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Arvo P\u00e4rt, the pre-eminent religious composer of our time, was born in 1935 in Estonia, before its Soviet occupation. His music suggests the contemplative devotion and purity of Gregorian plainchant and Renaissance church chorale, though it could only have been written today, being at once archaic and abstract-modern. With its sense of stasis and light, the music reflects the immensity of the Baltic landscape and Estonia\u2019s own forested plains. Under communism, P\u00e4rt fell foul of the Soviet censors as his music defied official atheism. His work is shaped by his Eastern Orthodox faith; it is a form of prayer.<\/p>\n
P\u00e4rt, who turned 90 on 11 September, has retired from public life and ceased to compose. He can still occasionally be glimpsed at the Arvo P\u00e4rt Centre, a beautiful glass-encased building that opened in 2018 on the edge of a pine forest close to Tallinn, Estonia\u2019s capital. The composer\u2019s manuscript scores, hand-written musical diaries and library of liturgical texts are archived there. There is a 150-seat concert hall, with a discreet gift shop and caf\u00e9 attached. P\u00e4rt lives nearby in a house facing the Gulf of Finland. He is the world\u2019s most-performed living composer after John Williams but is said to care little for his fame.<\/p>\n
P\u00e4rt is sometimes described as a \u201choly minimalist\u201d owing to the supposed kinship between his music and the repetitive drone syncopations of American minimalist composers such as Steve Reich and John Adams. But P\u00e4rt\u2019s music, unlike theirs, carries a sense of pain, lamentation and sorrow; listeners find a spirit-lifting beauty in its sparse, stilled quality and minor-key tonalities. Its slow-moving atmospherics spring from a monastical absorption in the word of God and is not (as P\u00e4rt\u2019s detractors sometimes claim) a New Age ambient sound wash. \u201cModern man has plenty to wail about,\u201d P\u00e4rt says, who should know.<\/p>\n
One of his greatest compositions, the bracingly solemn Passio <\/em>(1982), is set to words from the Passion in John\u2019s gospel. With its mood of penitence and rue, the 70-minute work for choir and orchestra considers human fallibility and imperfection, and issues from the stern spirit of Lent. It contains more than 200 bars of silence which are intended to open a space in the listener for contemplation of the divine. In some ways, the music was ahead of its time; its unhurried tempo serves as an antidote to the clamour of viral videos and online shrillness. Non-classical musicians who cite P\u00e4rt as an influence \u2013 Sigur R\u00f3s, Sunn O))), Aphex Twin, Bj\u00f6rk, Swans, Floating Points, Lupe Fiasco, Nick Cave \u2013 perceive a numinous solace in his music.<\/p>\n P\u00e4rt first came to notice in the West in 1977 with Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten<\/em>, written for strings and tolling tubular bell. With its overlapping sheets of sound, this mesmeric six-minute work developed P\u00e4rt\u2019s now famous technique of tintinnabuli<\/em> (Latin for \u201clittle bells\u201d), where melody acquires a steady-state, bell-like resonance. The compositional method is not to be taken literally \u2013 it is a poetical metaphor \u2013 but P\u00e4rt\u2019s best-known works since the mid-1970s, whether neo-Baroque instrumental scores such as Fratres <\/em>or large-scale choral works like Berliner Messe<\/em>, were composed with a doleful sound of bells in mind.<\/p>\n P\u00e4rt was raised in Rakvere in the east of Estonia by his Lutheran mother and Orthodox stepfather. Symphonies by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff were broadcast daily from loudspeakers in the market square, and the teenage P\u00e4rt bicycled repeatedly round just to listen. During his two years as a Soviet Army conscript in the mid-1950s he played percussion in his regiment\u2019s orchestra but was discharged owing to ill health. In 1957 he enrolled at the Tallinn Conservatory to study under the Estonian composer Heino Eller, whose Polish-Jewish wife, the violinist Anna Kremer, had been murdered in Estonia during the Nazi occupation. The hushed intensity of the sonatas and symphonic poems Eller wrote in Anna\u2019s memory deeply impressed P\u00e4rt.<\/p>\n Throughout the 1960s, P\u00e4rt worked in Soviet-occupied Tallinn as a sound engineer for Estonian Radio and won a Soviet state composition prize for a Young Pioneer children\u2019s cantata. Much of his work from this time was an exercise in what his Soviet composer friend Alfred Schnittke called \u201cpolystylism\u201d: a mash-up of influences. P\u00e4rt\u2019s use of collage and atonal asperities after Arnold Schoenberg alienated his conservative-minded Soviet censors, but earned him the respect of avant-garde composers in the West.<\/p>\n