2 Tempo 63 (249) 2–11 © 2009 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0040298209000229 Printed in the United Kingdom out of place in the 20th century: thoughts on arvo pärt’s tintinnabuli style Benjamin Skipp Of all recent art music styles, few have relied upon technological devel- opments for their composition, performance and recording to the same degree as minimalism. In both the output of the principal composers Arvo Pärt (photo: Universal Edition) PärtArvo (photo: Universal of the more recent minimalist canon (namely in the objet trouvé works of Reich and Adams,1 the film scores by Glass and Nyman2 as well as through the reliance on electronic amplification common to them all) and in the counter-cultural movements characterized by music whose content is absolutely dependent on electronic media, repetitive styles have been transformed. The sophistication of these procedures has naturally resulted in a diminished sense of human labour within the compositional process and, at times, the total loss of a composer’s authorial voice.3 The tintinnabuli music of Arvo Pärt stands out against the general tendency of such repetitive-based composers to harness the latest technology, to the extent that some commentators have baulked at the term ‘minimalist’ as an appropriate category. Robert Schwarz, for example, believes ‘neo-medievalist’ to capture something of Pärt’s particular adoption of a supposedly pre-modern, non-technological attitude, while Josiah Fisk opts for the ‘new simplicity’ to describe (neg- atively) Pärt’s monochromaticsm.4 It is an error, however, flatly to deride Pärt’s works for being identi- cal. Wolfgang Sandner, writing an explanation for the recording which announced Pärt’s entrance into the Western musical consciousness in 1984, conceived the blend of individual characterization within an over-arching generic style as the ‘curious union of historical master- craftsmanship and modern “gestus”.’5 In this Brechtian formulation, the individual works are conceived with the goal of presenting a single attitude when received together, each resembling a single strand within a thicker fabric. Similarity between works is essential to Pärt’s broader artistic aim, but it has meant that he is in constant danger of being per- ceived as the dupe of powerful capitalist agents, mass-producing works of identical value and character and sacrificing his originality to a tem- plate sanctioned by an insidious recording industry. This viewpoint, shaped by the discourse of musical modernity, expects the individual work to be instantly distinct, inimitable and self-contained. As Sandner suggested however, the ‘master-craftsmanship’ of Pärt is grasped most strongly through continual contact with his total oeuvre. 1 For example Steve Reich, Three Tales (2001) and John Adams, On the Transmigration of Souls (2002). 2 For example Philip Glass, The Hours (2002), dir. Stephen Daldry and Michael Nyman, Wonderland (1999), dir. Michael Winterbottom. 3 See Simon Emmerson, ‘ “Losing Touch?”: The Human Performer and Electronics’, in Music, Electronic Media and Cuture ed. Simon Emmerson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 194–217. 4 Robert K. Schwarz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon Press, 1999), p. 208 and Josiah Fisk, ‘The New Simplicity: The Music of Górecki, Tavener and Pärt’, The Hudson Review, vol. 47, no. 3 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 394–412. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 29 Sep 2021 at 21:44:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298209000229 thoughts on arvo pärt’s tintinnabuli style 3 Further, it is only possible to perceive the individual character inscribed into each work if it is compared to an over-arching stylistic voice, in this instance, tintinnabuli. The term refers to the esoteric man- ner of composition in which a work’s entire content emerges from a succession of chordal inversions fashioned from two principal voices. The first voice, T (tintinnabuli voice), is restricted to the pitches of a chosen and undeviating triad, while the second voice, M (modal voice), is a freer, melodic presence which mostly moves conjunctly through the degrees of a single mode. Pärt began his exploration of tintinnabuli in the miniature Für Alina, in which he restricted himself only to the two voices. In Passio, arguably the zenith of the tintinnabuli style, Pärt expanded the texture through the use of multiple T voices and contrary motion M voices occurring simultaneously. Pärt’s search for tintin- nabuli originated from a desire to imitate the sensations brought about by hearing the tolling of church bells, and he has commented to this purpose that the relationship between the two voices ‘can be likened to the eternal dualism of body and spirit, earth and heaven’.6 It is for this reason, so different to the cerebral logic of 12-tone music, that Hillier portrays tintinnabuli as ‘one of the forces displacing the hitherto central language of serialism’.7 The occurrence of small deviations from the Pärt idiom is the vehi- cle for clear qualitative judgements between works.8 A perception that Pärt’s music contains no difference is the result of an imperfect atten- tion to the individual works, which is no doubt motivated, in part, by scepticism towards the notion of any artist striving to create a single, consistent style given the current compositional ethos. As shall be explored below, this composerly decision is an uncomfort- able discipline amidst the heady stimuli caused by late capitalism. Fisk is most virulent (and inaccurate) in his attack on Pärt’s perceived uniform- ity of sound, as illustrated by his writing of Passio thus: ‘all voices move together in the same rhythm, and all the rhythms are built from the same few basic cells … what comes out of your CD player on ‘Scan’ is not much different from what comes out on ‘Play’.’ 9 This blasé descrip- tion, with its fatuous comparison, overlooks the subtlety of expression which lies inherent within the music, an intricacy which the devotees of early music have realized requires an insistent consideration in order to perceive. Pärt’s music, like pre- and early modern repertories, requires a judgement with the provision already in place that differentiation between works is of an alternative priority to that which exists in the majority of Western art music. Listening to Pärt’s music is therefore an alien process to those experi- ences encountered on a daily basis in the current period of technological saturation, since it demands a particular contemplative mode of appre- ciation which does not sit well with a soundbite culture. Jonathan Kramer portrayed this society as one in which ‘technology [had] created a context of fragmentation, short attention spans leading to constant discontinuities, and multiplicity’.10 This is suggestive of the greater 5 Wolfgang Sandner, liner note to Tabula Rasa (München: ECM, 1984). 6 In Hillier, Arvo Pärt, p. 96. 7 Hiller, Arvo Pärt, p. 2. 8 Für Alina can be celebrated for its judicious use of an anomaly in the tintinnabuli voice where a single note outside of the B minor triad occurs two-thirds of the way through, acting (com- paratively) as a moment of extreme dissonance. Pärt himself highlighted this moment with a depiction of a flower above the staff, implying that it is the seconds of minute difference which contain a work’s meaning. See Hillier, Arvo Pärt, pp. 88–89 for a copy of the score of Für Alina. 9 Fisk, ‘The New Simplicity’, p. 403. 10 Jonathan D. Kramer, ‘The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism’, in Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead and Josephe Auner (Routledge: New York, 2002), p. 19. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 29 Sep 2021 at 21:44:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298209000229 4 tempo aporia, identified by Max Weber, which is present as the result of an ever-increasing rationalization of all aspects of social life, in which the efficiency and appropriateness of technical means leads to a ‘disenchant- ment’ of the world.11 In response to this state, Pärt’s tintinnabuli works are characterized by three elements which speak of a purposeful oppo- sition to fetishism of the means: the absence of subject-matter drawn from living memory, an eschewal of contemporary technology and the adoption of what can be termed an ‘orthodoxy’ within his material. In comparison to John Adams, for example, whose works have con- sistently dealt with both particular historical moments (Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer) as well as addressing current questions of American identity (My Father Knew Charles Ives, American Berserk), Pärt’s music can be heard as distinctly unaffected by themes and events monu- mentalized through the media of the recent past. All of Pärt’s texts are drawn from a single ancient tradition, that of Judeo-Christianity, and it is impossible to segregate Pärt’s disciplined tintinnabuli from his conver- sion to the Orthodox Church while in Estonia. Extraordinary though it appears, both his faith and his musical technique seems to be connected to his weariness with a Soviet avant-garde as suggested by an interview of 1968 for the Soviet magazine Sirp ja Vasar (‘Hammer and Sickle’) in which Pärt intimated that he was reconfiguring his own sense of the modern as it presented itself in the modernist work Credo. In the inter- view he indicated that ‘progress’ to his mind was not achieved through the constant reformation of ideas in the paradigmatic manner of the avant-garde. The composer’s task was to embrace questions of a univer- sal nature rather than worry about the immediate historical importance of musical innovation: I am not sure there could be progress in art… Many art objects of the past appear to be more contemporary than our present art.