The Seed of Reflection
Arvo Pärt turned 85 yesterday. In terms of reach, no other living composer can match his rock star status. Few are as devout and downright monastic. Steve Reich once pointed out this paradox: He’s completely out of step with the zeitgeist, and yet he’s enormously popular.
Pärt’s music is used so often in film, advertising and dance that it has seeped into our collective consciousness. On a previous 9-11 anniversary, you might have seen this ineffably tender choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, filmed one sunrise on the 57th floor of WTC4, high above Ground Zero. That piece is called Spiegel im Spiegel: a mirror inside a mirror.
The reflecting-pond quality of Pärt’s music means that it can patiently bear all sorts of attempts to fill it with gestures. But it really yields its magic when listened to it in private contemplation – with nothing reflected in the mirror except the self.
I first encountered Pärt’s music as a teenager, in the summer after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was a participant at a youth music festival in Scotland where one of the visiting groups was a chamber ensemble from Estonia.
In their concert, they played his Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten. I remember noting the composer’s last name with curiosity, surprised by the appearance of an umlaut in an East Bloc language.
Most unexpected was the impact of the Cantus itself, a dirge of forbidding beauty with pealing bells and thick-flowing strings that seeped down a minor scale with the cumulative mass and languorous ferocity of lava. I was struck by the music’s austere grandeur. Pärt’s style bore no comparison to that of any other contemporary composer I had encountered. With its monochrome wash of a single tonality the piece was transparently accessible, yet filled with taut dissonances, many sustained for uncomfortable stretches of time.
Not long after, a friend introduced me to the album Tabula Rasa, which included the Cantus along with other instrumental works — equally gorgeous, equally forbidding. The music seemed to require a whole new way of listening, a simultaneous detachment from thought and clarity of focus that, perhaps for the first time, promised to still the chatter of my teenage mind.
All these years later, I recognize in my encounter with Pärt the seed for Beginner’s Ear.
Around the same time I fell in love with the paintings of Mark Rothko, and felt something of the same magnetic stillness and awe gazing at the huge fields of richly textured color. In an homage to Tabula Rasa in the Wall Street Journal many years later, I wrote
Pärt’s music has often been compared to Russian icons with their flat, shimmering surfaces, which resist any attempt to place them in time or space. But if Tabula Rasa has a visual equivalent, it is in the color block paintings of Mark Rothko. Rothko once wrote that he favored “flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth” and recommended that viewers stand inches away from his paintings in order to instill a sense of awe and “transcendence of the individual.” Seen that way, his juxtaposed fields of solid color appear to stretch out into space, much as Pärt’s static use of tonality distorts all sense of time. By focusing on a single color at a time, Rothko was able to reveal its inherent texture, mystery and emotion. Like Tabula Rasa, the paintings present a blank slate, teeming with life.
Take a 6-minute masterclass in listening with this charming video where Pärt talks about Für Alina, an ultra-spare piece. He has a beautiful line about how it’s a quality of concentration that elevates a blade of grass to a flower. (Then watch it again only to take in the beauty of his hands moving over the keyboard.)
And if you find a quiet quarter of an hour, gaze into this playlist with piano works by Pärt and Valentin Silvestrov, whose music seems to promise the same reflective clarity, but then pulls the listener into a hall of mirrors where the ghosts of the past play tricks on the ear.
As always, please let me know how this newsletter lands with you (just hit reply) and do forward it to a friend if you know someone who could use a dose of mindfulness and music on the weekend.
Corinna