Beyond B A C H - Arvo Pärt and the Minimalist Answer

Arvo Pärt
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(http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Pic-Lib-BIG/Part-Arvo-08.jpg)

A great image of Arvo Pärt, unfolding Bach's sonatas! Pärt is maybe the most obvious example of the profound link between Musica Nova and Baroque. Actually his passion goes much deeper, to the Plainsong and Gregorian Chant., to that very moment when Polyphony started to show its first buds.

Arvo Pärt composed in 1994 a Concerto piccolo über B-A-C-H for trumpet, string orchestra, harpsichord and piano: his answer to the challenge to show the way beyond B-A-C-H. I wanted badly to find a recording, it was impossible. I would have seen how a composer belonging to the Minimalist school was dialoging with Bach; or how could he emphasize the way Bach would sound whether wrapped in Minimalism.

What I found was another work of Arvo Pärt: Collage über BACH - Sarabande. Maybe some answers to the above questions would be found in this work.

(video by Stravinsky91)

(The B A C H motif)

(Arvo Pärt)

Arvo Pärt again

Somewhere on the southern edge of the Midwest States lies an endless expanse of rolling desert shimmering in the heat haze, with nothing to see for miles all around and with the silence broken only by the sound of a car radio playing what seems to be the music of the spheres. Such calm and beautiful music might almost have been written for this desert landscape.
I was driving through the desert in Utah. Tabula Rasa was being played on the radio. Suddenly I sensed a connection between the music and the loneliness of the landscape. The music is somehow very religious and basic.

(Gil Shaham)

My music was always been written after I had long been silent in the most literal sense of the word. When I speak of silence, I mean the nothingness out of which God created the world. If you approach silence with love, music will result.

(Arvo Pärt)

Fratres: a quickly played solo violin introduction – then the violin is starting its repetitive patterns on a rhythm kept by percussion. Bach’s Chaconne comes in mind. Then an interlude, violin sustained by string orchestra – the orchestra gives a large, generous background – the violin is played rapidly. Again Chaconne-like. Again violin and orchestra. Again percussion is signaling its presence. Again the orchestra, largely, generously, the violin is commenting it.

Tabula Rasa is a small concert for two violins, string orchestra and prepared piano. The prepared piano is giving a bell sound. The violins are sounding strangely, strange sound and strange score, seemingly in perpetual ascending. Actually one violin accompanies the other one that is trying an elegy. And actually there is a perfect balance between violins, orchestra and prepared piano. Eventually you realize that the main speaker is here the prepared piano: Tabula Rasa studies the fading of each sound from the piano; the violins and orchestra give the accompaniment and their accompanying score is ascending to the stars, only companions for the desert.

Symphony No. 3, performed by Göteborgs Symfoniker (conductor Neeme Järvi); the first part has some Middle Age flavor, you close your eyes and imagine a castle and a tournoi.



(Arvo Pärt)

Minimalist Music: Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt, Teiji Ito, James Tenney, Conlon Nancarrow: four composers very different one another, sharing the honesty, the courage to remain themselves, to resist success, to search only for their own truth.

















Arvo Pärt was born in Estonia in 1935.

By the sixties he was composing serial music (scandalizing the Soviet censors, of curse). Only he had the feeling that serialism was not his way. He was looking for something different in music, some basic simple structures of truth. So, he took a radical decision: to give up composition and to search firstly for his path.

He spent the next fifteen years by studying Renaissance music, Gregorian chant, Russian liturgical music, trying to find himself there, at the roots.

He started again to compose by 1977: Summa, Fratres, Magnificat, the Seven Magnificat Antiphons, the Beatitudes. And Spiegel im Spiegel, Festina Lente. And many other works of religious music, choral music, chamber music - it is now, listening to his works that I realize what Minimalism means in music - one note beautifully played is enough; and then silence, to meditate that lonely note. And the quiet development of music, with few and seldom notes, and long silences filled with music.

Minimalism does not mean only a movement of the sixties, it's much more. The boy in Andrey Rublyov, building the bell, he was a Minimalist, too. Malevich, giving us the black rectangle, he was a Minimalist, too. Minimalism is to give just a line, just a sound, and to fill the rest with silence, and beyond the line, beyond the sound, you will find your own self.

The image of Pärt, listening to the sound of the bell... And I think at the words of Tenney, each single sound is an event.

Just listen to Spiegel im Spiegel, it's pure beauty!

• Arvo Pärt again
• Beyond B A C H - Arvo Pärt and the Minimalist Answer
  

(Musica Nova)