YOUTHFUL CONVICTIONS

At ninety, Arvo Pärt and Terry Riley still sound vital.

- BY ALEX ROSS

For both men, minimalism allowed a radical reinvention of fundamentals.

In the spring of 1976, a Latvian architecture student named Hardijs Lediņš organized a music festival at the Riga Polytechnic Institute. The venue was a disused Anglican church where Lediņš had been hosting a discothèque. The festival's repertory ranged from thorny avant-garde creations by Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage to Terry Riley's mesmerically repetitive "In C," which had first been heard in San Francisco in 1964 and had more or less launched musical minimalism. Within this offbeat milieu, there arose an extraordinary new sound, one that combined minimalist tendencies with the sacred formulas of Gregorian chant. The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt presented a work titled "Sarah Was Ninety Years Old"—an austere ritual involving percussion and wordless voices. The scholar Kevin C. Karnes, in his 2021 book, "Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground," writes that nonconformist Latvians embraced Pärt's music as an "uncompromising sort of spiritual practice."

The conjunction of Riley and Pärt at a Latvian discothèque was not as unlikely as it might seem. To be sure, the two composers had little in common, beyond being born in 1935. Riley was a pioneer of West Coast counterculture, whose ecstatically looping patterns had influenced psychedelic rock. Pärt was a devout individualist who had emerged from the Soviet cultural system and tested its strictures at every turn. But the Californian and the Estonian converged on a radical reinvention of fundamentals. Both zeroed in on age-old scales and harmonies, extracted them from their usual contexts, and transformed them into objects of contemplation. The resulting music required new ways of playing and new ways of listening.