Pärt's Science

Thomas More's quote spoke of music becoming increasingly able to stir the emotions it was trying to produce in the listener. It's fascinating that Paul Hillier can sight in Pärt's tintinnabuli style three subdivisions of increasing response "to the words in ever greater detail, with a subtlety and variation unimaginable in the earlier works".

His divisions are, characteristic of a musical analyst, unhelpful and impossibly abstruse. "...the earliest, like drawing with just pencil and paper (the works of the later 1970s to early 1980s); the second, transferring this knowledge to the medium of fresco (mid-1980s to early 1990s); the third (mid-1990s to the present), now painting in oils...". But I suppose I can't blame him - there's only so much that sleeve notes can handle.

I might question the primacy of More's original goal - that the utopia for music is its increasing ability to stir specific emotions - but I think we can begin to see that general trend in a scientific approach to music. Pärt, in the 1970s, "began to study Gregorian chant (not to copy it, but to imitate the timeless quality of its ebb and flow); he also studied medieval and renaissance polyphony, and became fascinated, too, by the sound of church bells." This is music that is not so much concentrated on the Romantic ideal of "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" in Wordsworth's words, but music understood as a science - a part of the Quadrivium that included arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Perhaps this is why, as Pärt's music develops as an "aesthetic" (according to Hillier), it becomes like More's utopia, "responding to the words in ever greater details".

Tintinnabuli In Short

I can't possibly analyze Arvo Pärt well, let alone in one post. But here is a short introduction to the style that I think is proof of this return to the Medieval in High music. Here is an excellent article on the universality and "Bright Sadness" of Pärt's music, fitting for the season.

Tintinnabuli is derivative of the Latin word for "bells" and is essentially built off the interplay of two voices - one melodic and stepwise and one bell-like. "Tintinnabular". The main voice and the tintinnabular voice are the basic unit of Pärt's music, and he extends the logic in his grander and fuller pieces, creating a splendid diversity of emotion and expression. An example of the breath-taking potency in some of his sparser music is this section from the Kyrie of his Missa Sillabica.






You can see that the upper voice moves along the notes of a d-minor scale and the lower voice moves along the notes of a triad. This provides for considerable dissonance, but it's dissonance that you can, remarkably, only help but enjoy. Here is a sample of his Berliner Messe here.

The transcription of Missa Sillabica is done entirely by ear from "De Profundis" by Arvo Pärt, recorded by Paul Hillier and the Theatre of Voices.