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A guide to Arvo Prt's music

This week, Tom Service looks at a deeply spiritual composer who found his own musical language
with a love of every note at its heart
Monday 18 June 2012 17.10BST

Arvo Prt is one of those composers you might think you know: a reclusive,
extravagantly bearded Estonian who's ensconced in a world of so-called "holy
minimalism" a reverie of simplicity that luxuriates in the pure sounds of
"tintinnabulatory" tonality, which sounds a corrective (for some) and sentimental (for
others) note of archaism in a world of chaotic modernity. (Don't worry; I'll come back to
the whole "tintinnabulation" thing.)
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The problem with Prt is that his music has become, in a sense, a victim of its own
success. It's no wonder that music like Fratres or Spiegel im Spiegel or Tabula Rasa, are
so beloved of documentary makers and film producers for moments of heightened
emotion: the sudden atmosphere of stillness and meditation that Prt's music instantly
communicates is one of its most appealing qualities. But there's more to the man and his
work than that immediate sensory reaction. In fact, the style and technique of Prt's
music at least, his most familiar music, the pieces he's composed since the late 1970s,
which the turning point of his musical language has a surprising pre-history.
Growing up in communist Estonia, Prt found himself at odds with the regime on pretty
well every aesthetic and spiritual level. He wrote Estonia's first ever serial piece,
Nekrolog, in 1960, whose dissonance and expressionist intensity that will shock you if
you know Prt only from his later music! At that time, he experimented with collage,
with neo-classicism, and with aggressive dissonance, in ways that were bound to
alienate him from the Soviet authorities but which began to bring him respect in the
west. Prt's modernist credentials were cemented in his First and Second symphonies,
but a crisis came in 1968 with his Credo, a work in which at least three worlds collide.
Credo was an attempt to symbolise his frustration with what had become, for him, the
dry, desiccated, "children's games" of the avant garde, a world of purity represented by
tonality and a quotation from Bach, and a setting of a religious text. The piece only
avoided censure by the communists because its conductor, Neeme Jrvi, didn't show the
score to the Estonian composers' union before its premiere. And at its first performance,
the piece was a lightning rod for protest against the regime, both because of its musical
extremity and its religious conviction.
But what happened next was something that the censors, and Prt himself, could hardly
have predicted. He went into a self-imposed creative exile for the next eight years, trying
to find a way to resolve the creative conflict that he had opened up in Credo. His Third
Symphony, from 1971, is the only piece that dates from this transitional period, an
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attempt to fuse elements of the traditions Prt was drawn to: Gregorian chant, harmonic
simplicity, and the spiritual explorations into his Russian Orthodox faith he undertook at
the same time.
In 1976 he succeded in his quest, and the result sounds as if it had existed all along,
music of the "little bells", the so-called "tintinnabuli", which you hear for the first time in
this two-and-a-half minute piano miniature, Fr Alina. This little piece is the seed from
which the rest of Prt's musical life has grown: in the space of just a couple of years, Prt
composed the pieces that are still among his most popular today, including Fratres, the
concerto for two violins, Tabula Rasa, Summa, and the Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin
Britten.
And here's where it's easy to be fooled by preconceptions about Prt's work. To dismiss it
as cliched and sentimental holy minimalism is simply wrong. The power of the
"tintinnabulation" he discovered comes from its combination of ascetic rigour and the
apparent simplicity of its materials. And there are mysteries here. Prt designed strict
rules to control how the harmonic voices move with the melodic lines in his music,
diktats which are as strict as serialism; ironically, given his rejection of his previous
avant garde obsessions, the success of his new musical language is dependent on
precisely the objectivity of thinking that serial composition demands. That austerity of
process makes Prt's tintinnabulation a new use of tonality, even a new kind of tonality,
and it explains why his music sounds simultaneously ancient and modern, and why it
embodies a genuine expressivity rather than a rehearsal of second-hand conventions.
The success of Prt's work the repertory of choral works he has composed over the last
four decades, the instrumental works, even the new symphony he composed in 2008
is, I think, much more than simple popular acclaim for a composer who uses some
familiar chords. Prt told me that what he wants his music to express is "love for every
note", and in turn, communicate the spiritual power that he sees as music's essential
purpose. Prt is too modest to say that he has achieved that, but for the listeners who
love his music, it's an irrefutable truth.

Five key links

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Arvo Prt interviewed by Bjrk
Fratres
Fr Alina
Berliner Messe
Symphony No 3
More blogposts

Topics
Classical music
Arvo Prt
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