In the spring of 1976, Latvian architecture student Hardijs Lediņš organized a music festival at the Riga Polytechnic Institute. The venue was an abandoned Anglican church, where Lediņš held a disco. The festival's repertoire ranged from the edgy avant-garde works of Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage to Terry Riley's hypnotically repetitive “In C,” which first premiered in San Francisco in 1964 and ushered in musical minimalism. In this unusual environment, an extraordinary new sound emerged, combining the tendencies of minimalism with the sacred formulas of Gregorian chant. Estonian composer Arvo Pärt presented Sarah Was Ninety Years Old, a rigorous ritual using percussion and wordless voices. Scholar Kevin K. Carnes writes in his 2021 book Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the Soviet Underground of the 1970s that nonconformist Latvians embraced Pärt's music as “an uncompromising kind of spiritual practice.”
The meeting of Riley and Pärt at a Latvian disco was not as unlikely as it might seem. Of course, these two composers had little in common, except that they were born in 1935. Riley was a West Coast counterculture pioneer whose ecstatically looping patterns influenced psychedelic rock. Pärt was a committed individualist who emerged from the Soviet cultural system and experienced its limitations at every turn. But Californians and Estonians agreed on a radical rethinking of the fundamentals. Both focused on ancient scales and harmonies, took them out of their usual context and turned them into objects of contemplation. The resulting music demanded new ways of playing and new ways of listening.
Nearly fifty years later, minimalism has become a cliché, its techniques used endlessly in film and television soundtracks. Yet Riley and Pärt, who celebrate their ninetieth birthday this year, remain intriguing figures, distinguished by the tenacity with which they adhere to their youthful convictions. Riley remains active as a composer and improviser, collaborating with performers six or seven decades his junior. Pärt, who has apparently retired from creative activity, offers results that are far more complex and controversial than his monastic public image suggests. Recent holiday concerts dedicated to the two have become a place not of veneration but of restless rediscovery. Both retain the ability to make the familiar strange.
Pärt receives a lot of attention. There were two events dedicated to Pärt at Carnegie Hall in October, with more to come later in the season. The Estonian Festival Orchestra, the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of the Estonian Philharmonic under the direction of Paavo Järvi and Tõnu Kaljuste came from Estonia to honor the memory of their compatriot. Along with them came Alar Karis, the President of Estonia, who wrote on social networks: “Arvo Pärt’s music unites people beyond the boundaries of language and faith.” What struck me was that Pärt is probably his country's best-known representative on the world stage—an unusual status for a modern composer.
It would be easy to highlight the crowd-friendly side of Pärt's work – the hushed, soaring harmonies of “Fratres”, “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten” and “Tabula Rasa”, any of which, when played at medium volume on a home stereo, envelop the listener in a cocoon of soothing melancholy. Jarvi presented these three works at Carnegie, but in a way that emphasized their inner tension and hidden fury. The dynamics of “Cantus” range from triple piano to triple forte; Yarvi made the first border inaudible, and the second – intuitive, bordering on violence. In “Tabula Rasa,” Midori and the young Estonian virtuoso Hans Christian Aavik brought manic intensity to the solo violin parts, hinting at Paganini’s devilish spirit. The audience burst into applause after the first part. The vast silence of the second movement, with its ghostly arpeggios sounding from the prepared piano, was even more powerful in contrast.
Equally important, Järvi includes music from Pärt's early period, before 1976, when he had yet to find his minimalist voice and was experimenting with a riotous array of avant-garde techniques. In 1963's Perpetual Motion, strict serialist procedures create the impression of barely controlled bedlam. The 1968 song “Credo” contrasts the C major prelude from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (Book I) with a swell of orchestral chaos and a varied chorus singing and shouting. Similar apocalyptic sentiments characterize the contemporary scores of Alfred Schnittke, Shostakovich's opposite successor. Schnittke supported Pärt's turn to a seemingly simpler, religiously oriented style and played prepared piano in several early performances of “Tabula Rasa”. At Carnegie, this role was taken on by Nico Muhly, one of countless young composers who felt Pärt's influence.
