Who is Arvo Part?
First, a child of Estonia, a tiny country across the Baltic Sea from Finland. It became a satellite of the Soviet Union when Part was young. Eventually he left, settling in West Berlin, where he has lived for decades. He’s now 70, with a vast number of compositions and recordings. But place is not important in accessing Arvo Part — the key fact about him that he has no real connection to this century. The music tells the story: It is timeless. If you must think of an antecedent, try Bach, for Part and Bach both use religious texts, in Latin. And Part, like Bach, favors a structure that, for all its intricacies, is fundamentally simple — a prayer to God. In Part’s case, the music is built on what he describes as ‘tintinnabulation’ — a bell-like repetition of a single note. The music doesn’t move forward. It sits. It just…exists. Indeed, if you listen carefully, it becomes the only thing that exists. As Part says: The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search f
