Thoughts on Arvo Pärt's Tintinnabuli Style

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 identical. 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 perceived 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.

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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 manner 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 tintinnabuli 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 attention 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.

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 opposition 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 consistently 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 conversion 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 interview 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 universal 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. How do we explain it? The secret to its contemporaneity resides in the question: How thoroughly has the author-composer perceived, not his own present, but the totality of life, its joys, worries and mysteries? … Art has to deal with eternal questions, not just sorting out the issues of today.12 After Credo, Pärt’s works become more consistent in their intention to engage with a Christian Orthodox subject, not solely through sympathetic text setting but through the enabling of a spiritual experience in order to attain answers to the ‘eternal questions’. The incongruous and thorough rejection of technology that charac- terizes Pärt’s compositions is at odds with the highly ‘technocratized’ society in which his music has been commercially successful, leading to a supposition that his works constitute a reactionary mode of escapism. As Charles Jencks has observed in relation to architecture, the radical spirit of modernism has always maintained an ‘overpowering faith in industrial progressivism’,13 arguably the same international attitude that unites Adams with the European avant-garde. Yet Pärt’s preference for working in a media that excludes contemporary technology need not be understood as a childish refusal to integrate himself into the modern world. Rather it is indicative of an attitude, equally noble, which is resistant to the increasingly strong hand which technology enjoys within the creative process. His compositional method, which he describes in mystical terms as the enlargement of a ‘discovered nucleus’,14 differs

11 See Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 135–138. 12 Quoted in Hillier, Arvo Pärt, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 65. 13 Charles Jencks, What is Postmodernism? (Chichester: Academy Editions, 1996), p. 23. 14 Geoff Smith, ‘Sources of Invention: An Interview with Arvo Pärt’, The Musical Times, vol. 140 (Autumn, 1999), p. 19.

greatly to that of Steve Reich and John Adams who rely on advanced synthesisers and playback at every stage of creativity. This is not to deny the craftsmanship apparent in the Americans’ work, but only to suggest that the absence of technology in Pärt’s music has contributed to a focus on nuanced differentiation between works, in contrast to the dramatic juxtaposition of styles and genres within the oeuvres of those more technologically-minded composers. The shifts in style that have consistently characterized Reich’s output are an instructive example. These significant changes in Reich’s compositional technique have been dependent upon – and arguably the result of – his continual interest in technology. In both his more experimental music (such as Pendulum Music, the tape pieces and, more recently the mixed-media productions of The Cave and Three Tales) through to his less immediately avant-garde works Different Trains and the ‘counterpoint’ series, recording technology and sound manipulation have facilitated new avenues of musical inventiveness. This gamut of works represents more than the traditional attempt to master different genres, but is illustrative of a form of musical pluralism which employs record- ed, manipulated and electronically-created sounds to undermine the very concept of genre and thus the notion of a ‘composer-style’.15 Pärt’s music desists from putting forward a similar aesthetic challenge; on the contrary, the unified style of his output revivifies an older, pre-modern argument because of his resoundingly traditional materials. Not only traditional, but arguably ascetic. His development of a sys- tematic musical grammar, namely tintinnabuli, has resulted in a corpus of works whose intent is inextricable with an exercise of self-discipline. The strictness of Pärt’s palate is the third way, in addition to his rejection of technology and contemporary subject matter, in which his music is distinct from the music of the contemporary avant-garde currently composing in Europe and North America. There is a strong sense of iconoclasm embodied by this tradition (or, as Harold Bloom perceived in relation to poetry, an oedipal desire16) to desecrate the musical ten- ets of technique established by canonic predecessors. Pärt himself felt a similar urge in the music of his first period but, by Für Alina (1976), this had been replaced by an idiom free of patricidal angst. Tintinnabuli is, in essence, harmonically simple, undeviating in terms of its modal rela- tionships and could not be classed as ‘experimental’,17 with the caveat that this kind of discipline is itself radical in comparison to the reigning compositional paradigm of difference and development as it emerged in the middle of the 20th century. This paradigm, which in music can be understood as the effect of such experimental figures as John Cage or Cornelius Cardew, was to expand the number of compositional choices available beyond any governing system. Their aleatoric procedures were the means for challenging the serialist hegemony, even if the manner of achieving an aleatoric work of music, as through Cage’s use of I Ching, was highly organized. In union with similar advances in science and technology, the latter stages of the 20th century have witnessed the con- tinuation of this approach within music, easily accepting the association of ‘experimentation’ with ‘progress.’ At the same time, the embracing

15 See Marina Lobanova, Musical Style and Genre: History and Modernity (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000). Particularly relevant here is chapter v, ‘The Problem of Musical Genre: Baroque, Classicism and the Twentieth Century,’ pp. 171–199. 16 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 17 My understanding of experimental is borrowed from the definition propounded in Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp.1–30.

of ‘noise’ as a valid musical experience chimes with the ongoing democ- ratization of culture endemic to postmodernism.18 Together, these tendencies have contributed to plurality not only within works them- selves, but to a climate of music composition generally leading one commentator to its characterization as ‘less a jostling of rival alliances than an increasing turmoil of separate voices.’19 Pärt considers his music to be a personal stand against the ‘turmoil’ of multiplicity. This realization mirrored his purposeful removal from what can be reasonably termed a conventional modernist approach of alienating procedures, rejecting the ‘sand pit game’20 of Darmstadt for a pared-down musical orthodoxy. Namely, these alienating techniques were the ‘devices’ of collage and musical quotation imperative to his brand of polystylism before 1976. The instigation of a new style after this point reflected a desire to leave the ‘critical tropes’ which were prob- lematized by his modernist works, tropes which can be collated under his attitude towards a European ‘Enlightenment’ musical past. There appears to be a definite separation between works composed before 1976, which address questions of historicity and canonicity through a form of self-conscious detachment, and those composed after 1976 which refrain from issuing challenges to their own musical heritage. The procedures of tintinnabuli, stringently conceived and adhered to, were a necessary system which allowed Pärt to shift his focus away from issues of compositional choice and towards themes extraneous to the material. Only by developing an a priori musical grammar could Pärt begin to address that aspect of his existence which had overtaken musical concerns – his faith in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The, as yet, irreversible change to a style of unified works which occurred in 1976 can be understood as a significant aesthetic conversion in compositional approach, and one that has been crucial in the reception of his style after the exodus from Estonia in 1984. As a term, ‘unified’ has become laden with both technical and ideological mean- ings which require qualification in this context. In various critiques of analytical method, ‘unity’ stands for a set of values which have become a prioritized set of criteria in canon formation. Those values are noto- riously in a tautological relationship with the music; identifying unity within a work serves as a form of legitimatization, only because estima- ble works within the canon validate the notion of unity. For this reason, perhaps, unity has been dismissed as the self-serving tool of analysts and critical thinkers keen to regulate a particular canon.21 Significantly, the qualities most associated with this canon – notated, empirical and fear- ful of the inexplicable – are firmly reliant on Enlightenment precepts. The paradox in Pärt’s development is that the ‘aesthetic conversion’ to unity was symptomatic of a break, rather than a realignment with his cultural attachment to modernity, as might have been expected. His is a peculiar version of unity, which stands outside of the Western tradition. This has been perceived most pertinently in a concise essay by David Clarke, whose own critique of Pärt leads him to view the simplified unity of his newer style as a challenge to modernism, the final chapter of the Enlightenment narrative.22 While Clarke views the tintinnabuli works as a more ‘authentic’ compositional voice than Pärt’s earlier for-

18 Jencks, What is Postmodernism, p. 27. 19 Paul Griffiths, Modern Music: A Concise History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), p. 191. 20 Smith, ‘Sources of Invention’, p. 19. 21 See Fred Everett Maus, ‘Concepts of Musical Unity’, in Rethinking Music ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 171–192. 22 David Clarke, ‘Parting Glances: Aesthetic Solace or Act of Complicity?’ The Musical Times, vol. 134, no. 1810, (December, 1993), pp. 680–684.

ays into collage, he warns that ‘far from signifying the resolution of the conflicts of modernity, this music is in fact symptomatic of a deepening crisis’,23 precisely because of the music’s palatable nature. In this judgement Clarke is unable to extricate himself fully from the mindset which modernism has engendered, one which takes for granted that music should point towards some sort of dialectical thinking and never ‘provide the comfort of a closed and harmonious other world’ through its harmonious sameness.24 There are two aspects of Pärt’s tintinnabuli music that contribute to the seemingly unified quality. Firstly they are works which are self- contained, that is, they do not engage in citation of music of the past. Certainly they are semantically referential through text or an allusive title, and often have a dramatic purpose through drawing on Christian subjects and the liturgy. Because of this tendency they could hardly be considered as abstract. However, one of the most notable features of Pärt’s tintinnabuli style when compared to his earlier compositions is the absence of musical quotation, and it is this aspect which provides a groundwork of unity. This is not to claim that Pärt’s works do not make reference to each other, since his tintinnabuli style has only become rec- ognizable because of its reappearance across multiple works; but it is true that the constellation of Pärt’s music is becoming a closed and unified body because he has stepped back from incorporating music from other sources. This is indicative of a broader change in Pärt’s outlook towards the interaction of music and history. The play of found musical objects was a defining aspect of Pärt’s modernism and rooted him within a specific tradition of eclecticism. The move to unified, self-referential music highlights his departure from this tradition. Secondly, the term ‘unified’ in relation to Pärt’s compositions refers to his espousal of ‘non-dialectical’ forms. While his tintinnabuli works do display moments of contrast in both the rhythmic organization and between certain lines of counterpoint, there is rarely a sense of formal transformation at a deeper level.25 The one possible, although significant, exception is Passio, whose expansive conclusion mirrors the summation of the Passion narrative. Even this work could hardly be interpreted as teleological, however, as the sense of being harmonically pulled towards an end-point is deliberately absent throughout the work; the final phrase cannot represent an apotheosis as it is effectively a free- standing section, unrelated tonally to that which has preceded it in the same manner as a religious doxology. In a work such as Passio, where there are no differentiated formal sections, the tension and synthesis which is inherent to classical forms cannot function. This contrasts significantly with his earlier work Credo, described by Paul Hillier as the ‘pivotal work in Pärt’s oeuvre’.26 Credo of 1968 articulates the conclusion of Pärt’s interest in collage and heterogene- ity within single movements, while tentatively suggesting the first move towards the homogenized tintinnabuli works for which he has become most widely recognised. As a fabric of multiple distinct historical styles – the Baroque, the serial and the aleatory – it represents the culmina- tion of Pärt’s fascination with the idea of ‘the past’ as a topic. This is pre-figured in the predecessor closest to Credo, Collage sur B–A–C–H (1964), the second movement of which can be understood as the most

23 Clarke, ‘Parting Glances’, p. 680. 24 Clarke, ‘Parting Glances’, p. 683. 25 Typically Pärt will utilize the device of mensuration canon to enable rhythmic contrast, as in Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten. See Clarke, ‘Parting Glances’, p. 680. 26 Hillier, Arvo Pärt, p. 58.

voluble statement of Pärt’s disciple-like relationship to the Baroque master. Although the dimensions of Credo are that much greater than the earlier sarabande, they share a reliance on the effect of alternation achieved through the quotation of Bach’s music and the playing of his own. In Collage sur B–A–C–H, the sarabande’s small dimension, which is dependent upon the aria from Bach’s English Suite in D minor in addition to its intimate use of strings, oboe and harpsichord, results in an intensely condensed juxtaposition of diatonic homophony and atonal heterophony. Credo fully explores the same power of contrast between tonality, free atonality and a stricter serialism through the play of vastly alternating musical parameters.27 The ‘dialectical’28 property of Credo – its interplay between the oppositions of order and disorder, rationality and chaos, the group and the individual – links it historically with the Passion narrative. This is apparent most audibly in Pärt’s ritualized treatment of the chorus, which takes on the role of the crowd through an increasingly strident sequence of un-notated shouts. The deliberate shock of this moment is in homage to Bach’s equally explosive portrayal of the Jewish turba in his Passion settings. Pärt himself, through the numerous allusions to Bach, seems to be pointing towards this specific example of Gospel tension, and it is this that prompts Hillier to identify a psychological content, linked to the Christian narrative of redemption, which is missing in the earlier collage works. He writes that ‘in Credo the elements of conflict are more violent than ever, but for the first time we encounter moments of tonality with an enduring quality; what had seemed catastrophe is now redeemed through catharsis in music of a newly calm intensity’.29 The choice of text suggests a purposeful dialogue between the notion of legal recompense as it was understood in Jewish society and Christ’s overturning of that idea in his portrayal of the Heavenly kingdom.30 It is, therefore, Pärt’s first theological work because the ‘dialectic between the textual juxtaposition and explicit opposition of Old and New Testament teaching infuses the whole piece’.31 It remains ambiguous, however, whether Credo represents as sincere a conversion to the Christian message as do his consequent tintinnabuli works. The opening gesture seemingly represents an affirmation of faith in the figure of Christ, but it can be understood equally as an assertion in the worldly conception of beauty as it has historically been portrayed or mediated by music. Significantly Pärt takes the first prelude of Bach’s Das Wohltemperirte Clavier as his paradigm, quoting almost in full the entire prelude in C major after the first statement (‘Credo in Jesum Christum’). Bach’s first prelude, so often treated as a pedagogical model and ingrained into the general consciousness of Western musi- cians, has become a shorthand for the mathematical perfection of equal temperament. It is as potent a symbol as ‘In the Beginning’, which initi- ates both Genesis and the Gospel of St John. Set against the powerful chords of the C major opening, Pärt can be heard to be committing an

27 To be capable of doing so, Pärt required an extended type of form and instrumentation, both of which were conceived for choral-symphonic forces. These include a full comple- ment of wind, brass, percussion, four-part choir and piano. Within these orchestral sections the extreme tessitura of the work is reflected by the use of almost the entire range of the piano’s keyboard, by the employment of double piccolo and double bass clarinet to empha- size the limits of acoustic instrumental pitch and through extensive percussion. 28 On Pärt and the dialectic of Credo, see Peter Quinn, ‘Out with the Old and in with the New: Arvo Pärt’s Credo’, Tempo No. 211 (January 2001), pp. 15–21. 29 Hillier, Arvo Pärt, p. 59. 30 The translation reads: ‘I believe in Jesus Christ. You have heard it said: an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth; But I say unto you: do not resist injustice’. 31 Quinn, ‘Out with the Old’, Tempo, p. 16.

act of sacrilegious collage as a form of commentary. The ‘god’ which Pärt is deifying is not only that embodied by Jesus Christ, but the figure of Bach as he has been immortalized through the canon of modernity, and it is essential that the serial episodes of Credo are defeated by the superimposed historical object. Pärt’s subjection of his own artistic per- sona to the totem of Bach a ‘is transmitted by the very familiarity of the Bach model’.32 Peter Quinn believes this manner of quotation functions as a ‘mask’, covering Pärt’s true compositional voice in comparison with his later tintinnabuli works, whose absence of collage and serial procedures allows an unfettered channel between the composer and his audience. The opening of Credo signalled Pärt’s adherence to two icons of Western culture, Christ and Bach, but in a manner which required the latter to become an intermediary. It is not until the tintinnabuli works that the effects of his conversion are felt in a fully-developed aesthetic manner, so that the self-conscious decision of alloying his style with Bach’s is made redundant. The sense of conviction – although not necessarily of belief – portrayed in Credo is achieved through the coupling of a religious text with the musical processes which serve as illustration of the text while clearly not in a manner which could be described as word- painting. There remains a sense, however, that the collage nature of the work, and the self-conscious reference to Bach, prevents the total aban- donment of the self which can be discerned in minimalist works. After Credo, Pärt’s works become more consistent in their intention to engage with a Chrisitan Orthodox subject, not solely through sympathetic text setting, but through the enabling of direct spiritual experience. Examining Fratres, a representative work of Pärt’s tintinnabuli period from 1977, proves this to be the case. The work is an example of passacaglia, the total of nine statements of an eight-bar phrase containing two parallel modal voices a tenth apart and a single tintinnabuli voice on the triad of A minor. A constant presence of the tintinnabuli triad and the non-deviating harmonization of his chosen mode results in the impossibility of modulation, echoed in the melodic material which is purposefully devoid of highly-characterized elements. Combined, these features emphasise the austerity of the work’s essentially repetitive framework. Moments of differentiation between the recurring statements exist in the cello figuration, but these differences are purely of gesture; their harmonic content is identical to that created between the modal and tintinnabuli voices in the piano. Unlike his earlier collage work, Pärt is here aiming to avoid an interaction with the social forms of the musical past. According to David Clarke, his ‘tintinnabuli style – with its rejection of atonality and other modernist complexities – thus becomes a cloister in which to immure himself against the conflict, confusion and fragmentation of both the social conditions of the outside world, and the language of the symbolic artefacts created in response to them’.33 Indebted to the tradition of the passacaglia, but unlike the previous historically significant examples which have emerged in every musical style-period, it does not contribute to an aggrandizement of the form, nor reveal any extended technical brilliance in the overlapping of phrases. Rather than aiming to problematize the simplicity of the form through, for example, obscur- ing the regularity of phrase-lengths, Pärt draws attention to its repetitive

32 Quinn, ‘Out with the Old’, Tempo, p. 20. 33 See David Clarke, review of Fratres, Music and Letters, vol. 75, (November, 1994), pp. 652– 658.

framework as a means of achieving a wilful artlessness. There are no moments when the composer reveals himself through material which is foreign to the process established by the initial passacaglia phrases. In the same way that Steve Reich claims that some of his works strictly obey a process once it has been initiated, so there is a similar sense that Fratres is following a pre-ordained pattern both in the repeated statements and within the melodic patterns.34 As an embodiment of the unity discussed above, Fratres represents an austere parallel to Eastern Orthodoxy. The idea of ritual becomes increasingly powerful to Pärt and it appears that Fratres contains the elements of fixity and non-fixity which characterize ritual action within a religious order. In this way, it is possible that the subject of the work is about transformation, but in an entirely different manner to the kind of transformation experienced within dialectical works. There is no sense of dramatic conflict followed by synthesis. The work occupies a ritualized space, presenting a fixed framework of an action repeated nine times at the same time as enabling those taking part to enter various new spiritual states. In this way it is most closely resembled by the pro- cessional character of certain rituals within the Christian liturgy.35 Pärt’s quest to discover a suitable musical technique that expressed his religious conviction led him to displace Bach from being his central historical concern. If the works up until Credo are viewed as his attempt to engage with the issue of Bach’s supremacy within the canon of Western art music, then tintinnabuli can be understood as a response to values essentially missing from that particular narrative of modernity. This was, namely, the gradual waning of the metaphysical as the focal point for artistic experience. Certainly Bach himself was consistent in his dedications of his works to the glory of God, but the purely formal ingenuity of his counterpoint marked the beginning of a trajectory characterized by increasing concern with rationality – which, by the late 20th century, had added technological sophistication as a barometer of a composer’s objective faculties. The attraction for Pärt of the earliest kinds of music, particularly examples of plainsong, resided within their indissoluble relationship with the numinous. Here the figure of the composer, worldly and despoiled, was constantly involved in a process of self-erasure. The shaping of plainsong was less an individual activ- ity and more a communal response to repeated recitations of religious texts. In the years between Credo and Für Alina, Pärt was absorbed by extensive studies of theory and practice of plainsong, and its ‘ornamen- tation’ through polyphony. Pärt deliberately appropriated the methods of creation behind the earliest examples of polyphony as the substance of his own style. For example the two-part nature of organum, which is based on the interplay of the principal (fixed) and organal (extempo- rarized) voices, re-emerges in the relationship between the tintinnabuli voice (restricted to the triad) and melodic voice (freer to express the text). In the best of Pärt’s works, the two states of freedom and fixity appear to be finely balanced, even though in reality the whole work has been carefully plotted to produce these results.

34 This is noted by Clarke, review of Fratres, p. 653. 35 The title of Fratres seems to accord with this interpretation. Translated as the archaic word ‘brethren’, it gives a sense of the particular concept of communication that ritual facilitates within a community. It also recalls more specifically the Orate Fratres which represented the vocalized dialogue between the celebrant and the congregation before the Secret in the Latin Mass. See John Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 119

It is somewhat paradoxical of Pärt that his eschewal of technology, outlined above, crucially does not extend to objections to the produc- tion of recordings of his works. (It is equally ironic that Pärt should propagate his self-portrait as the mystic carefully moulding each suc- cessive chord, in the image of a fairy-tale druid at work on his potions, through the medium of digital video.36) The growth of Pärt’s reputa- tion since he left Estonia has been dependent upon the success of tintinnabuli, and certain works – such as Spiegel im Spiegel, Fratres and In Memoriam Benjamin Britten – have become ubiquitous in a particular genre of documentary-drama as an emotive soundtrack.37 Theological considerations of Pärt’s works as religious objects or practices therefore seem disingenuous, because of their popularity and appropriation as film and television soundtracks. This has been the natural consequence of a wide-scale interest with minimal music beyond the boundary of academia but also because the absence of moments of dramatic content in Pärt’s music makes it an ideally non-distractive accompaniment for certain kinds of visual imagery. How seriously can the claim be received, then, that tintinnabuli’s evo- cation of a pre-technological age is necessary for its religious purpose to be fulfilled? According to Hillier, tintinnabuli aimed to provide a counter-balance of values in a cultural market-place of excessive speed and variation: A culture that attempts to live without the sustaining power of myth is a culture that is not whole, that has no connection with the past. And it is in this manner that we may understand Pärt’s sense of purpose: as an attempt to reconstitute art within a sense of past and future time, to fly in the face of the disconnected- ness of postmodernism and seize a cultural meta-narrative from time so distant, yet so potently realized that it has the force of new life.38 Interpreting Pärt’s reformation of style is consequently problematic, as his compositional attitude does not easily accord with either narrative, of modernism or postmodernism, as they are most commonly recognised in Europe and North America. The move away from a style which incorporated cacophony and structure in a dialectical fashion – that which was pejoratively termed the ‘formalism’ of his symphonic style – suggests that he had completed his own modernist project. It reflects a creative tiredness with the aims of a constantly innovative and socially-responsive avant-garde, while simultaneously rebuffing the ‘dis- connectedness of postmodernism’. At the heart of what can be viewed as the Enlightenment musical meta-narrative is the idea of a continu- ally developing relationship, or tension, between form and content. As has already been suggested, it is this meta-narrative, wrapped up with the issues of canon formation that originated in the 18th century and particularly in the figure of Bach, which played the formative role in Pärt’s primary grasp of musical creation. An alternative meta-narrative, which Hillier traces in Pärt’s work since 1976, is left unidentified beyond the reference to earlier plainsong practices, but it is clear that the qualities which are associated with the Enlightenment meta-narrative are not those perceived in tintinnabuli.

36 I refer to the film Arvo Pärt: 24 Preludes for a Fugue (2002), dir. Dorian Supin. 37 For example the use of Speidel im Spiegel in Wit (2001) dir. Mike Nichols, and In Memoriam Benjamin Britten in Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) dir. Michael Moore. 38 Hillier, Arvo Pärt, p. 74.