In the spring of 1976, a Latvian architecture student named Hardijs Lediņš organized a music festival at the Riga Polytechnic Institute. The venue was a disused Anglican church where Lediņš had been hosting a discothèque. The festival’s repertory ranged from thorny avant-garde creations by Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage to Terry Riley’s mesmerically repetitive “In C,” which had first been heard in San Francisco in 1964 and had more or less launched musical minimalism. Within this offbeat milieu, there arose an extraordinary new sound, one that combined minimalist tendencies with the sacred formulas of Gregorian chant. The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt presented a work titled “Sarah Was Ninety Years Old”—an austere ritual involving percussion and wordless voices. The scholar Kevin C. Karnes, in his 2021 book, “Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground,” writes that nonconformist Latvians embraced Pärt’s music as an “uncompromising sort of spiritual practice.”
The conjunction of Riley and Pärt at a Latvian discothèque was not as unlikely as it might seem. To be sure, the two composers had little in common, beyond being born in 1935. Riley was a pioneer of West Coast counterculture, whose ecstatically looping patterns had influenced psychedelic rock. Pärt was a devout individualist who had emerged from the Soviet cultural system and tested its strictures at every turn. But the Californian and the Estonian converged on a radical reinvention of fundamentals. Both zeroed in on age-old scales and harmonies, extracted them from their usual contexts, and transformed them into objects of contemplation. The resulting music required new ways of playing and new ways of listening.
Nearly fifty years on, minimalism has become the stuff of cliché, its devices endlessly exploited on film and television soundtracks. Yet Riley and Pärt, who are marking their ninetieth birthdays this year, remain intriguing outliers, notable for the stubbornness with which they have held to their youthful convictions. Riley remains active as a composer and an improviser, collaborating with performers six or seven decades his junior. Pärt, who has apparently retired from creative work, offers an output that is far more complex and contradictory than his monkish public image suggests. Recent celebratory concerts dedicated to the two have been sites not of reverence but of restless rediscovery. Both retain the power to make the familiar strange.
Pärt is receiving the grand treatment. Carnegie Hall hosted two all-Pärt events in October, with more to follow later in the season. The Estonian Festival Orchestra, the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, under the direction of Paavo Järvi and Tõnu Kaljuste, travelled from Estonia to honor their compatriot. Alar Karis, the President of Estonia, came with them, posting on social media, “Arvo Pärt’s music brings people together beyond language & faith.” It struck me that Pärt is probably his country’s most famous representative on the world stage—an unusual status for a contemporary composer to hold.
It would have been easy to emphasize the audience-friendly side of Pärt’s œuvre—the hushed, hovering harmonies of “Fratres,” “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten,” and “Tabula Rasa,” any of which, when played at mid-volume on a home stereo, wrap the listener in a cocoon of comforting melancholy. Järvi presented these three pieces at Carnegie, but in a way that emphasized their inner tensions and hidden furies. The dynamics of “Cantus” range from triple-piano to triple-forte; Järvi made the former borderline inaudible and the latter visceral to the edge of violence. In “Tabula Rasa,” Midori and the young Estonian virtuoso Hans Christian Aavik brought a manic intensity to the solo-violin parts, hinting at Paganini-like diabolism. The audience burst into applause after the first movement. The vast stillness of the second movement, with spectral arpeggios chiming on a prepared piano, was all the more potent in contrast.
Just as important, Järvi included music from Pärt’s early, pre-1976 period, when he had not yet found his minimalist-inflected voice and was experimenting with a riotous array of avant-garde techniques. In “Perpetuum Mobile,” from 1963, strict serialist procedures accumulate into an impression of barely controlled bedlam. “Credo,” from 1968, pits the Prelude in C from Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” Book I, against upwellings of orchestral chaos and a variously chanting and shouting choir. Such apocalyptic moods also characterize contemporaneous scores by Alfred Schnittke, Shostakovich’s contrarian successor. Schnittke supported Pärt’s turn toward an outwardly simpler, religiously oriented style and played the prepared piano in several early performances of “Tabula Rasa.”At Carnegie, the role was taken by Nico Muhly, one of countless younger composers who have felt Pärt’s influence.
