Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt (born September 11, 1935, Paide, Estonia) is an Estonian composer who developed a style based on the slow modulation of sounds such as those produced by bells and pure voice tones, a technique reminiscent of the medieval Notre-Dame school and the sacred music of Eastern Orthodoxy; Pärt is a devout Orthodox Christian. His major works include the violin concerto Tabula Rasa (1977), Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten (1977), Magnificat-Antiphones (1988), The Beatitudes (1991), and Lamentate (first performed 2003). His medieval liturgical sound won him a wide audience in the West during the late 1990s.

Pärt showed an early interest in music. In 1958, after finishing requisite military service, he enrolled at the music conservatory in Tallinn, Estonia. From 1958 to 1967 he worked for the music division of Estonian Radio. He won recognition in eastern Europe by taking first place in the All-Union Young Composers’ Competition for an early popular work, Meie aed (1959; “Our Garden”), a cantata for children’s choir and orchestra, and also for the oratorio Maailma samm (1960; “The World’s Stride”).

Developing an interest in the contemporary 12-tone system (an early 20th-century composing method generally credited to Arnold Schoenberg), he experimented with it in his own striking composition Nekrolog (1960), the first 12-tone piece written in Estonia. Pärt graduated from the conservatory in 1963. Soon afterward he composed his Symphony No. 1 (1964) and Symphony No. 2 (1966), the latter including quotations from the music of other composers. He also used this collage technique in Credo (1968), a work for piano, mixed chorus, and orchestra. Banned in the Soviet Union because of its religious text, Credo signaled the end of Pärt’s experimentation with the 12-tone system.

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Composers & Their Music

Eight years of intensive music study followed. Pärt composed little but film scores during this time, immersing himself in the examination of such forms as the Gregorian chant and Orthodox liturgical music. The first sign of his new musical direction was his Symphony No. 3 (1971), one of the few works he produced during his “years of silence.” But it was with the release of his works for strings during the late 1970s—especially Fratres (1977)—that his compositions began to take on a distinctly Pärtian sound.

Pärt’s first work written in this new, austere style was a piano piece titled Für Alina (1976), the work in which he discovered the triad series, which he made his “simple, little guiding rule.” Describing the sound of the triad as like that of pealing bells, he called his new method of composition “tintinnabuli style.” With it he produced a simple, intense, and ravishing sound that seemed to communicate directly to a new generation in search of spiritual connection. It did not, however, win the approval of the authorities, and in 1980 Pärt moved with his family to Vienna; later he settled in West Berlin.

Pärt’s style was described as “holy minimalism” by one reviewer and as neo-Baroque by others. In 1995 the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, on their first North American tour, featured Pärt’s works in concert. Their program’s particular draw was Pärt’s Te Deum, which they had recorded (1993) on the ECM label and which had topped the classical music charts.

In 1996 Pärt was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He continued to write orchestral and choral works, many of which were recorded. The music of his later period was characterized by slow tempi, long stretches of silence, medieval tonal and rhythmic devices, and the controlled use of dissonance, among other features. In 2009 his fourth symphony, Los Angeles, premiered, and the following year the Arvo Pärt Centre, home to the composer’s archives, was established in Harjumaa, Estonia. A new building opened in 2018, expanding the centre’s programming to include concerts and educational activities. In 2014 Pärt received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for music.

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