Arvo Pärt

From serialism to the hypnotic tintinnabuli, the 90-year-old Estonian's world has shifted radically over the years,

- Paul Hillier

Arvo Pärt’s music has a sound which appears hauntingly simple, though it stirs complex emotions. Much of it is written for voices singing sacred texts, but there are also instrumental works composed in the same way, and works that combine voices and instruments together. This music is now well known, and communicates directly with audiences around the world. But the origins of that sound emerged in the 1970s from a composer who had started, so to speak, at the other end.

Pärt spent most of his childhood in the little town of Rakvere, Estonian SSR, and then studied in Tallinn, where his musical skills were quickly recognised. Already as a student he found work at Estonian Radio as a recording engineer, and composed music for stage and films. His earliest compositions involved the piano and children’s music, and in 1959 a cantata for children’s choir and orchestra, Meie Aed (Our Garden), won an all-State competition. However, in 1961 Pärt was censured for the ‘Western formalism’ of Nekrolog, an orchestral work that espoused serial technique. Throughout the 1960s, he wrote a series of modernist works which are disturbing to listen to: despairing, nihilistic and yet impressive enough in terms of skill. He also utilised the music of JS Bach, which he used with quotations, illusions and parodies.

This process reached a climax in 1968. That year of student demonstrations across Europe, Soviet tanks rolling into Prague and the escalating war in Vietnam was also a year of crisis for Pärt. He wrote a large work for choir, piano and orchestra, called Credo, in which he used serial techniques to deconstruct Bach’s C Major Prelude from the