This one note, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements – with one voice, with two voices. I build with the most primitive materials – with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells. And that is why I call it tintinnabulation. Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers – in my life, my music, my work. 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. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises – and everything that is unimportant falls away. Time and timelessness are connected. This instant and eternity are struggling within us. And this is the cause of all of our contradictions, our obstinacy, our narrow-mindedness, our faith and our grief.
Arvo Pärt
It was largely thanks to violinist Gidon Kremer that Arvo Pärt became known in the West, having been encouraged by his Baltic fellow in adopting his now celebrated ‘tintinnabulation’ style, inspired by the bells and chants of his Orthodox faith.
Three works in particular, dating from 1977-8 – two years before Pärt left Soviet-oppressed Estonia for Germany – shook listeners to the core: Tabula Rasa, effectively a concerto for two violins, prepared piano and strings; Fratres and Spiegel im Spiegel for violin and piano. Performed with yearning, bitter-sweet passion, the intensity of the works glow anew with sensitivity to Pärt’s mathematically-inspired structures that lends real eloquence to his sound-world. The sense of proportion in tempo, phrase arc and inner voices is striking.
Spiegel in Spiegel has to the best-known of all the music by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b.1935). Composed in 1978, just before Pärt left Estonia for Berlin, it was originally written for single piano and violin, though many other versions exist, including for piano and ‘cello, or viola, clarinet, flute, and percussion. An example of minimalist music, it has a meditative and serene simplicity in both its structure and tonalities.
In the 1960s, although largely cut off from western contemporary classical music, Pärt experimented with serialism, collage, neo-classicism and aggressive dissonance, styles which cemented his modernist credentials, but set him at odds with the Estonian Soviet authorities. However, he was frustrated with the dry “children’s games” of the avant-garde, and, as a reaction to this and in an attempt to find his own compositional style, he went into a self-imposed creative exile, during which he explored the traditions, both musical and cultural, he was most drawn to: Gregorian chant, harmonic simplicity, and his Russian Orthodox faith. What emerged was a distinctive and unique compositional voice: the music of “little bells”, or “tintinnabuli”, heard for the first time in his piano miniature Für Alina. This piece set the seed from which his most famous music grew, including Spiegel im Spiegel, Fratres, Summa, and Tabula Rosa.
It is easy to dismiss Pärt’s music as simplistic, sentimental and clichéd “holy minimalism”, but the music’s power lies in both its absolute simplicity and the austere rigour applied to its construction. And here Pärt was harking back to his adventures in serialism, devising strict rules to control how the harmonic voices move within the music. As a result, his music sounds both ancient and avant-garde, while the new tonalities of the “little bells” and the simple harmonic progressions give the music a spare, profound and meditative expressivity.
The German title Spiegel im Spiegel means both “mirror in the mirror” as well as “mirrors in the mirror”, referring to the infinity of images produced by parallel plane mirrors. In the music, this mirroring is achieved through the fragments in the piano, which are endlessly repeated with small variations, as if reflected back and forth. These repeating fragments also invoke, in tintinnabuli style, the twilight first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 27 no. 2, the ‘Moonlight’, with its peaceful recurring triplets.
The piano part carries the tintinnabular voice with its repeating broken chords and low, sustained Fs in the bass. The texture is coloured throughout by high, bell-like (tintinnabular) recurring sounds in the upper registers. The violin line is based on a slow ascending melodic line, beginning with a G-A two-note scale, which alternately ascends then descends to A by step. With each subsequent ascent and descent, a note is added to the line, a process which could go on indefinitely (the “mirror in mirror” again). It is this continuity and constant inversion of the violin line, combined with the piano, that creates the sense of perfect tranquility. There is no drama or ambiguity here because we know the music will always return to the “home” tonality of A. Rather, the emotional content comes from introspective atmosphere created by the simplicity and pure sonorities of the music.
The notes themselves are not difficult, but it is important to set an appropriate tempo for the music (too slow and it could sound ponderous). Then the main task is to set the mood of reflection, with the notes falling like water dropping into water, and to play the notes “as beautifully as possible” (Tasmin Little, violinist). The music, in effect, plays itself: there is absolutely no need for over-interpretation, and one should simply step back, “have faith” in the music, and the composer’s ability to create a mesmeric tranquility.
One of the first and most famous examples of Pärt’s new sound world is Fratres (Latin for “brothers”), written in 1977. It’s a piece written “without fixed instrumentation,” a characteristic which recalls the highly-adaptable music of J.S. Bach. Listening to Fratres, you can sense the unfolding of a beautiful and seemingly inevitable mathematical process. Built on a constant open fifth (A-E) drone, the entire piece is delicately poised somewhere between A major and minor. The solemn two-bar percussion pattern in 6/4 time which comes between each of the nine “rotations” has been compared to the percussion interjections in Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. As time signatures alternate from 7/4 to 9/4 to 11/4, we have a sense of musical “space” filling in.
Between 1977 and 2009, there have been at least eighteen authorized versions of Fratres –everything from strings to wind octet and percussion, to trombone ensemble and timpani. Listening to multiple incarnations back-to-back provides a unique experience. The same persistent, eternal message seems to be finding voice in multiple messengers. Here are a few more versions:
European History 