![]() The power of the "tintinnabulation" he discovered comes from its combination of ascetic rigour and the apparent simplicity of its materials. To dismiss it as cliched and sentimental holy minimalism is simply wrong. This little piece is the seed from which the rest of Pärt's musical life has grown: in the space of just a couple of years, Pärt composed the pieces that are still among his most popular today, including Fratres, the concerto for two violins, Tabula Rasa, Summa, and the Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten.Īnd here's where it's easy to be fooled by preconceptions about Pärt's work. ![]() In 1976 he succeded in his quest, and the result sounds as if it had existed all along, music of the "little bells", the so-called "tintinnabuli", which you hear for the first time in this two-and-a-half minute piano miniature, Für Alina. His Third Symphony, from 1971, is the only piece that dates from this transitional period, an attempt to fuse elements of the traditions Pärt was drawn to: Gregorian chant, harmonic simplicity, and the spiritual explorations into his Russian Orthodox faith he undertook at the same time. He went into a self-imposed creative exile for the next eight years, trying to find a way to resolve the creative conflict that he had opened up in Credo. And at its first performance, the piece was a lightning rod for protest against the regime, both because of its musical extremity and its religious conviction.īut what happened next was something that the censors, and Pärt himself, could hardly have predicted. The piece only avoided censure by the communists because its conductor, Neeme Järvi, didn't show the score to the Estonian composers' union before its premiere. Credo was an attempt to symbolise his frustration with what had become, for him, the dry, desiccated, "children's games" of the avant garde, a world of purity represented by tonality and a quotation from Bach, and a setting of a religious text. Pärt's modernist credentials were cemented in his First and Second symphonies, but a crisis came in 1968 with his Credo, a work in which at least three worlds collide. He wrote Estonia's first ever serial piece, Nekrolog, in 1960, whose dissonance and expressionist intensity that will shock you if you know Pärt only from his later music! At that time, he experimented with collage, with neo-classicism, and with aggressive dissonance, in ways that were bound to alienate him from the Soviet authorities but which began to bring him respect in the west. ![]() Growing up in communist Estonia, Pärt found himself at odds with the regime on pretty well every aesthetic and spiritual level. In fact, the style and technique of Pärt's music – at least, his most familiar music, the pieces he's composed since the late 1970s, which the turning point of his musical language – has a surprising pre-history. But there's more to the man and his work than that immediate sensory reaction. It's no wonder that music like Fratres or Spiegel im Spiegel or Tabula Rasa, are so beloved of documentary makers and film producers for moments of heightened emotion: the sudden atmosphere of stillness and meditation that Pärt's music instantly communicates is one of its most appealing qualities. The problem with Pärt is that his music has become, in a sense, a victim of its own success. Reading this on mobile? Click here to view ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |