Arvo Pärt: Faithing The Music

He won’t talk to the press. I have his home phone number but am forbidden to use it. If this is intended to make me feel like I’ve just been given a hotline to his Holiness, then it works. Arvo Pärt is always mentioned in the same breath as the other recently emerged, ‘religious-flavoured’ composers (Taverner, MacMillan, Gavin Bryars, as well as the classical industry’s current dream ticket, Górecki), but the actual words used of Pärt usually begin and end there. Almost all his records are released through a fortunate and very close relationship with Manfred Eicher’s ECM label; they sell in the same voluminous (by the classical business’s standards) quantities as other New Music bestsellers, yet he’s still by no means a truly household name. To me he’s always resembled the classic image of the fairytale hermit; the kind of wizened old figure itinerant princes would encounter at the roadside, granting wishes or spouting curses. So what sets Pärt apart, what musical qualities and values allow him to retain his distanced but privileged position?

There’s a firm protective aura surrounding Pärt. It’s impossible for the curious to get near him, especially now that he’s ensconced somewhere working on a major new work, Adam’s Lament, which early reports indicate will be a two-hour oratorio that forsakes his obsession with Latin liturgical texts for a Russian Orthodox sacred tract. A new CD, released in October by ECM (ECM 1505), completes the recorded cycle of evangelical settings from the last ten years with Te Deum (1985) and Magnificat (1989), and brings us further up to date by the inclusion of Te Berliner Messe (1990), a celebratory mass written ten years after Berlin became his new home in the West. This last piece is entirely in contrast to the devastating grief of his Miserere (1989), written for the vocal Hilliard Ensemble and released as ECM 1430. The hushed and fractured syllables clotted with silence, followed by electric guitar-boosted, tintinnabulous climaxes that comprise the Miserere created a mood I’ve never otherwise encountered at classical performances when it was played at the beginning of 92 in King’s Chapel in Cambridge. Surrounded by weeping members of the audience at the end, you felt the possibility that composed music might still be able to cause the kind of legendary extreme reactions unimaginable in today’s sedate concertgoers (hysterical bawling at Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony in Stalin’s Moscow. Fisticuffs and consternation at Stravinsky, Varèse etc). But the Berlin Mass, while retaining Pärt’s trademark solemnity, also has a newer confidence, a surer motion free of the explosive doubting passages discernible in earlier works. Although you couldn’t call it mellifluous, it sounds as though he’s found harmony between ancient music’s and modernism’s pluralist Babel. This is the one, if any, to cross him over to Taverner-whetted appetites.

“I take music”, wrote George Steiner in Real Presences, “to be the naming of the naming of life.” Steiner’s logic privileges music above literature/language; the artforms that claim to form close parallels with lived experience. Music is prior to all this, singing the need to make art’s engagement in the first place.
If this in turn implies that the deepest, most purely ‘musical’ music’s are those that enact or seem to exist in a timeframe before language established the parameters of our cultural experience, Steiner’s book represents one of the first and most explicit attempts to escape from deconstruction’s nihilist critique; postmodernism’s primordial supermarket. If a society’s music – or its reaction to it – is one of the most telling and immediately obvious gauges of how it is faring, then we could take the vigorous support of the successful new breed of emphatically tonal, sombrely meditative composers as a positive sign that, at least spiritually (as far it’s possible still to be so), those who’ve been affected by this music are prepared to invest a newfound optimism again. But it can’t be as simple as this: the quality of music is inevitably altered by being filtered through the marketing process. Any record retailer will tell you that the rush on Górecki’s Third Symphony began well before any of the advertising ‘hype’ got underway; it genuinely was the extraordinary way the music sounded that began to drive people crazy when they heard it over the airwaves. Yet after the words about the music start to rush in, the listening experience is irrevocably altered. How easy it is to respond appropriately to the awesome, shattered melodic embers of its third movement if you know that you’ve just parted cash for “Britain’s best-selling classical CD”? More to the point, with this kind of ‘success’, and with so many critical hammers poised to fall on his subsequent endeavours, this can’t fail to influence Górecki to some extent when he next picks up his ink and manuscript. (There are signs that he does give little mind to, and is pretty amused by, the mercenary attentions of the West. At an Elektra Nonesuch press conference earlier this year during his visit to the UK, he doodled a couple of staves of musical notation to illustrate a point. After setting it aside, he made a show of tearing it up after hacks lunged for the foolscap, greedy for a saleable memento.)

David James, The Hilliard Ensemble’s mercurial countertenor, has been as far inside this music as anyone is likely to get. Having witnessed Pärt’s work taking shape in front of him, he’s well placed to comment about the delicacy of the composer’s position in relation to modern performance practices, and is revealing about the composer’s working methods. The recording session photographs of Pärt in the booklet of his new CD show the composer sidling along the darkened aisles of the ancient church at Lohjaa, Finland, pointing out details of the 14th century frescoes or listening from behind pillars, hand concealing much of his face. David James agrees. “That’s a fair reflection of what it’s like, actually. He walks around different parts of the church, listening, then suddenly he hears the right timbre and goes ‘That’s what I want.’ Arvo is very involved, very attentive. During the recording sessions the music is still evolving, and his approach to writing is like having a baby: you bring it into the world and try to guide it along certain paths until the moment when suddenly it leaves home. Your influence is no more, you’ve done as much as you can until it disappears and you have to let go.”