A Single Note

While studying my undergraduate in music, I chose to write my dissertation on Arvo Part. My thesis focussed specifically on the emergence of his writing technique Tintinnabuli and it’s implementation in his landmark work, Tabula Rasa. If you have never heard the name, you will have definitely will have heard his music. The likes of Spiegel im Spiegel or Fratres pop up here and there in film and television (see The Place Beyond the Pines being a personal favourite). I’ve been fascinated with Part from the very first time I heard his music. The second movement of Tabula Rasa - Silentium - was to change the way I thought of music and my approaches writing it. Even now, the crawling prepared piano peppered throughout Silentium still gives me shivers, or the thunderous climax to the first movement, Ludus.

During my research there was one quote that I came across which has stayed with me over the years, something that I find I always return to when I’m feeling stuck. When discussing Tintinnabuli on the inner notes of a CD release, he said that:

'Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers – in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises – and everything that is unimportant falls away. Tintinnabulation is like this. Here I am alone with silence. I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements – with one voice, two voices. I build with primitive materials – with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells and that is why I call it tintinnabulation.’

- (Hillier Paul, Arvo Pärt, 1997 (p.87))

This resonated with me. Of course, there are many composers who strive to emulate the emotional density of Parts music but many have failed to achieve such a work that is so connecting. Following the release of his work Credo, which was an amalgamation of various musical settings, Part self-imposed himself into creative exile for 8 years, where he was to hibernate, eventually emerging with tintinnabulation*. At the time, Part’s music was one that shone through the rest as feeling truly sublime. It captures something that I think is difficult to find in others’ music; a sort of holy minimalism, draped in spirituality and a meditative tonality. It can be easily forgotten, the importance of a single note and it’s power in composition. It is a voice that when stripped down to the essentials provides a raw, very human element to his music. Perhaps this is why his music is so profoundly engaging, that it has the ability to strip back the surface level complexities of composition and provide the bare bones, something intrinsically beautiful and emotional.

This is not to discredit music that has a more complex fundamentality to it, just that Part’s Russian Orthodox background gives rise to an obvious spirituality and religion within his music. In fact, as mentioned earlier, the haunting movement of Arvo’s Tabula Rasa, Silentium, was played for terminally ill AIDS and cancer patients in palliative care who described it as ’angel music’. In a kind of odd mix of religion, spirituality, mathematics, minimalism and avant-guardism, Part is able to communicate a great deal in plain terms as well as the complexities and emotional depth that can come from a single note. Yet it doesn’t always feel religious, rather, otherworldly and timeless. Coming back to Part recently, it’s given me a lot to reflect on, particularly in the use of symmetry that he uses (even on a mathematical level) - something I’ll talk more about in the future.

In the meantime if you wanted to know more, there is a great book in which the workings of tintinabuli are detailed and discussed with the man himself: A Conversation with Arvo Part (Robert Crow, Enzo Restagno, Leopold Brauneiss, Saal Kareda). It's a super interesting read, one which definitely helped provide me with a fresh perspective with my approach to composition.

Until next time.

S