Out of Place in the 20th Century: Thoughts on Arvo Pärt's Tintinnabuli Style

Author(s): Benjamin Skipp

Source: Tempo, Vol. 63, No. 249 (Jul., 2009), pp. 2-11
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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 Tempo 63 (249) 2-11 © 2009 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S0040298209000229 Printed in the United Kingdom

OUT OF PLACE IN THE 20TH

CENTURY! THOUGHTS ON ARVO
PART'S TINTINNABULI STYLE
I
! Benjamin Skipp
D
ö
o
Of all recent art music styles, few have relied upon technological devel-
%
opments for their composition, performance and recording to the same
degree as minimalism. In both the output of the principal composers
< of the more recent minimalist canon (namely in the objet trouvé works
of Reich and Adams,1 the film scores by Glass and Nyman2 as well as
through the reliance on electronic amplification common to them all)
and in the counter-cultural movements characterized by music whose
content is absolutely dependent on electronic media, repetitive styles
have been transformed. The sophistication of these procedures has
naturally resulted in a diminished sense of human labour within the
compositional process and, at times, the total loss of a composer's
authorial voice.3 The tintinnabuli music of Arvo Part stands out against
the general tendency of such repetitive-based composers to harness the
latest technology, to the extent that some commentators have baulked
at the term 'minimalist' as an appropriate category Robert Schwarz,
for example, believes 'neo-medievalist' to capture something of Part's
particular adoption of a supposedly pre-modern, non-technological
attitude, while Josiah Fisk opts for the 'new simplicity' to describe (neg-
atively) Part's monochromaticsm.4
It is an error, however, flatly to deride Part's works for being identi-
cal. Wolfgang Sandner, writing an explanation for the recording which
announced Part's entrance into the Western musical consciousness
in 1984, conceived the blend of individual characterization within an
over-arching generic style as the 'curious union of historical master-
craftsmanship and modern "gestus".'5 In this Brechtian formulation,
the individual works are conceived with the goal of presenting a single
attitude when received together, each resembling a single strand within
a thicker fabric. Similarity between works is essential to Part's broader
artistic aim, but it has meant that he is in constant danger of being per-
ceived as the dupe of powerful capitalist agents, mass-producing works
of identical value and character and sacrificing his originality to a tem-
plate sanctioned by an insidious recording industry. This viewpoint,
shaped by the discourse of musical modernity, expects the individual
work to be instantly distinct, inimitable and self-contained. As Sandner
suggested however, the 'master-craftsmanship' of Part is grasped most
strongly through continual contact with his total oeuvre.

1 For example Steve Reich, Three Tales (2001) and John Adams, On the Transmigration of Souh
(2002).
For example Philip Glass, The Hours (2002), dir. Stephen Daldry and Michael Nyman,
Wonderland (1999), dir. Michael Winterbottom.
See Simon Emmerson, ' "Losing Touch?": The Human Performer and Electronics', in Music,
Electronic Media and Cuture ed. Simon Emmerson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 194-217.
4 Robert K. Schwarz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon Press, 1999), p. 208 and Josiah Fisk, The
New Simplicity: The Music of Górecki, Tavener and Part', The Hudson Review, vol. 47, no. 3
(Autumn, 1994), pp. 394-412.

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 THOUGHTS ON ARVO PART'S TINTINNABULI STYLE 3

Further, it is only possible to perceive the individual character

inscribed into each work if it is compared to an over-arching stylistic
voice, in this instance, tintinnabuli. The term refers to the esoteric man-
ner of composition in which a work's entire content emerges from a
succession of chordal inversions fashioned from two principal voices.
The first voice, Τ (tintinnabuli voice), is restricted to the pitches of a
chosen and undeviating triad, while the second voice, M (modal voice),
is a freer, melodic presence which mostly moves conjunctly through the
degrees of a single mode. Part began his exploration of tintinnabuli in
the miniature FiirAlina, in which he restricted himself only to the two
voices. In Passio, arguably the zenith of the tintinnabuli style, Part
expanded the texture through the use of multiple Τ voices and contrary
motion M voices occurring simultaneously. Part's search for tintin-
nabuli originated from a desire to imitate the sensations brought about
by hearing the tolling of church bells, and he has commented to this
purpose that the relationship between the two voices 'can be likened to
the eternal dualism of body and spirit, earth and heaven'.6 It is for this
reason, so different to the cerebral logic of 12-tone music, that Hillier
portrays tintinnabuli as 'one of the forces displacing the hitherto central
language of serialism'.7
The occurrence of small deviations from the Part idiom is the vehi-
cle for clear qualitative judgements between works.8 A perception that
Part's music contains no difference is the result of an imperfect atten-
tion to the individual works, which is no doubt motivated, in part, by
scepticism towards the notion of any artist striving to create a single,
consistent style given the current compositional ethos.
As shall be explored below, this composerly decision is an uncomfort-
able discipline amidst the heady stimuli caused by late capitalism. Fiskis
most virulent (and inaccurate) in his attack on Part's perceived uniform-
ity of sound, as illustrated by his writing of Passio thus: 'all voices move
together in the same rhythm, and all the rhythms are built from the
same few basic cells . . . what comes out of your CD player on 'Scan' is
not much different from what comes out on 'Play'.'9 This blasé descrip-
tion, with its fatuous comparison, overlooks the subtlety of expression
which lies inherent within the music, an intricacy which the devotees of
early music have realized requires an insistent consideration in order to
perceive. Part's music, like pre- and early modern repertories, requires
a judgement with the provision already in place that differentiation
between works is of an alternative priority to that which exists in the
majority of Western art music.
Listening to Part's music is therefore an alien process to those experi-
ences encountered on a daily basis in the current period of technological
saturation, since it demands a particular contemplative mode of appre-
ciation which does not sit well with a soundbite culture. Jonathan
Kramer portrayed this society as one in which 'technology [had] created
a context of fragmentation, short attention spans leading to constant
discontinuities, and multiplicity'.10 This is suggestive of the greater

5 Wolfgang Sandner, liner note to Tabula Rasa (München: ECM, 1984).

6 In Hillier, Arvo Part, p. 96.
7 Hiller, Arvo Part, p. 2.
8 FiirAlina can be celebrated for its judicious use of an anomaly in the tintinnabuli voice where
a single note outside of the Β minor triad occurs two-thirds of the way through, acting (com-
paratively) as a moment of extreme dissonance. Part himself highlighted this moment with a
depiction of a flower above the staff, implying that it is the seconds of minute difference which
contain a work's meaning. See Hillier, Arvo Part, pp. 88-89 for a copy of the score of FiirAlina.
9 Fisk, 'The New Simplicity' , p. 403.
10 Jonathan D. Kramer, The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism , in Postmodern
Music /Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead and Josephe Auner (Routledge: New York,
2002), p. 19.

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4 TEMPO

aporia, identified by Max Weber, which is present as the result of an

ever-increasing rationalization of all aspects of social life, in which the
efficiency and appropriateness of technical means leads to a 'disenchant-
ment' of the world.11 In response to this state, Part's tintinnabuli works
are characterized by three elements which speak of a purposeful oppo-
sition to fetishism of the means: the absence of subject-matter drawn
from living memory, an eschewal of contemporary technology and the
adoption of what can be termed an 'orthodoxy' within his material.
In comparison to John Adams, for example, whose works have con-
sistently dealt with both particular historical moments (Nixon in China,
The Death of Klinghoffer) as well as addressing current questions of
American identity (My Father Knew Charles Ives, American Berserk), Part's
music can be heard as distinctly unaffected by themes and events monu-
mentalized through the media of the recent past. All of Part's texts are
drawn from a single ancient tradition, that of Judeo-Christianity and it
is impossible to segregate Part's disciplined tintinnabuli from his conver-
sion to the Orthodox Church while in Estonia. Extraordinary though it
appears, both his faith and his musical technique seems to be connected
to his weariness with a Soviet avant-garde as suggested by an interview
of 1968 for the Soviet magazine Sirpja Vasar ('Hammer and Sickle') in
which Part intimated that he was reconfiguring his own sense of the
modern as it presented itself in the modernist work Credo. In the inter-
view he indicated that 'progress' to his mind was not achieved through
the constant reformation of ideas in the paradigmatic manner of the
avant-garde. The composer's task was to embrace questions of a univer-
sal nature rather than worry about the immediate historical importance
of musical innovation:

I am not sure there could be progress in art... Many art objects of the past
appear to be more contemporary than our present art. How do we explain it?
The secret to its contemporaneity resides in the question: How thoroughly has
the author-composer perceived, not his own present, but the totality of life, its
joys, worries and mysteries? . . . Art has to deal with eternal questions, not just
sorting out the issues of today.12

After Credo, Part's works become more consistent in their intention to

engage with a Christian Orthodox subject, not solely through sympa-
thetic text setting but through the enabling of a spiritual experience in
order to attain answers to the 'eternal questions'.
The incongruous and thorough rejection of technology that charac-
terizes Part's compositions is at odds with the highly 'technocratized'
society in which his music has been commercially successful, leading to
a supposition that his works constitute a reactionary mode of escapism.
As Charles Jencks has observed in relation to architecture, the radical
spirit of modernism has always maintained an Overpowering faith in
industrial progressivism',13 arguably the same international attitude that
unites Adams with the European avant-garde. Yet Part's preference for
working in a media that excludes contemporary technology need not
be understood as a childish refusal to integrate himself into the mod-
ern world. Rather it is indicative of an attitude, equally noble, which is
resistant to the increasingly strong hand which technology enjoys with-
in the creative process. His compositional method, which he describes
in mystical terms as the enlargement of a 'discovered nucleus',14 differs

11 See Max Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), pp. 135-138.
12 Quoted in Hillier, Arvo Part, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 65.
13 Charles Jencks, What is Postmodernism? (Chichester: Academy Editions, 1996), p. 23.
14 Geoff Smith, 'Sources of Invention: An Interview with Arvo Part', The Musical Times, vol.
140 (Autumn, 1999), p. 19.

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 THOUGHTS ON ARVO PART'S TINTINNABULI STYLE 5

greatly to that of Steve Reich and John Adams who rely on advanced
synthesisers and playback at every stage of creativity This is not to deny
the craftsmanship apparent in the Americans' work, but only to suggest
that the absence of technology in Part's music has contributed to a focus
on nuanced differentiation between works, in contrast to the dramatic
juxtaposition of styles and genres within the oeuvres of those more
technologically-minded composers.
The shifts in style that have consistently characterized Reich's output
are an instructive example. These significant changes in Reich's compo-
sitional technique have been dependent upon - and arguably the result
of - his continual interest in technology. In both his more experimen-
tal music (such as Pendulum Music, the tape pieces and, more recently
the mixed-media productions of The Cave and Three Tales) through to
his less immediately avant-garde works Different Trains and the 'coun-
terpoint' series, recording technology and sound manipulation have
facilitated new avenues of musical inventiveness. This gamut of works
represents more than the traditional attempt to master different genres,
but is illustrative of a form of musical pluralism which employs record-
ed, manipulated and electronically-created sounds to undermine the
very concept of genre and thus the notion of a 'composer-style'.15 Part's
music desists from putting forward a similar aesthetic challenge; on the
contrary, the unified style of his output revivifies an older, pre-modern
argument because of his resoundingly traditional materials.
Not only traditional, but arguably ascetic. His development of a sys-
tematic musical grammar, namely tintinnabuli, has resulted in a corpus
of works whose intent is inextricable with an exercise of self-discipline.
The strictness of Part's palate is the third way, in addition to his rejection
of technology and contemporary subject matter, in which his music
is distinct from the music of the contemporary avant-garde currently
composing in Europe and North America. There is a strong sense of
iconoclasm embodied by this tradition (or, as Harold Bloom perceived
in relation to poetry, an oedipal desire16) to desecrate the musical ten-
ets of technique established by canonic predecessors. Part himself felt
a similar urge in the music of his first period but, by FiirAlina ( 1 976), this
had been replaced by an idiom free of patricidal angst. Tintinnabuli is,
in essence, harmonically simple, undeviating in terms of its modal rela-
tionships and could not be classed as 'experimental',17 with the caveat
that this kind of discipline is itself radical in comparison to the reigning
compositional paradigm of difference and development as it emerged
in the middle of the 20th century. This paradigm, which in music can be
understood as the effect of such experimental figures as John Cage or
Cornelius Cardew, was to expand the number of compositional choices
available beyond any governing system. Their aleatoric procedures were
the means for challenging the serialist hegemony, even if the manner of
achieving an aleatoric work of music, as through Cage's use of Í Ching,
was highly organized. In union with similar advances in science and
technology, the latter stages of the 20th century have witnessed the con-
tinuation of this approach within music, easily accepting the association
of 'experimentation' with 'progress.' At the same time, the embracing

15 See Marina Lobanova, Musical Style and Genre: History and Modernity (Amsterdam: Harwood
Academic Publishers, 2000). Particularly relevant here is chapter v, The Problem of Musical
Genre: Baroque, Classicism and the Twentieth Century,' pp. 171-199.
16 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York; Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997).
17 My understanding of experimental is borrowed from the definition propounded in Michael
Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), pp. 1-30.

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6 TEMPO

of 'noise' as a valid musical experience chimes with the ongoing democ-

ratization of culture endemic to postmodernism.18 Together, these
tendencies have contributed to plurality not only within works them-
selves, but to a climate of music composition generally leading one
commentator to its characterization as less a jostling of rival alliances
than an increasing turmoil of separate voices/19
Part considers his music to be a personal stand against the 'turmoil'
of multiplicity. This realization mirrored his purposeful removal from
what can be reasonably termed a conventional modernist approach of
alienating procedures, rejecting the 'sand pit game'20 of Darmstadt for
a pared-down musical orthodoxy. Namely, these alienating techniques
were the 'devices' of collage and musical quotation imperative to his
brand of poly sty lism before 1976. The instigation of a new style after
this point reflected a desire to leave the 'critical tropes' which were prob-
lematized by his modernist works, tropes which can be collated under
his attitude towards a European 'Enlightenment' musical past. There
appears to be a definite separation between works composed before
1976, which address questions of historicity and canonicity through
a form of self-conscious detachment, and those composed after 1976
which refrain from issuing challenges to their own musical heritage.
The procedures of tintinnabuli, stringently conceived and adhered to,
were a necessary system which allowed Part to shift his focus away from
issues of compositional choice and towards themes extraneous to the
material. Only by developing an a priori musical grammar could Part
begin to address that aspect of his existence which had overtaken musi-
cal concerns - his faith in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
The, as yet, irreversible change to a style of unified works which
occurred in 1976 can be understood as a significant aesthetic conver-
sion in compositional approach, and one that has been crucial in the
reception of his style after the exodus from Estonia in 1984. As a term,
'unified' has become laden with both technical and ideological mean-
ings which require qualification in this context. In various critiques of
analytical method, 'unity' stands for a set of values which have become
a prioritized set of criteria in canon formation. Those values are noto-
riously in a tautological relationship with the music; identifying unity
within a work serves as a form of legitimatization, only because estima-
ble works within the canon validate the notion of unity. For this reason,
perhaps, unity has been dismissed as the self-serving tool of analysts and
critical thinkers keen to regulate a particular canon.21 Significantly, the
qualities most associated with this canon - notated, empirical and fear-
ful of the inexplicable - are firmly reliant on Enlightenment precepts.
The paradox in Part's development is that the 'aesthetic conversion'
to unity was symptomatic of a break, rather than a realignment with his
cultural attachment to modernity, as might have been expected. His is a
peculiar version of unity, which stands outside of the Western tradition.
This has been perceived most pertinently in a concise essay by David
Clarke, whose own critique of Part leads him to view the simplified
unity of his newer style as a challenge to modernism, the final chapter
of the Enlightenment narrative.22 While Clarke views the tintinnabuli
works as a more 'authentic' compositional voice than Part's earlier for-

18 Jencks, What is Postmodernism, p. 27.

19 Paul Griffiths, Modern Music: A Concise History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), p. 191 .
Smith, Sources or Invention , p. 19.
21 See Fred Everett Maus, 'Concepts of Musical Unity', in Rethinking Music ed. Nicholas Cook
and Mark Everist, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 171-192.
22 David Clarke, 'Parting Glances: Aesthetic Solace or Act of Complicity?' The Musical Times,
vol. 134, no. 1810, (December, 1993), pp. 680-684.

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 THOUGHTS ON ARVO PART'S TINTINNABULI STYLE 7

ays into collage, he warns that Tar from signifying the resolution of the
conflicts of modernity, this music is in fact symptomatic of a deepening
crisis',23 precisely because of the music's palatable nature. In this judge-
ment Clarke is unable to extricate himself fully from the mindset which
modernism has engendered, one which takes for granted that music
should point towards some sort of dialectical thinking and never 'pro-
vide the comfort of a closed and harmonious other world' through its
harmonious sameness.24
There are two aspects of Part's tintinnabuli music that contribute
to the seemingly unified quality. Firstly they are works which are self-
contained, that is, they do not engage in citation of music of the past.
Certainly they are semantically referential through text or an allusive
title, and often have a dramatic purpose through drawing on Christian
subjects and the liturgy. Because of this tendency they could hardly be
considered as abstract. However, one of the most notable features of
Part's tintinnabuli style when compared to his earlier compositions is
the absence of musical quotation, and it is this aspect which provides a
groundwork of unity. This is not to claim that Part's works do not make
reference to each other, since his tintinnabuli style has only become rec-
ognizable because of its reappearance across multiple works; but it is
true that the constellation of Part's music is becoming a closed and uni-
fied body because he has stepped back from incorporating music from
other sources. This is indicative of a broader change in Part's outlook
towards the interaction of music and history. The play of found musi-
cal objects was a defining aspect of Part's modernism and rooted him
within a specific tradition of eclecticism. The move to unified, self-refer-
ential music highlights his departure from this tradition.
Secondly, the term 'unified' in relation to Part's compositions refers
to his espousal of 'non-dialectical' forms. While his tintinnabuli works
do display moments of contrast in both the rhythmic organization
and between certain lines of counterpoint, there is rarely a sense of
formal transformation at a deeper level.25 The one possible, although
significant, exception is Passio, whose expansive conclusion mirrors the
summation of the Passion narrative. Even this work could hardly be
interpreted as ideological, however, as the sense of being harmonically
pulled towards an end-point is deliberately absent throughout the work;
the final phrase cannot represent an apotheosis as it is effectively a free-
standing section, unrelated tonally to that which has preceded it in the
same manner as a religious doxology. In a work such as Passio, where
there are no differentiated formal sections, the tension and synthesis
which is inherent to classical forms cannot function.
This contrasts significantly with his earlier work Credo, described
by Paul Hillier as the 'pivotal work in Part's oeuvre'.26 Credo of 1968
articulates the conclusion of Part's interest in collage and heterogene-
ity within single movements, while tentatively suggesting the first move
towards the homogenized tintinnabuli works for which he has become
most widely recognised. As a fabric of multiple distinct historical styles
- the Baroque, the serial and the aleatory - it represents the culmina-
tion of Part's fascination with the idea of 'the past' as a topic. This is
pre-figured in the predecessor closest to Credo, Collage sur B-A-C-H
(1964), the second movement of which can be understood as the most

23 Clarke, 'Parting Glances', p. 680.

M Clarke, Parting Glances , p. 683.
25 Typically Part will utilize the device of mensuration canon to enable rhythmic contrast, as
in Cantus in Memonam Benjamin Britten. See Clarke, 'Parting Glances', p. 680.
26 Hillier, Arvo Part, p. 58.

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8 TEMPO

voluble statement of Part's disciple-like relationship to the Baroque

master. Although the dimensions of Credo are that much greater than
the earlier sarabande, they share a reliance on the effect of alternation
achieved through the quotation of Bach's music and the playing of his
own. In Collage surB-A-C-H, the sarabande's small dimension, which is
dependent upon the aria from Bach's English Suite in D minor in addi-
tion to its intimate use of strings, oboe and harpsichord, results in an
intensely condensed juxtaposition of diatonic homophony and atonal
heterophony. Credo fully explores the same power of contrast between
tonality, free atonality and a stricter serialism through the play of vastly
alternating musical parameters.27
The 'dialectical'28 property of Credo - its interplay between the
oppositions of order and disorder, rationality and chaos, the group
and the individual - links it historically with the Passion narrative. This
is apparent most audibly in Part's ritualized treatment of the chorus,
which takes on the role of the crowd through an increasingly strident
sequence of un-notated shouts. The deliberate shock of this moment is
in homage to Bach's equally explosive portrayal of the Jewish turba in his
Passion settings. Part himself, through the numerous allusions to Bach,
seems to be pointing towards this specific example of Gospel tension,
and it is this that prompts Hillier to identify a psychological content,
linked to the Christian narrative of redemption, which is missing in the
earlier collage works. He writes that 'in Credo the elements of conflict
are more violent than ever, but for the first time we encounter moments
of tonality with an enduring quality; what had seemed catastrophe is
now redeemed through catharsis in music of a newly calm intensity'.29
The choice of text suggests a purposeful dialogue between the notion
of legal recompense as it was understood in Jewish society and Christ's
overturning of that idea in his portrayal of the Heavenly kingdom.30 It
is, therefore, Part's first theological work because the 'dialectic between
the textual juxtaposition and explicit opposition of Old and New
Testament teaching infuses the whole piece'.31
It remains ambiguous, however, whether Credo represents as sincere
a conversion to the Christian message as do his consequent tintinnab-
uli works. The opening gesture seemingly represents an affirmation
of faith in the figure of Christ, but it can be understood equally as an
assertion in the worldly conception of beauty as it has historically been
portrayed or mediated by music. Significantly Part takes the first prel-
ude of Bach's Das Wohltempenrte Clavier as his paradigm, quoting almost
in full the entire prelude in C major after the first statement ('Credo in
Jesum Christum'). Bach's first prelude, so often treated as a pedagogical
model and ingrained into the general consciousness of Western musi-
cians, has become a shorthand for the mathematical perfection of equal
temperament. It is as potent a symbol as 'In the Beginning', which initi-
ates both Genesis and the Gospel of St John. Set against the powerful
chords of the C major opening, Part can be heard to be committing an

27 To be capable of doing so, Part required an extended type of form and instrumentation,
both of which were conceived for choral-symphonic forces. These include a full comple-
ment of wind, brass, percussion, four-part choir and piano. Within these orchestral sections
the extreme tessitura of the work is reflected by the use of almost the entire range of the
piano's keyboard, by the employment of double piccolo and double bass clarinet to empha-
size the limits of acoustic instrumental pitch and through extensive percussion.
28 On Part and the dialectic of Credo, see Peter Quinn, Out with the Old and in with the New:
Arvo Part's Credo', Tempo No. 211 (January 2001), pp. 15-21.
29 Hillier, Arvo Part, p. 59.
30 The translation reads: Ί believe in Jesus Christ. You have heard it said: an eye for an eye and a
tooth for tooth; But I say unto you: do not resist injustice'.
31 Quinn, Out with the Old', Tempo, p. 16.

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 THOUGHTS ON ARVO PART'S TINTINNABULI STYLE 9

act of sacrilegious collage as a form of commentary. The 'god' which

Part is deifying is not only that embodied by Jesus Christ, but the figure
of Bach as he has been immortalized through the canon of modernity,
and it is essential that the serial episodes of Credo are defeated by the
superimposed historical object. Part's subjection of his own artistic per-
sona to the totem of Bach a 'is transmitted by the very familiarity of the
Bachmoder.32
Peter Quinn believes this manner of quotation functions as a 'mask',
covering Part's true compositional voice in comparison with his later
tintinnabuli works, whose absence of collage and serial procedures
allows an unfettered channel between the composer and his audience.
The opening of Credo signalled Part's adherence to two icons of Western
culture, Christ and Bach, but in a manner which required the latter to
become an intermediary. It is not until the tintinnabuli works that the
effects of his conversion are felt in a fully-developed aesthetic manner,
so that the self-conscious decision of alloying his style with Bach's is
made redundant. The sense of conviction - although not necessarily of
belief - portrayed in Credo is achieved through the coupling of a reli-
gious text with the musical processes which serve as illustration of the
text while clearly not in a manner which could be described as word-
painting. There remains a sense, however, that the collage nature of the
work, and the self-conscious reference to Bach, prevents the total aban-
donment of the self which can be discerned in minimalist works. After
Credo, Part's works become more consistent in their intention to engage
with a Chrisitan Orthodox subject, not solely through sympathetic text
setting, but through the enabling of direct spiritual experience.
Examining Fratres, a representative work of Part's tintinnabuli period
from 1977, proves this to be the case. The work is an example of pas-
sacaglia, the total of nine statements of an eight-bar phrase containing
two parallel modal voices a tenth apart and a single tintinnabuli voice
on the triad of A minor. A constant presence of the tintinnabuli triad
and the non-deviating harmonization of his chosen mode results in the
impossibility of modulation, echoed in the melodic material which is
purposefully devoid of highly-characterized elements. Combined,
these features emphasise the austerity of the work's essentially repeti-
tive framework. Moments of differentiation between the recurring
statements exist in the cello figuration, but these differences are purely
of gesture; their harmonic content is identical to that created between
the modal and tintinnabuli voices in the piano.
Unlike his earlier collage work, Part is here aiming to avoid an inter-
action with the social forms of the musical past. According to David
Clarke, his 'tintinnabuli style - with its rejection of atonality and other
modernist complexities - thus becomes a cloister in which to immure
himself against the conflict, confusion and fragmentation of both
the social conditions of the outside world, and the language of the
symbolic artefacts created in response to them'.33 Indebted to the tradi-
tion of the passacaglia, but unlike the previous historically significant
examples which have emerged in every musical style-period, it does not
contribute to an aggrandizement of the form, nor reveal any extended
technical brilliance in the overlapping of phrases. Rather than aiming to
problematize the simplicity of the form through, for example, obscur-
ing the regularity of phrase-lengths, Part draws attention to its repetitive

32 Quinn, Out with the Old', Tempo, p. 20.

33 See David Clarke, review of Fratres, Music and Letters, vol. 75, (November, 1994), pp. 652-
658.

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10 TEMPO

framework as a means of achieving a wilful artlessness. There are no

moments when the composer reveals himself through material which
is foreign to the process established by the initial passacaglia phrases.
In the same way that Steve Reich claims that some of his works strictly
obey a process once it has been initiated, so there is a similar sense that
Fratres is following a pre-ordained pattern both in the repeated state-
ments and within the melodic patterns.34
As an embodiment of the unity discussed above, Fratres represents
an austere parallel to Eastern Orthodoxy. The idea of ritual becomes
increasingly powerful to Part and it appears that Fratres contains the ele-
ments of fixity and non-fixity which characterize ritual action within a
religious order. In this way, it is possible that the subject of the work is
about transformation, but in an entirely different manner to the kind of
transformation experienced within dialectical works. There is no sense
of dramatic conflict followed by synthesis. The work occupies a ritu-
alized space, presenting a fixed framework of an action repeated nine
times at the same time as enabling those taking part to enter various
new spiritual states. In this way it is most closely resembled by the pro-
cessional character of certain rituals within the Christian liturgy35
Part's quest to discover a suitable musical technique that expressed
his religious conviction led him to displace Bach from being his central
historical concern. If the works up until Credo are viewed as his attempt
to engage with the issue of Bach's supremacy within the canon of
Western art music, then tintinnabuli can be understood as a response to
values essentially missing from that particular narrative of modernity.
This was, namely, the gradual waning of the metaphysical as the focal
point for artistic experience. Certainly Bach himself was consistent in
his dedications of his works to the glory of God, but the purely formal
ingenuity of his counterpoint marked the beginning of a trajectory
characterized by increasing concern with rationality - which, by the late
20th century, had added technological sophistication as a barometer of
a composer's objective faculties. The attraction for Part of the earliest
kinds of music, particularly examples of plainsong, resided within their
indissoluble relationship with the numinous. Here the figure of the
composer, worldly and despoiled, was constantly involved in a process
of self-erasure. The shaping of plainsong was less an individual activ-
ity and more a communal response to repeated recitations of religious
texts. In the years between Credo and Für Alina, Part was absorbed by
extensive studies of theory and practice of plainsong, and its 'ornamen-
tation' through polyphony. Part deliberately appropriated the methods
of creation behind the earliest examples of polyphony as the substance
of his own style. For example the two-part nature of organum, which
is based on the interplay of the principal (fixed) and organal (extempo-
rarized) voices, re-emerges in the relationship between the tintinnabuli
voice (restricted to the triad) and melodic voice (freer to express the text).
In the best of Part's works, the two states of freedom and fixity appear
to be finely balanced, even though in reality the whole work has been
carefully plotted to produce these results.

34 This is noted by Clarke, review of Fratres, p. 653.

The title of Fratres seems to accord with this interpretation. Translated as the archaic word
'brethren', it gives a sense of the particular concept of communication that ritual facilitates
within a community. It also recalls more specifically the Orate Fratres which represented
the vocalized dialogue between the celebrant and the congregation before the Secret in the
Latin Mass. See John Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the
Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 119

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 THOUGHTS ON ARVO PART'S TINTINNABULI STYLE 11

It is somewhat paradoxical of Part that his eschewal of technology,

outlined above, crucially does not extend to objections to the produc-
tion of recordings of his works. (It is equally ironic that Part should
propagate his self-portrait as the mystic carefully moulding each suc-
cessive chord, in the image of a fairy-tale druid at work on his potions,
through the medium of digital video.36) The growth of Part's reputa-
tion since he left Estonia has been dependent upon the success of
tintinnabuli, and certain works - such as Spiegel im Spiegel, Fratres and
In Memonam Benjamin Britten - have become ubiquitous in a particular
genre of documentary-drama as an emotive soundtrack.37 Theological
considerations of Part's works as religious objects or practices therefore
seem disingenuous, because of their popularity and appropriation as
film and television soundtracks. This has been the natural consequence
of a wide-scale interest with minimal music beyond the boundary of
academia but also because the absence of moments of dramatic con-
tent in Part's music makes it an ideally non-distractive accompaniment
for certain kinds of visual imagery.
How seriously can the claim be received, then, that tintinnabuli's evo-
cation of a pre-technological age is necessary for its religious purpose to
be fulfilled? According to Hillier, tintinnabuli aimed to provide a coun-
ter-balance of values in a cultural market-place of excessive speed and
variation:

A culture that attempts to live without the sustaining power of myth is a culture
that is not whole, that has no connection with the past. And it is in this manner
that we may understand Part's sense of purpose: as an attempt to reconstitute
art within a sense of past and future time, to fly in the face of the disconnected-
ness of postmodernism and seize a cultural meta-narrative from time so distant,
yet so potently realized that it has the force of new life.38

Interpreting Part's reformation of style is consequently problematic,

as his compositional attitude does not easily accord with either narra-
tive, of modernism or postmodernism, as they are most commonly
recognised in Europe and North America. The move away from a style
which incorporated cacophony and structure in a dialectical fashion
- that which was pejoratively termed the 'formalism' of his symphonic
style - suggests that he had completed his own modernist project. It
reflects a creative tiredness with the aims of a constantly innovative and
socially-responsive avant-garde, while simultaneously rebuffing the 'dis-
connectedness of postmodernism'. At the heart of what can be viewed
as the Enlightenment musical meta-narrative is the idea of a continu-
ally developing relationship, or tension, between form and content. As
has already been suggested, it is this meta-narrative, wrapped up with
the issues of canon formation that originated in the 18th century and
particularly in the figure of Bach, which played the formative role in
Part's primary grasp of musical creation. An alternative meta-narra-
tive, which Hillier traces in Part's work since 1976, is left unidentified
beyond the reference to earlier plainsong practices, but it is clear that
the qualities which are associated with the Enlightenment meta-narra-
tive are not those perceived in tintinnabuli.

36 I refer to the film Arvo Part: 24 Preludes for a Fugue (2002), dir. Dorian Supin.
37 For example the use of Speidel im Spiegel in Wit (2001) dir. Mike Nichols, and In Memonam
Benjamin Britten in Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) dir. Michael Moore.
38 Hillier, Arvo Part, p. 74.

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