Arvo Pärt's Sound of Silence
If the music of 'Tabula Rasa' has a visual equivalent, it is in Mark Rothko's paintings
In the worldof contemporary art music, Arvo Pärt cuts a perplexing figure. Devout, media shy and reclusive, he is also one of the most commercially successful composers alive. The 74-year-old Estonian's unique style of minimalism, influenced by Russian Orthodox mysticism and early Western polyphony, has been featured in more than 50 films. To browse through the reviews of Mr. Pärt's works found on YouTube and Amazon.com is to dip into ecstatic confessions of transcendental experiences. His latest album, "In Principio," debuted at No. 2 in the classical charts; according to Amazon, customers who bought this collection of choral works in Latin "also bought" works by U2, Diana Krall and Van Morrison. As the American minimalist composer Steve Reich put it, Mr. Pärt is "completely out of step with the zeitgeist, and yet he's enormously popular. His music fulfils a deep human need that has nothing to do with fashion."
Mr. Pärt found a way out of the modernist impasse, one that eschews the alienating experiments of serialism without clinging to 19th-century models of tonality. With his "Tabula Rasa" (1977) for two solo violins, prepared piano and orchestra, he presented his alternative: a blank slate, charged with emotion even in the absence of any event. Over 30 years later the work continues to reveal itself as a masterpiece.
Mr. Pärt received his musical education in Tallinn during the Khrushchev era, when Soviet taste championed bombastic symphonic works and atheism was a mandatory part of the music curriculum. In his early works, he experimented with serialism, a technique frowned upon as a form of Western decadence. His first choral work, the "Credo" of 1968, was banned for its overtly religious character and the composer subjected to harassment.
Not long after, Mr. Pärt retreated into self-imposed silence. For eight years, he composed virtually nothing, devoting himself instead to the study of early music and converting to the Russian Orthodox faith. He emerged from this period with a new style, informed by early Western music and Orthodox mysticism.
Based on the intervals and overtones of church bells, the style, which Mr. Pärt dubbed "tintinnabuli" (from the Latin word for small bells), is tonal in a way that sounds ancient yet modern. The hypnotic repetition of simple patterns is similar to the minimalism developed by composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass. But while their repetitions evoke the mechanical pulse of urban life, Mr. Pärt's create a sense of sheltering space that invites the listener to turn inward.
In "Tabula Rasa," that space is created with the very first chord, a fortissimo double A played by the solo violins at the upper and lower edges of their register. Like a scream it tears through the silence and then disappears into it without explanation, leaving a gaping void that seems to last an eternity. Then the orchestra enters, establishing the pattern that will run through the movement, playing the three notes of the A-minor triad against slow A-minor scales. The soloists embellish the same pattern, circling each other with crisp arpeggios in their register's stratosphere.
These chords broken down into their individual notes work like a prism breaking up a beam of light into many colors. If the core of the music, the tonality, is essentially static, its surface is agitated, sparkling, with the two violins spraying notes like drops of water.
Gradually the soloists' voices become submerged in the sound of the orchestra, which launches into an angry cadence. The movement ends with the same fortissimo chord that opened it, now played by the orchestra, and held with a sustained ferocity that offers little by way of resolution.
A bell-like arpeggio from the piano introduces the second movement, now in D minor, which again rests on a single pattern, imitated across sections of the orchestra, of a rising and falling motif over a languidly drawn-out descending scale. Fragile and delicate, the soloists' parts soar high above the orchestra and piano, rubbing against each other in sweet suspensions that bring to mind the sexually teasing harmonies of early baroque music.
Their movement is spooled out so slowly that the violins' descent down the scale is almost imperceptible. When they reach the bottom of their register and hand their motif down to the lower strings in the orchestra, the effect is surprising and inevitable like a sunset in June. The last bars see the basses continuing the descent so quietly that one barely notices that they end on the penultimate note of the scale: Only the listener's mind can supply the final note of resolution.
From the late 17th century onward, classical music used tonality to favor certain notes of the scale over others, allowing for the development of a musical theme that the listener intuitively understands: A musical idea ventures forth from the harmonic home to which it must eventually return.
The resulting tension creates a sense of linear progress or narrative.
Serial music abolished this system by making all 12 notes of the scale equal-with the result that they sound equally meaningless. Mr. Pärt's tintinnabuli compositions, by contrast, revolve around a single static tonality that invites contemplation. He once told students his aim was "to concentrate on each sound, so that every blade of grass is as important as a flower." Tonality acts as a hidden pole that gently pulls the music inward.
Mr. Pärt's music has often been compared to Russian icons, whose flat, shimmering surfaces resist any attempt to place them in time or space. But if "Tabula Rasa" has a visual equivalent, it is in the color-block paintings of Mark Rothko, who once recommended that viewers stand inches from his paintings to instill a sense of awe and "transcendence of the individual."
Seen that way, his fields of solid color appear to stretch out into space, much as Mr. Pärt's static use of tonality dissolves all sense of time.
By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
Wall Street Journal, 06.06.2009