Arvo Part - Mein Weg

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Arvo Part Info

"Arvo Pärt was born in Paide, Estonia, a small town near Tallinn, the country's capital, on 11 September 1935. In 1944, Estonia saw the occupation of the Soviet Union, which would last for over 50 years, and would have a profound effect on his life and music...

...Living in the old Soviet Union, Pärt had little access to what was happening in contemporary Western music but, despite such isolation, the early 1960s in Estonia saw many new methods of composition being brought into use and Pärt was at the fore front. His Nekrolog was the first Estonian composition to employ serial technique. He continued with serialism through to the mid 60s in pieces such as the Symphony No. 1, Symphony No. 2 and Perpetuum Mobile, but ultimately tired of its rigours and moved on to experiment, in works such as Collage über BACH, with collage techniques.


Official judgement of Pärt's music veered between extremes, with certain works being praised and others, like the Credo of 1968, being banned. This would prove to be the last of his collage pieces and after its composition, Pärt chose to enter the first of several periods of contemplative silence, also using the time to study French and Franco-Flemish choral music from the 14th to 16th centuries: Machaut, Ockeghem, Obrecht, Josquin. At the very beginning of the 1970s, he wrote a few transitional compositions in the spirit of early European polyphony, like his Symphony No. 3 from 1971.

Pärt turned again to self-imposed silence, but re-emerged in 1976 after a transformation so radical as to make his previous music almost unrecognisable as that of the same composer. The technique he invented, or discovered, and to which he has remained loyal, practically without exception, he calls "tintinnabuli" (from the Latin, little bells), which he describes thus: "I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements —with one voice, two voices. I build with 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." The basic guiding principle behind tintinnabulation of composing two simultaneous voices as one line —one voice moving stepwise from and to a central pitch, first up then down, and the other sounding the notes of the triad— made its first public appearance in the short piano piece, Für Alina..."