Pärt’s creative output has played a significant role in shaping the soundscapes of contemporary music since the 1960s. In particular, through his unique compositional technique, tintinnabuli, which he devised in 1976, Pärt has profoundly affected the course of classical music. His works have reached a remarkably broad and diverse audience and have not only been sung out in concert halls and on recordings but also in films and theatre productions.
During this important year, a visit to the Arvo Pärt Centre, which is nestled among the pines of Laulasmaa, just a 30-minute drive from Tallinn, is well worth anyone’s time. Opened to visitors in 2018, the centre houses the composer’s extensive personal archive and serves as a concert and exhibition venue dedicated to his work. All year long, the centre will be celebrating Arvo Pärt’s 90th birthday through concerts, a new permanent exhibition, multiple publications, and film screenings.
A boy with a bicycle
After the Second World War, in a small town in Estonia called Rakvere, there lived a schoolboy who liked to ride his bicycle for hours in the town’s central square. The boy was Arvo Pärt, and if it seemed that he was just there to cycle, that was only how it seemed. In fact, it was music that brought the young Pärt to his hometown’s marketplace – music that could be heard from loudspeakers hanging on the lampposts. Back then, it was not so easy to get access to the radio, but once one was obtained, it provided the gift of listening to classical music and concert broadcasts. Arvo Pärt: “Sometimes when the wind carried these sounds into our backyard, it felt like finding the meaning of life…”
From those years onwards, neither Pärt’s need for music nor his love for it could be substituted by anything else. A young man had found his calling. Little could that boy have imagined that one day Rakvere would have its own modern concert hall, dedicated to the composer Arvo Pärt. The Ukuaru Music Hall in Rakvere will open at the end of 2025.
I believe
November 1968. The most important concert venue in Tallinn – Estonia Concert Hall – is crowded with people. The Estonian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir are on the stage, conducted by Neeme Järvi. And in that deeply anti-religious Soviet cultural room, the Latin words “Credo in Jesum Christum” (“I believe in Jesus Christ”) unexpectedly sounded from the stage, as did a musical parable on the notes of Prelude in C Major (WTC I) by J. S. Bach. This was the premiere of Arvo Pärt’s “Credo”. The audience was struck as if by thunder and demanded the piece to be repeated immediately.
After that evening, “Credo” was quietly but systematically eliminated from the concert repertoire, as well as from official reports. This trying episode became a landmark in Pärt’s creative life, as it solidified his status as a persona non grata. New commissions were out of the question, and his earlier works also disappeared from concert and radio programmes. “This was my musical death sentence,” Pärt later commented. Indeed, “Credo” led the composer into a long creative crisis that lasted for eight years and ended only in 1976 when Pärt’s new compositional style – tintinnabuli – was born.
‘This dramatic piece can be experienced live this year at the Pärnu Music Festival in July, at the Arvo Pärt Days birthday concert in Tallinn in September, and at Carnegie Hall in New York in October, performed by the Estonian Festival Orchestra under Paavo Järvi.
Arvo Pärt Centre. Photo by Silver Gutmann.
Eight years of searching
The year 1968 was a turning point. After “Credo”, Pärt resolutely gave up all his earlier compositional techniques and styles, sensing the deeper need for his own musical language. Pärt has said, “I was left completely naked. It was like turning a new page in my life, or in music at least. It was a decision, a conviction in something very significant – that in order to be born for the new, you have to die for the past. All ideals must be re-evaluated.”
This process of re-evaluation had already begun sometime earlier in the composer’s spiritual search, through which he found his belief and joined the Orthodox Church. Those eight years of creative crisis were full of new ideas and experiments but also disappointment and growing frustration. Commenting on this, Pärt has said, “I didn’t know at the time whether I was going to be able to compose at all in the future. Those years of study were no conscious break but an agonising inner conflict between life and death. I had lost my inner compass, and I no longer knew what an interval or a key was.”
These sufferings are documented in Pärt’s so-called musical diaries, which he started using in 1974 to write down both his musical and verbal ideas. From these pages we see also how the composer has drawn inspiration from many things, like Gregorian chant and early polyphony, scripture, and prayers.
Pärt found a long-sought musical language of his own in February 1976 with the short piano piece “Für Alina”. Over the next two years, he composed an abundance of new works, including “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten”, “Tabula rasa”, “Fratres”, “Spiegel im Spiegel”, and others. He had finally created his own unique compositional technique. He would call it tintinnabuli, and it has been the basis of his musical style until today.
The years of emigration and the return home
In 1980, Arvo Pärt and his family were forced to leave Estonia, initially emigrating to Vienna and later to Berlin. This marked the beginning of almost a decade during which performances of his music were banned in Estonia and throughout the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, in Germany, Pärt began his longstanding collaboration with producer Manfred Eicher, and in 1984, ECM Records released their first joint recording, “Tabula rasa”. Since then, all the most significant albums of Pärt’s music have been released under the ECM label, and his works have been performed and recorded by the finest orchestras and interpreters of our time.
Around the time of Estonia’s restoration of independence in 1991, Pärt reconnected with his homeland and its musical life, returning to live permanently in Estonia in 2010. That same year, the Arvo Pärt Centre and personal archive was established in Laulasmaa by the composer’s family.
The exhibition “Tintinnabuli: A World on Music Paper”, which opened earlier this year, invites visitors on a serene journey to explore Arvo Pärt’s unique style, which has made him a beloved composer worldwide and one of Estonia’s most celebrated icons. The exhibition seeks to answer the questions of what exactly this evocatively named phenomenon is and how has it drawn thousands to concert halls, shaped the face of contemporary music, and even changed lives. Visitors can find the answers to these questions in interactive book pages that bring Arvo Pärt’s musical world to life through descriptions, images, animations, and soundscapes.
