Geeta Dayal
On the occasion of the Estonian composer’s ninetieth birthday, a new album collects recordings of four of his most famous works.
Silentium, by Arvo Pärt, Mississippi Records
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The work of the legendary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt feels both ancient and new. His music is imbued with a rich sense of history, evoking Renaissance polyphony and medieval chants. The modern sound comes through in its epic stillness, silence, and wide-open spaces. He has often been described as a minimalist, but not in the typical sense of the word. Minimalism in music is often associated with pulses and patterns of repetition, as in pieces by American composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Pärt’s European minimalism is different, with a slow, graceful pace that is placid and peaceful in a relentlessly frenetic world.
Over the past few decades, Pärt’s music has reached wide acclaim. He consistently ranks as the world’s most-played living composer in venues throughout the world. Celebrities from Björk to Keanu Reeves have attended his atmospheric concerts, and directors including Terrence Malick and Paul Thomas Anderson have used his pieces in their films. Pärt’s Fratres, in a version for cello and piano, was used to great effect in Anderson’s 2007 There Will Be Blood, for instance. (Pärt never aimed to be famous, though—in 1978, when he was asked about doing commercial work, such as soundtracks for feature films and documentaries, he dryly replied, “It helps me only in getting money for a sandwich. It doesn’t help me in any other way.”) 2025 will see Pärt’s ninetieth birthday, and numerous concerts, screenings, reissues, and celebrations are being planned internationally. A key hub of the festivities is the striking, expansive Arvo Pärt Centre, located in the coastal town of Laulasmaa, about twenty miles outside of Estonia’s capital Tallinn, in a dense pine forest near the Baltic Sea. Also part of the celebrations surrounding this year, the new album Silentium, released on Mississippi Records, collects unique recordings of four of his famous pieces.
Pärt, born in 1935, began experimenting with music in the late 1950s in Soviet-occupied Estonia. In the 1960s, he continued these explorations while working as a sound engineer for Estonian radio. By the early 1970s, he had converted to Orthodox Christianity and immersed himself deeply in sacred music. A few years later, Pärt developed his creative breakthrough, a unique compositional method known as tintinnabuli (Latin for “little bells”), which debuted in the spare, elegant Für Alina (1976). In this style, two lines appear in tandem—one usually playing a melody in a stepwise manner, the other playing in certain triad relationships relative to the melody.
“Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when am searching for answers—in my life, in my music, in my work,” he once explained. “In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity . . . Here I am alone with silence. I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me.” The concept of tintinnabuli may seem lofty and abstract, but Pärt’s music has resonated with millions, most poignantly with sick patients in hospitals. In Spiegel im Spiegel (1978), probably his best-known composition, a pianist plays soft, soothing arpeggios while a violinist offers slow, lyrical phrases. It has often been played at deathbeds, a salve for the dying.
Silentium opens with Vater Unser (“Our Father,” 2005), arranged for trombone and strings. Pärt based it on the Lord’s Prayer and later dedicated it to Pope Benedict XVI. The mood in the beginning is quiet and somber, and it gradually becomes more uplifting. The melody is simple, with a radiant, crystalline purity. The strings are understated, allowing the trombone to take flight.
The next piece is a brief solo rendition of Variationen zur Gesundung von Arinuschka (“Variations for the Recovery of Arinuschka,” 1977) by the Dutch pianist Marcel Worm. Variationen has a soothing, childlike melody, further softened around the edges by ample helpings of the sustain pedal. The third piece, Fratres, performed by the Hungarian State Opera Orchestra, is moody and intense. Fratres (“Brothers,” 1977) is one of Pärt’s most celebrated works. It has been arranged in many ways over the years, including for violin and piano, strings, and chamber orchestra with percussion. My favorite take on Fratres is the mesmerizing version by the pianist Keith Jarrett and the violinist Gidon Kremer, released on ECM Records in 1984. This recording for strings and percussion is less nimble than Jarrett and Kremer’s exhilarating interplay, but sounds more lavish and grand.
The finale is a previously unreleased interpretation of Silentium, by the Boston-based chamber orchestra A Far Cry. Silentium is the second movement of Tabula Rasa, a double concerto for two violins, prepared piano, and strings. This performance, which stretches over nearly twenty-two minutes, unfolds at almost half the speed of other recordings, offering a unique experience. This glacially slow Silentium sounds impossibly vast, allowing the listener to luxuriate in the rich timbres of the instruments.
Screenshot from And Then Came The Evening and the Morning, directed by Dorian Supin. Courtesy Mississippi Records.
Listening to Pärt can be a mystical experience. But as solemn as his works may seem, he also has a zany sense of humor. “I think the world venerates him as this deeply religious composer who tackles eternal themes in his music, but I think it’s also good to remember that he also has a playful experimental side,” Maria Juur, an Estonian electronic music producer living in Los Angeles who records under the name Maria Minerva, told me last week. A lighthearted documentary by the late filmmaker Dorian Supin, And Then Came the Evening and the Morning (1990), portrays scenes of Pärt cooking at home; testing out cool sounds on a classic 1980s digital synthesizer, the Yamaha DX7; and jokingly holding a banana to his head like a telephone earpiece. But there are also moments of deep seriousness and intensity, as he obsessively fine-tunes a choral work, or immerses himself in playing piano, leaning his head on the instrument to absorb the subtleties of the sound.
Silentium is often melancholy and pensive, reflecting our very worrying time. But in between the notes, there is lightness and transcendence. “I think he represents freedom—musical freedom, freedom of ideas,” says Juur. It is music that feels like it has always been there, timeless and universal.
Geeta Dayal is an arts critic and journalist specializing in twentieth-century music, culture, and technology. She has written extensively for frieze and many other publications, including the Guardian, Wired, the Wire, Bookforum, Slate, the Boston Globe, and Rolling Stone. She is the author of Another Green World (Bloomsbury, 2009), a book on Brian Eno, and is currently at work on a new book on music.