I still remember the first time I heard the music of composer Arvo Pärt. I was in the library at a retreat center in Missouri perched on bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. I was due to be ordained to the priesthood and was taking a week of solitary silence to prepare. I’d had the run of the place for days. No one was around. I sat in the library as darkness came down, watching through the windows as the water in the river lost color. Everything was quiet.
As I often feel when on retreat, I was lonely. I felt the weariness of sitting with my spotted soul. I was at the point in the retreat to which I so desperately need to arrive, the part where I finally consent and give the keeping of myself to God. In that humility, so hard-won, I finally find myself as an invisible, divine communion enters my unfolding soul.
I was in that fragile transition of spiritual surrender when I turned on an Arvo Pärt album I’d brought along. His song for Benjamin Britten, in particular, reworked something inside of me that I cannot explain. It expressed its own sort of loneliness and longing, and yet brought consolation. Pärt’s music expresses, without word, all the struggle and glory of the human experience all at once.
Who is Arvo Pärt?
Knowing Pärt’s biography, his music makes a lot of sense. Born in communist Estonia, the budding composer debuted Credo in 1968, a musical piece that combines elements of the Christian Creed with other spiritual allusions. At the Credo premier, the stunned audience demanded an immediate repeat of the song, but afterwards the communist authorities banned the piece. Pärt was told to explain himself, and managed to convince the government he hadn’t meant to make a political statement by alluding to Christianity. They let him go, but the experience brought on a 10-year hiatus from active composing.
“It was as though I had bought myself freedom,” Pärt later said, “but at the cost of renouncing everything and being left completely naked.”
During his fallow period, he quietly converted to Orthodoxy. His new faith deepened. He was a seed embedded in the soil. Patiently, slowly, he learned about sacred chant. He listened to the great treasury of music created by the Church. He created a new style of composition known as tintinnabuli, which is marked by a simple, musical line and is often described as “bell-like.” Pärt’s sacred music evokes stillness, reverence and transcendence.
For the feast day
Tomorrow is the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, which brings to mind one of Pärt’s great Marian compositions. His Magnificat is still, to this day, one of his most popular pieces. Taken from the first words uttered by Our Lady at the Annunciation, “Magnificat anima mea/ My soul magnifies…” the Magnificat is sung every day at vespers.
Pärt’s version of the hymn falls into a great tradition of putting Our Lady’s words to music. In some ways, his composition sounds quite modern. The score is minimalist and he’s not afraid of playing with atonal chords. The piece doesn’t sound like a staid church hymn or even quite like traditional chant. Yet, it unmistakably draws from a deep wellspring of sacred music, blending meditative minimalism with expansive, emotional resonance.
Like all good sacred music, the sound serves the text. The syllables and natural sound of the words inform the shape of the music, not the other way round. Pärt fits the song to Our Lady and captures her quiet rejoicing. He makes her humility beautiful and creative. In short, the song sounds motherly. It’s the sound of maternal wonder. I can picture Our Lady holding her newborn in her arms, looking into his face, and marveling I helped make him?
Peter Kwasniewski, in an essay about Pärt, writes “music is an elemental mystery that must be approached reverently and silently. Paradoxically, music can spring up only in silence, it originates and resonates only in silence, and the appreciator, no less than the composer, must have a quiet soul.”
The Magnificat is the perfect incarnation of quietness. In it, Our Lady humbles herself, makes herself small, and by doing so discovers the beauty and greatness to which she is called.
The singing alternates from male to female voices and also from harmonious lines to dissonant ones, creating a gentle sense of inner struggle. We sense Our Lady coming to terms with the gravity of her vocation, the importance of her motherhood, and intuiting the suffering she is opening up within herself.
To express 'infinity and chastity'
In an interview in 1978, asked to explain his musical goals, Pärt said that he was trying to express, “infinity and chastity.”
I think that’s such a beautiful way of putting it. As a virtue, chastity is related to wholeness. Chastity holds something back, a disordered desire, and in the holding back a higher desire is able to come to fruition. That higher desire, because it is aligned with God, is joined to infinity. A piece of music that is chaste possesses a controlled yearning that burns under the surface with the heat of the sun. It isn’t flashy or egotistical. Pärt never uses his talent to show off. Rather, he restrains his music in order to search out that which is of higher value.
When I was on that retreat so many years ago, I never imagined how great the vocation was to which I was being called, nor the chastity and humility that would be required of me. I’m still seeking out those virtues that can call forth my best self and often have embarrassing failures; sometimes I get wrapped up in my own isolated sins and desires. I still have to go on retreats and feel lonely and learn self-renunciation the hard way.
Life is funny, how we get all mixed up and lost and then come back again. I keep coming back to Our Lady’s example in the Magnificat, her example of how surrender to God leads to greatness. And I keep coming back to the music of Arvo Pärt, whose compositions manifest the exact same magnifying effect.
