Less is More
On Sunday 17 September our church will become the venue for the UK premier of a new work by Arvo Pärt, his Greater Antiphones for string orchestra.
He is currently the most performed living composer in the world. He developed his unique and distinctive style of music in the mid 1970ies after a long silence. Behind the iron curtain prior to his silence he had become a well-known composer of what was then ultra-modern music (his first two symphonies). His silence was part enforced and part self-imposed because he had had a religious conversion experience. His work ‘credo’, had alerted the atheist Soviet authorities to his Christian conversion and he was forbidden to compose.
He was converted in the remote and beautiful monastery of Pühtitsa in northeast Estonia, which is full of mystery and long, simply sung services according to the Christian Orthodox tradition. Pärt never says much, but asked later about what he had discovered during his years of silence, he replied: “I have discovered it is enough when a single note is played beautifully”, thus was born his unique form of what I would like to call ‘spiritual minimalism’, but what he himself called ‘tintinabolism’.
Behind the iron curtain in a small Nordic country that very few people had ever heard of, Pärt was writing music that was never allowed to be performed by the occupying Soviet authorities. The piece ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’, sometimes played during Communion here, is one of the early works in this style. Because of his Jewish wife Nora he was forced to go into exile, living in Vienna and Berlin, slowly becoming famous.
His personal humility and deep prayerfulness and his refusal to speak in public other than through his music has stayed with him to this day, now happily living in his beloved and now free and independent Estonia. Pärt’s music stands at the crossing point between faith and music and between popular and classical music; over the years his music has drawn many young people back into the Christian faith and spiritual practice.
Bernhard Schunemann
3 September 2017
