Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt (born 1935) invented a compositional system he called tintinnabuli — Latin for "little bells" — and with it created some of the most widely performed and deeply consoling music of the late 20th century. He was born in Estonia, then a Soviet republic, studied at the Tallinn Conservatory, and worked through serialist and collage techniques before falling silent for eight years in the mid-1970s. He emerged in 1976 with Für Alina, a piece for solo piano of extraordinary simplicity: one voice moving in a slow melody while another articulates only the notes of the A-minor triad. Two voices. Two functions. Nothing else. Tintinnabuli.

The system is more rigorous than it sounds. One voice (the "melodic" voice) moves stepwise through a scale, creating melody. The other (the "tintinnabuli" voice) arpeggiate a triad, like a bell — from which the name. The result is music of great purity that does not sound calculated, because it is not being calculated in the conventional sense. The system generates music the way a clock generates time: by mechanism, but mechanism aimed at something real.

Fratres (1977), Spiegel im Spiegel (1978), Tabula Rasa (1977), and Passio (1982) are the core early works. Pärt emigrated to Vienna in 1980 when the Soviet authorities made life difficult, then settled in Berlin. His later works — the St. John Passion (1982), the Te Deum (1984), the Berliner Messe (1990) — have grown larger in scale while remaining connected to the original simplicity. He is the most performed living composer in the world by a significant margin.

StyleTintinnabuli: melodic voice plus triad voice. Sacred tonality. Silence as essential material. Music that sounds like it is not moving and is moving profoundly.

Listen: Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror) for violin and piano. Then Tabula Rasa for two violins and string orchestra. Then the full Passio — if you have two hours of silence to give it.