The parking lot of the Arvo Pärt Center looks more like a trailhead or a campsite. There are no buildings, just a sea of Scots pine trees opening to a path that quickly curves and continues out of sight.
One evening in July, shards of sunlight broke through the leaves on that winding walkway as signs of the outside world disappeared, the sounds of traffic replaced with birdsong. After a few minutes, the center came into view: a wavy, white building with floor-to-ceiling windows and a tower like an abstracted steeple.
The long walk from the parking lot to the front door encourages a kind of cleansing, a reset for the mind. It’s one of the ways in which getting to the center, built in the name of perhaps the most famous classical music composer alive, requires intention. Another is its isolation: Temple-like, it is in a forest on the outskirts of Laulasmaa, Estonia, about 45 minutes away by car from the nearest major city, Tallinn.
“We want the right people to come in,” said Michael Pärt, the composer’s son, who leads the center’s governing council. “We removed ourselves from the noise of the world into the forest, so that when you arrive, you are where you need to be in order to hear the gentler signals. You can start hearing your soul.”
Spirituality is the point. One courtyard holds a chapel that Arvo Pärt (pronounced AR-voh pehrt), who lives nearby, visits regularly. The center’s library houses his vast collection of religious books. The whole place exudes the ethos of Pärt, whose music demands love and dedication from its interpreters yet almost nothing of its listeners, offering a timeless sound redolent of both the Renaissance and modern Minimalism, and capable of touching casual audiences and avant-gardists alike.
Pärt is widely beloved in a way that is typically reserved for pop stars, some of whom even regard him with immense respect. Michael Stipe has called his music “a house on fire in an infinite calm.” PJ Harvey said Pärt’s stirring and then often silent “Tabula Rasa” is such a consuming experience, she can handle it only once a year. Thom Yorke described listening to his works as “knocking on a wall, and a hole appears in the wall where you can see a new world which you were completely unaware of the existence of.”
It is virtually unheard-of for a living composer to be the subject of a graphic novel, but Pärt is. His music is used in hospitals and in Hollywood, in ballet and in theater. And in the coming months he will be freshly prominent, with tributes planned around the world for his 90th birthday, on Sept. 11. Chief among them is a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall, which has named him to its Debs Composer’s Chair for the 2025-26 season.
“He’s one of the great composers of our day,” said Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director. “He’s extraordinarily popular, but he’s also very important. He’s touched the zeitgeist.” Pärt, he added, has imbued his music with the religion and spirituality “that people really need.”
The Carnegie appointment is more about programming than new commissions or a residency. Pärt stopped writing several years ago and has retreated from public life. Those close to him say that he is in cognitive decline. (Never one to speak about his music, he was unavailable for an interview.) But, his son said, “his soul is in a very happy place.”
“He just is,” Michael Pärt said. “And shouldn’t this be every person’s dream?”
Pärt’s catalog, then, is more or less complete. It is being performed more broadly than ever, by new and often younger artists, but that hardly begins to describe his place in the field. He has accomplished something that few composers have done: He invented a system of composing, which he calls tintinnabuli, and reached an unthinkable number of listeners for classical music in the process.
“It’s great music,” said Paul Hillier, whose ensemble set an early standard for performing Pärt’s works. “It’s as simple as that.”
PÄRT, WHO CAME OF AGE in Soviet Estonia, hardly seemed bound for global fame. He started composing with an abrasively avant-garde, serialist style in works like “Nekrolog,” which, while fashionable in the West, put him under scrutiny in the East. He wasn’t alone, though; he had champions in Tallinn, including the conductor Neeme Järvi, whom he met in his 20s and remains close with today.
“Everything was Shostakovich and Prokofiev,” Järvi said in an interview. “But then there was this strange music that was different from what others were doing, and it was from Estonia.”
It wasn’t long before Pärt moved on from serialism, experimenting with a collage technique that mixed early music, like Gregorian chant, with modern dissonance. Eventually, with “Credo” in 1968, he took a turn for the overtly spiritual, like Sofia Gubaidulina in Russia and Henryk Gorecki in Poland. But that put Pärt even more out of favor with the Soviet establishment.
A crisis followed. “I was convinced that I just could not go on with the compositional means at my disposal,” he later said. “There simply wasn’t enough material to go on with, so I just stopped composing altogether.”
He entered a period of quiet in which he wrote very little, joined the Russian Orthodox Church and filled notebooks with drawings and sketches that reflected an increasing fascination with plainchant. He wrote music reduced to a single line of melody, and Michael Pärt said his father has joked that “any further reduction would result in silence.”
In a 2007 speech, Arvo Pärt said he “had to get to a state where I could find a musical language that I wanted to live with”; he was searching “for a small island of sound, for a ‘place’ inside me, where — let’s call it — a dialogue with God might occur.”
The result, in 1976, was a spare piano solo called “Für Alina,” which served as a kind of prototype for tintinnabuli, a word that comes from the Latin for “bells.” Its score looks like a modern engraving of Renaissance music. A double octave at the lowest end of the keyboard opens the piece with the sound of a pedal tone. The notes don’t have stems, so they appear as ovals on the page and have no strict beat. There is no time signature, or set number of beats per measure; instead, bars separate entire phrases, however long or short. The tempo and expression are entirely up to the player.
But the heart of tintinnabuli style is in the sound of the music. Pärt’s system of composing, in its simplest terms, brings together two lines: the M-voice, or the melody, and the T-voice, the tintinnabuli, made up of a fixed triad, the most common type of chord. The effect is of a wandering top line over a foundation that, in its static reliability, resembles unchanging church bells. The two lines, bound by rules of harmony, form an inseparable whole, which led him to coin the formula 1 + 1 = 1.
Mathematical rules often led to emotionally chilly works in musical modernism, but the tintinnabuli system naturally produces harmonic tension and serene resolution. And it all comes back to Pärt’s spirituality; he once told Hillier that the M-voice signified “the subjective world, the daily egoistic life of sin and suffering,” while the T-voice was “the objective realm of forgiveness.”
Far from being restrictive, Pärt’s new system led to a flurry of works now considered classics, including “Tabula Rasa,” “Fratres” and, maybe his most famous piece, “Spiegel im Spiegel.” Almost all his music since “Für Alina,” nearly a half-century’s output, has been in the tintinnabuli style.
He couldn’t continue to work in Estonia, though. As his future there became untenable, he and his family left through a policy that allowed his second wife, Nora, to emigrate to Israel because of her Jewish background. (Like her husband, she had converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity.) But after leaving Estonia, they went instead to Vienna, where the publisher Universal offered Pärt a contract and a de facto refuge. Eventually, the family settled in Berlin, where they remained for nearly three decades.
Pärt’s music caught the attention of Manfred Eicher, the founder of ECM Records, who created the label ECM New Series just to release the album “Tabula Rasa” in 1984. It was Pärt’s breakthrough, a catapult to global attention that has never gone away.
THERE IS ALWAYS an element of mystery to fame, but Pärt seems to have tapped into a kind of ur-expression in music that has a profound effect on people regardless of how much they know about it. (The effect of that has been double-edged; his works have been embraced by a New Age audience, then criticized by some cynical specialists as New Age or “holy Minimalist.”) Its spirituality is broad, recalling elements of multiple religions. Its harmonic language would be as at home in the 15th century as the 21st. This is a sound, Michael Pärt said, “without boundaries.”
The music isn’t cloyingly populist, either. If anything it is personal, devotional, a product of composing, what he called his way of “breathing in and out.” He has also been guided by the belief that “art should concern itself with the eternal and not just the current,” perhaps another source of his mass appeal.
For all its accessibility, though, Pärt’s music is difficult to perform. He has said that “it is enough when a single note is beautifully played,” but in works so stripped down and fragile, that can be a challenge to sustain, whether over a few minutes or an hour.
Interpreters have described it requiring a kind of selflessness. His works, in their clean construction and economy, resist over-expression. “We don’t want to hear the performer perform,” Hillier said. “Just doing the music is enough.”
The same applies to conductors. Michael Pärt said that his father’s scores “pretty much perform themselves.” Changes in dynamics are built into the architecture of a piece, the way the orchestra’s sound thickens and naturally grows throughout “Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten.”
For many artists, all this is easier said than done. And sometimes, Pärt demands the extramusical. Paavo Järvi, Neeme’s son and the conductor of the Estonian Festival Orchestra, recalled a rehearsal of the Third Symphony in which Pärt told him, “I don’t feel that you love this chord enough.” With that in mind, the players tried again, and, Järvi said, “It was beautiful.”
Pärt’s works used to be a niche specialty. (The violinist Gidon Kremer and Hillier’s ensemble, with its background in early music, took naturally to Pärt’s idiom.) But that has changed over time; his style has become absorbed into the ecosystem of conservatories and concert halls.
And understanding his artistry has become easier since he returned to Estonia in 2010, with the reputation of a national treasure. The Arvo Pärt Center was established, opening in 2018 and offering resources for anyone interested in his music. Young members of the Järvi Academy performed his “Greater Antiphons” at the center’s auditorium this summer with not just technical ability, but real beauty, too.
That concert was part of the Parnu Music Festival, run by Paavo Järvi, which this year was programmed as a celebration of Pärt’s 90th birthday. The Estonian Festival Orchestra performed some of the works it will bring to Carnegie Hall in October with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, including “Silhouette” (whose premiere recording Järvi released on Sept. 5) and “Tabula Rasa,” featuring Hans Christian Aavik, a young violinist with a pure, expressive sound ideal for the piece. Multiple evenings ended with Pärt’s “Estonian Lullaby” as an encore; he has described lullabies as “little pieces of lost Paradise.”
The night of the academy concert, Pärt was spotted outside at the center. But he didn’t make an official appearance, nor did he attend the festival in Parnu. Järvi said that if he walked into a rehearsal, he would “hug everybody and be the warmest person,” but he prefers to be on his own, away from the noise.
“Now he has the forest,” Järvi said. “I think he is sort of done now. And he deserves that, right?”
Audio credits: “7 Magnificat-Antiphon,” No. 1: “O Weisheit,” Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Tõnu Kaljuste, conductor (Erato); “Tabula Rasa,” Gidon Kremer and Tatjana Grindenko, violins, Alfred Schnittke, prepared piano, Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra, Saulius Sondeckis, conductor (ECM New Series); “Nekrolog,” Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Paavo Järvi, conductor (Erato); “Credo,” Philharmonia Orchestra, Philharmonia Chorus, Neeme Järvi, conductor (Chandos); “Für Alina,” Alice Sara Ott, piano (Deutsche Grammophon); “Spiegel im Spiegel,” Vladimir Spivakov, violin, Sergej Bezrodny, piano (ECM New Series); “Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten,” Staatsorchester Stuttgart, Dennis Russell Davies, conductor (ECM New Series); “Silhouette,” Estonian Festival Orchestra, Paavo Järvi, conductor (Alpha); “Estonian Lullaby,” Estonian Festival Orchestra, Paavo Järvi, conductor (Alpha).
Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic.
The post Arvo Pärt Reached Pop Star Status. Now He’s Ready to Rest. appeared first on New York Times.
