Silence is commonly assumed to be the absence of sound, a lack, or an empty void. However, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s work suggests that silence is more generative and elusive, a mystery that is neither merely absence nor presence, implying that it may be more than either term can encapsulate. Mississippi Records‘ recent release of Silentium presents a compelling invitation to experience the transformative power of Pärt‘s work through a sampling of four pieces of his composition. They are collected here as a means to experience what is called the “holy minimalism” of his work that paradoxically evokes a sense of fullness within its simplicity.
There is no living classical composer whose works are more frequently performed than Pärt’s. He is the closest thing the world of classical music has to a rock star. Indeed, those who can be counted as within his fandom include Björk, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Thom Yorke, and Michael Stipe. Much like Pärt himself, these artists are unintimidated by the seeming contradictions of shadows and illumination, structure and freedom, and sorrow and joy, seeing them as artistically fecund when one side of the scale is not subsumed to the other.
Much has been written about the theoretical underpinnings of Pärt’s “holy minimalism”, what Pärt refers to as “tintinnabulation”. The term is derived from the Latin to indicate the tolling of little bells, and it speaks to Pärt’s distinctive use of two voices that are neither completely in conversation nor in conflict within his compositions. One might suggest that they are in a form of prayer, arising both from Pärt’s departure from modernist restrictions of the Cold War Soviet Union and watered by the streams of Eastern Orthodoxy, which Pärt converted to in the early 1970s.
As explained by Tom Service in the excellent podcast primer, “How to listen to…Arvo Pärt”, the tintinnabuli style consists of a melodic voice that unfurls in several notes as Pärt composes, twinned with a tintinnabuli voice, a shadow voice restricted to just three notes of a “harmonic triad”. It is the distinct and elusive interplay of these voices within Pärt’s compositions that so many find compelling. They are the play between freedom and fixity, liberty and structure. Pärt described the tintinnabuli project to virtuoso violinist Viktoria Mullova as an attempt at a “mathematics of love”.
Even this phrasing suggests the mystical quality of Pärt’s art—the promise of precision and formula in interplay with the ephemeral and ungraspable. A technical grasp of music theory is not a prerequisite for appreciating Pärt’s work. Instead, it could be argued that it is preferable to experience listening to Pärt’s work first before analyzing it. However, such an analysis doesn’t explain Pärt as much as it feeds back into a deeper listening.
The collection curated by Mississippi Records on Silentium does not introduce new material from Arvo Pärt, but instead collects four interpretations of Pärt’s compositions. Each is part of other collected works, but presented here in a way that can both serve as an introduction for the novice to Pärt’s voice and style and as a set of provocative interpretations upon which Pärt fans can meditate.
The album consists of four pieces, the first of which is “Vater Unser (Our Father)”, based on the Lord’s Prayer in German and written originally for a boy soprano and piano. On Silentium, “Vater Unser” is arranged for trombone and strings, with the trombone taking the boy soprano role in the original scoring. This interplay between the strings and trombone mirrors the mystery respectively of the weight of earthiness and grounding in conversation with weightlessness and ascension, the breath of the spirit. Unlike some baroque versions of the Lord’s Prayer, Pärt’s composition never collapses into an untethered transcendence. The music suggests that prayer is found in this unresolvable interplay.
This track is followed by “Variationen zür Gesundung von Arinuschka (Variations for the Healing of Arinuschka)”, a piece for solo piano that was composed in 1977 for Pärt’s daughter as she was recuperating from appendix surgery. Here, pianist Marcel Worms’ solo version is sparse and teases out the realization that paucity co-exists with abundance. There is a playfulness in the piece that only emerges well into the austere tintinnabuli, suggestive of the mystery of a wholeness in a move beyond the simple notes.
The remainder of the record consists of two of Arvo Pärt’s most recognizable works, both of which were on the notable ECM collection from 1984, Tabula Rasa. The first of these is “Fratres for Strings and Percussion”. This Hungarian State Opera Orchestra recording is striking in the ominous, industrial sound of the bass percussion as the strings maintain a tense, ongoing hum. It is an anxious noise from which the violins and cello plead and yearn in this style of two voices. It is a hypnotic dance that fades into silence, an ending that is also a beginning, a death that is also birth. It also thematically prepares the listener for the final piece.
The title track, “Silentium”, closes out this collection with a bold interpretation by Boston chamber orchestra A Far Cry. They take the second movement of Pärt’s most famous concerto, “Tabula Rasa”, and slow it down to almost half its original speed. It is an interpretative move that perhaps highlights the mystery of silence as musically generative. Twentieth-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich famously suggested that what we mean when we use the term “God” is “the ground of being”. It is not being itself nor a being among beings. If so, it could be named and grasped. Instead, it is what gives rise to being but can never be contained within being’s categories.
Silence plays a shadowy, creative role here. Pärt’s composition has been credited for its palliative properties by a Scottish study of its use with AIDS and cancer patients in hospice care. This interpretive recording by A Far Cry underscores how “Silentium” gestures towards liminal space, beckoning without defining.
This carefully curated collection by Mississippi Records serves as a fine introduction to Arvo Pärt’s style for the novice, while also offering some novel takes for established fans. The album is a fine testament to one of the most important figures in music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.