December 17, 2009: Arvo Pärt and the Word made flesh

As we near the end of the period of Advent, this would be a good time for those still thinking about choosing gifts to consider the latest ECM release of the music of Arvo Pärt.  The disc is entitled In Principio, and it is one of the nominees for Best Classical Contemporary Composition in this year's Grammy Award competition.  More importantly, however, those who were positively impressed by Olivier Messiaen's non-standard musical approach to the Nativity, Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jésus, as performed by Marino Formenti a little over a week ago may now wish to consider the equally non-standard approach taken in the title composition on this album.  The text for this work for mixed choir and large orchestra consists of the first fourteen verses from The Gospel According to Saint John, whose climax occurs, both musically and textually, in the final verse.  In the translation of The Jerusalem Bible, that verse is as follows:

The Word was made flesh,
he lived among us,
and we saw his glory,
the glory that is his as the only Son of the Father,
full of grace and truth.

Pärt is as seriously devout in his Christianity as Messiaen was but in entirely different ways.  While, as was recently demonstrated, Messiaen cast his celebration of the Nativity in a language of subtle harmonic progressions and melodic lines, Pärt's is very much a language of gesture;  and his musical gestures often reflect the gestures of the declamation or incantation of sacred texts.

I have Steve Reich to thank for my first exposure to Pärt.  I had attended a talk he gave in 1985 at UCLA about "New York Counterpoint," which he had recently completed and was about to be performed at the Chandler Pavilion.  In the course of his presentation, he offered what he called his "Minimalism 101" account of how he and fellow composers like Philip Glass and John Adams became aware of new approaches to composition.  During the question period, one bright student piped up, "Which composer do you listen to with the most interest these days?"  Without skipping a beat, Reich replied, "Arvo Pärt;"  and that was enough to get me listening to Tabula Rasa, the first ECM disc of Pärt's music.

Listening to In Principio, however, I am just beginning to appreciate why Reich replied so quickly and so confidently.  One could never mistake the two composers;  but Reich shares with Pärt this appreciation that text, particularly sacred text, has its own inherent musical value.  (Consider how Reich explored this proposition in Tehillim.)  The three settings of sacred texts on In Principio ("In Principio" itself, "Cecilia, Vergine Romana," and "Da Pacem Domine") all take, as a point of departure, John's mystical conception of Word made flesh and follow it through to Word made music.  Thus, it is because the Word that is so important, that the gestures of utterance are so fundamental to the grammar, logic, and rhetoric behind Pärt's music.

This is equally true of his strictly instrumental music.  Indeed, in the case of "Für Lennart in memoriam," commissioned for the burial service of former President of Estonia, Lennart Meri, the Old Russian text for the service was written into the score below the double bass part.  However, the more secular composition "Mein Weg" explores gesture in a manner that departs from its foundation in speech.  This is a composition of "embedded" gestures:  Gestures "in the small" compound to form gestures "in the large" in a manner that could be described as fractal without too great a stretch of the imagination.

In this respect Pärt has a more unlikely kindred spirit in Claude Debussy.  Consider the often discussed influence of Katsushika Hokusai on La Mer, culminating in the decision by Durand to reproduce "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" on the cover of the score:

For an early nineteenth-century Japanese woodcut, this displays a remarkable intuition for the self-embedding of a feature on different scales;  and, when one listens closely to Debussy's orchestral texture, one hears that same self-embedding in motifs played by different instruments concurrently.  As with Reich, one would never confuse Pärt with Debussy;  but each took a shared approach to gesture and pursued it in a unique direction.

In Principio is thus a single recording that reveals Pärt to us in the depth of both his sacred and secular values.  All performances are conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste with a sensitivity to detail that reveals that depth with the utmost clarity.  This makes for an excellent gift for anyone seeking ways to expand his/her listening experiences.