How Arvo Pärt revolutionised classical music: “You can kill people with sound”
For the uninitiated, the world of classical music can often seem a needlessly complex landscape. Over the years, countless composers have come and gone, desperate to outdo each other and achieve levels of musical greatness afforded only to a few. While the advent of jazz, rock, and pop might have lessened the relevance of classical music for most people within the modern age, the composers that make up the genre have never stopped pushing music forward through innovation. Perhaps the greatest example of this lies within the unique compositions of Arvo Pärt.
Hailing from the small town of Paide in Estonia, Pärt’s childhood was storied by musical experimentation. After the middle register of the Pärt family’s home piano was unusable, the young Arvo was forced to create music using only the top and bottom notes on the instrument, providing the foundations for the fearless innovation he would come to perfect in adulthood. These early years clearly had an effect on Arvo, as he began writing his own compositions during the late 1940s when he was only a teenager.
During his youth, Pärt was exposed to a wide range of musical experiences, including playing percussion in the army band during his military service in the 1950s and working as a sound engineer for the broadcaster Eesti Rahvusringhääling in Estonia.
Establishing himself among the country’s most promising young composers, Pärt was often criticised for his use of eclectic influences. Fittingly, though, the composer never particularly took note of the criticism, going so far as to create his own compositional style, tintinnabuli.
The unique and minimalistic style first appeared in the 1976 piano composition Für Alina and was influenced by Pärt’s fascination with chant music. Featuring a mellow, somewhat meditative quality that went on to characterise the composer’s style as a whole, the minimalism of tintinnabuli completely revolutionised the field of classical music composition.
Admittedly, minimalism is a strange way of describing the music of Pärt – after all, few people would be able to create compositions of such quality and deceptive complexity. His music is the product of a lifelong obsession with the intricacies behind composition and sound. His character is perhaps best summarised in the quote, “You can kill people with sound. And if you can kill, then maybe there is also the sound that is the opposite of killing. And the distance between these two points is very big. And you are free – you can choose. In art, everything is possible, but everything is not necessary.”
Seemingly, the pioneering innovation of Pärt paid off, with the Estonian composer hailed as one of the greatest figures in all of contemporary classical music. In fact, the composer has reached such a level of success and critical acclaim that, in 2018, a foundation – Arvo Pärt Centre – was set up to maintain his personal archive in Laulasmaa. For a genre that is so often viewed as old-fashioned or archaic, Pärt managed to drag classical composition firmly into the modern age.
