music with the Incarnation, especially through his manipulation of the relationship between sound and silence. The theological underpinnings for this are sought also in iconography, with particular reference the Platytera icon, Massimo Cacciari, and theology (St. Maximos the Confessor, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and more recent figures such as Romano Guardini and John Behr). Works by Pärt discussed include Tabula Rasa, Passio, Stabat Mater, Berliner Messe and Nunc dimittis.

The Piano and the Performing Body in the Music of Arvo Pärt

This chapter examines references to the piano in existing literature on Pärt and articulates a perspective on the piano’s role in his music. Pärt’s compositional output for the piano is relatively small; but, as his primary instrument, the piano has played an important role in the development of his sonic world. Musicians’ physical relationships with their instruments over time generate an archive of embodied knowledge and memories; bodily performance then becomes an important way in which music creates meaning for composers and performers alike. Thus, this chapter draws on representations of Pärt composing at the piano as captured in cinema, analyzing the bodies of composer and instrument in dynamic engagement. It also features a close observational analysis of performing Für Alina, Pärt’s inaugural tintinnabuli work from 1976, and what a phenomenological experience of learning and performing this piece might tell us about the expressive nature of tintinnabuli music.