The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, who turns 90 on 11th of September, 2025, is without doubt one of the most frequently performed contemporary classical composers on this planet. Past the live performance degree and cathedral choir, Pärt’s tune options closely in film and television soundtracks: “There Will Be Blood,” “Thin Red Line” or “Wit,” for example. It’s continuously worn to rouse profound emotions and transcendent spirituality.
Many Estonians grew up listening to the tune Pärt wrote for children’s films and Estonian cinema classics within the Sixties and ‘70s. Popes and Orthodox patriarchs honor him, and Pärt’s tune has won the highest levels of recognition, including Grammy Awards. In 2025, Pärt is being celebrated in Estonia, at Carnegie Hall and around the globe.
In the back of a lot of Pärt’s recognition – and his listeners’ prayer – is his engagement with sacred Christian texts and Orthodox Christian spirituality. But his tune has impressed a large length of artists and thinkers: Icelandic singer Björk, who respects its good looks and self-discipline; the theater artist Robert Wilson, who was once attracted to its detail of week; and Christian theologians, who admire its “bright sadness.”
As a music scholar with experience in Estonian music and Orthodox Christianity, and a longtime Pärt fan, I’m thinking about how Pärt’s exploration of Christian traditions – without delay mischievous and fervent – appeals to such a lot of. How does this occur musically?
Gerda Arendt via Wikimedia Commons
Tintinnabuli
Pärt emerged from a duration of private creative catastrophe in 1976. In a now-legendary concert, he offered the arena to unutilized tune composed the use of a method he invented referred to as “tintinnabuli,” an onomatopoeic Latin guarantee which means “little bells.”
Tintinnabuli is tune decreased to its elemental elements: easy melodic strains derived from sacred Christian texts or mathematical designs and married to ordinary harmonies. As Pärt describes it, tintinnabuli is the good thing about relief instead than complexity – releasing the basic great thing about his tune and the message of his texts.
This was once a departure from Pärt’s previous modernist and experimental tune, and expressed a yearslong attempt to reconcile his newfound commitment to Orthodox Christianity and his rigorous creative beliefs. Pärt’s exit is documented within the dozens of notebooks he stored, starting within the Nineteen Seventies: religious texts, diary entries, drawings and ideas for musical compositions – a documentary trove of Christian musical creativity.
Tintinnabuli was once impressed, partially, via Pärt’s passion in a lot previous types of Christian tune, together with Gregorian chant – the single-voice making a song of Roman Catholicism – and Renaissance polyphony, which weaves in combination multiple melodic lines. As a result of its associations with the church, this tune was once ideologically fraught in an anti-religious Soviet Estonia.
In Pärt’s notebooks from the Nineteen Seventies, there are pages and pages of musical sketches the place he works out early music-inspired approaches to texts and prayers – the seeds of tintinnabuli. The method become his resolution to existential creative questions: How can tune reconcile human subjectivity and divine truths? How can a composer withdraw from the way in which, so as to discuss, to let the sounds of sacred texts resonate? How can artists and audiences way tune in order that, to usefulness Pärt’s well-known resonance, “every blade of grass has the status of a flower”?
Rene Riisalu/Presidendi kantselei via Wikimedia Commons
In a 2003 conversation with the Italian musicologist Enzo Restagno, Pärt’s spouse, Nora, presented an equation to know the way tintinnabuli works: 1+1 = 1.
The primary part – the primary “1” – is melody, as singer and conductor Paul Hillier lays out in his 1997 book on Pärt. Melody expresses a subjective enjoy of shifting throughout the international. It facilities round a given musical observe: the “A” key at the piano, for example.
The second one part – the “+1” – is tintinnabuli itself: the presence of 3 pitches, sounding in combination as a bell-like halo: A, C, E.
After all, the 3rd part – the “= 1” – is the team spirit of melodic and tintinnabuli voices in one tone, orientated round a central musical observe.
Formulation
Right here’s the crux of Arvo Pärt’s paintings: the connection of one+1, melody and solidarity, is ordered now not via moment-to-moment possible choices, but by formulas intended to amplify the tone and construction of sacred texts.
A easy tintinnabuli formulation would possibly journey like this: If the melody rises 4 notes with 4 syllables of textual content, the notes of the tintinnabuli triad will apply underneath that layout with out overlapping. It helps and steers. Or if the melody falls 5 notes with 5 syllables of textual content, the notes of the tintinnabuli triad will trade above and beneath that layout to assemble a distinct musical texture – all arranged round symmetry.
Pärt continuously we could the choice of syllables in a guarantee, the space of a word or verse, and the tone of a language state his formulation. This is the reason Pärt’s music in English, with its many single-syllable phrases, consonant clusters and diphthongs, sounds a method. And this is the reason his music in Church Slavonic, the liturgical language for lots of Orthodox Christians, sounds differently.
Tintinnabuli is set simplicity and good looks. The sharp of Pärt’s paintings is how his formulation really feel just like the musical resonance of undying truths. In a 1978 interview with the journalist Ivalo Randalu, Nora Pärt recalled what her husband as soon as stated about tintinnabuli’s formulation: “I know a great secret, but I know it only through music, and I can only express it through music.”
Quietness
If this all turns out coldly formulaic, it isn’t. There’s a sensuousness to Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli tune that converses with listeners’ physically enjoy. Pärt’s formulation, born out of lengthy, prayerful classes with sacred texts, deal good looks within the heat and friction of relationships: melody and tintinnabuli, guarantee and the boundaries of language, sounds and hush.
“For me, ‘silent’ means the ‘nothing’ from which God created the world,” Pärt advised the Estonian musicologist Leo Normet in 1988. “Ideally, a silent pause is something sacred.”
Quietness is a ordinary trope in Pärt’s tune – certainly, the second one motion of his tintinnabuli masterpiece “Tabula rasa,” the identify paintings on the 1984 ECM Records release that introduced him to world consideration, is “Silentium.”
Any sounding tune isn’t serene, after all – and, in human phrases, hush is in large part metaphorical, since we can’t retirement tone into the hush of absolute 0 or a vacuum.
However Pärt’s hush is other. It’s non secular stillness communicated via his musical formulation however made smart throughout the motion of human performers. This can be a composer’s hush as he will get out of the way in which of a sacred textual content’s musicality to be in contact its fact. With out paradox, Pärt’s recognition lately might smartly rise from the hush of his tune.
