I

could compare my music to white light, which contains all colors.

Only a prism can divide the colors and make them appear;
this prism could be the spirit of the listener.
Arvo Prt

White Light
The truly important composers of an era produce music that only they can bring into the world;
and that they can be recognized by their styles is no empty phrase, but can be experienced by
listening. Thus in an era that admits of no overall style, only personal idioms, it would probably
be true to say: the more highly developed a style, the more it excludes. An unmistakable idiom
is the acoustic side of these artists' pre-eminent position; the other is the unseen but
extraordinarily well-developed sense of responsibility it imposes on them.
That is why composing - if practiced on the level of necessity - is a serious undertaking, for it is
an existential one. This becomes most palpable in the critical phase of a work, when a basic
change of direction, perhaps even a total about turn, becomes necessary. Uncertainty and
doubt, reticence and scruples, all manner of inward and outward inhibitions battle with the joys
of discovering that something new and fundamental is emerging, that the foundations are being
laid for a poetics which must be robust enough to create a whole new body of work. Up to the
very last, the question remains: is the time ripe for the birth of the New? Looking back at his
development, Arvo Prt used a musical metaphor to describe this stage in his work and his
personal state on the threshold to that crucial step into the public eye: "I was like an upbeat
suspended in the air, waiting for the phrase to start."
In itself, an upbeat is no more than a harbinger, a preparation of what is to come. The first
seminal note Prt notated in 1976, after long years of preparation, is the sustained octave in the
low bass at the start of the piano piece Fr Alina. Above it sounds, for the first time, the
connection of triadic and melodic notes that characterizes the "tintinnabuli style". Fr Alina was

one of seven works performed in Tallinn in 1976, at a concert premiering the initial results of
the new compositional style.
It is to this period of new departures, to the magic of these new beginnings, that the artistic
concept of the present recording hearkens back, and it does so through transformation. Prt
establishes a link here between two works embodying, on a higher level, the fundamental traits
of the "tintinnabuli style" - creating music by concentrating on an indispensable core of material.
Now, three interpretations of the duet Spiegel im Spiegel, written in 1978, become formal pillars
positioned before, between and after the two solo renderings of Fr Alina.
As the title Spiegel im Spiegel is a precise description of what happens in the piece, we would do
well to call the compositional means to mind. The part for the stringed instrument is itself
already constructed as a mirror: the phrases it plays - each one successively adding one more
note of the scale - always return, by steps or jumps, to the mirror axis, the central A. The piano
mirrors the violin part twice over with pure F-major triads, once at close range above it, but also
with a layer of alternately higher and lower pitches recreating on a large scale the narrower
tonal space traversed by the violin. The piano also confirms the melody notes of the violin with
parallel thirds and octaves. All of the mirror images, which allow three further voices to unfold
from the core voice, are stringently developed; not a single note is arbitrary. Thus the
masterfully serene interpretations of Vladimir Spivakov (to whom the work is dedicated) with
Sergej Bezrodny and Dietmar Schwalke with Alexander Maker transfigure the familiar major
tonality into a new, ethereal world. And yet, thanks to the wonderful unpredictability of its
methodical development, the music brings to mind the saying that stringency is the source of
true joy.
Although closely related to Spiegel im Spiegel through the "tintinnabuli style", when directly
juxtaposed Fr Alina exhibits strong dissimilarities. The more one listens for the essential
principle of Prt's poetics that even the most minimal means suffice to effect a difference -
the more these dissimilarities are thrown into relief. That major turns to minor and a duo
becomes a solo are only of secondary significance; the key distinction in the overall concept is

the divergent way of dealing with time. Unlike the stringent Spiegel im Spiegel, Fr Alina has no
fixed metre or tempo. In conjunction with the marking "Calm, exalted, listening to one's inner
self", the sounds of indeterminate length literally cry out for a free, individual temporal
conception. As a further factor, the upper voice is freely composed, though within strict
parameters. An additional element of indeterminacy is introduced by the fact that the pedal
point struck at the beginning combines with the other sounds to produce humming overtones
and shadowy resonances in the piano. The flexible scope of this terse piano piece, with duration
of barely two minutes, encourages an improvisational approach. Alexander Maker emphasizes
this sense of freedom, his style of playing seemingly transcending time. The way the pianist
"listens to his inner self" strikes the listener as a spontaneous approach to the existential
autonomy of the sonorities themselves. For the present CD, Prt has selected two phases of
Maker's several-hour "improvisation" and inserted them between the three interpretations of
Spiegel im Spiegel.
With the prism image that precedes this text, Prt offers us an aid to understanding his entire
body of works in the "tintinnabuli style": since Fr Alina, his scores have been irradiated with
the white light of the pure triad. But here, in this journey to the origins of the style, to perhaps
its purest form, its meaning is illuminated in a special way. A system of mirror reflections serves
to present the same thing in an ever-new light and in its abundance of colors. From this
perspective, Spiegel im Spiegel is not merely a link in a formal series but itself functions as a
musical prism, enabling the colors of Fr Alina to emerge and shine forth.
An optical prism is a simple, regular construction of transparent, light-refracting material, which
fulfills its function when two of its surfaces are inclined towards one another at a specific angle.
"A prism acting on white light is the analyzing instrument that separates its constituent rays into
their original classes," writes Arthur Zajonc* "If the first prism is followed by a second, the
'colorific rays' can be brought together again and so re-create white light."

Perhaps Prt's words can be understood in this sense, too: perhaps the sympathetic spirit of the
listener is the prism which enables the colors the interpreters have given the music, but above
all the silence that envelops it, to be transformed into white light again.

Hermann Conen
Translation: Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart

*Arthur Zajonc: Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind. Oxford University
Press, 1995, p. 84.