Arvo Postmodern PDF

twentieth-century music 5/1, 45–78 © 2008 Cambridge University Press
doi: 10.1017/S1478572208000601 Printed in the United Kingdom
Transcending the Icon: Spirituality and Postmodernism in

Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa and Spiegel im Spiegel
MARIA CIZMIC
Abstract
This essay explores the perceptions of value that circulate around Arvo Pärt’s early tintinnabuli works Tabula Rasa
(1977) and Spiegel im Spiegel (1978). Western reception hears Pärt’s music as either ‘spiritually deep’ or musically
‘flat’. By understanding how modernist subjectivity translates into standards of musical value, I attempt to dismantle
the biases inherent in both camps and go on to consider Pärt’s early tintinnabuli works in terms of both spirituality
and postmodernism. Couched in the religious revivalism of the 1970s, Tabula Rasa offers a narrative of transcend-
ence that performs a Neoplatonic model of subjectivity built directly from Orthodox praxis and supplies an alternative
to dominant Soviet cultural narratives. By the 1980s Western marketing of tintinnabuli transformed the influence of
religion into the visual and linguistic rhetoric of ‘holy minimalism’. Does commodification leech out spiritual ‘depth’
from Pärt’s music? The essay responds to this question by turning to Fredric Jameson’s ‘antinomies of post-
modernism’ and an analysis of Spiegel im Spiegel ’s musical stasis, process, surface, and depth. While Jameson’s
postmodernism still finds value in modernist subjectivity, this essay suggests an alternative way of understanding
musical value through a consideration of Pärt reception and experiences of illness.
I
On 18 November 1999 Salon.com published a review of the 1999 Deutsche Grammophon
recording of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa (composed in 1977), featuring violinist Gil Shaham.1
The review’s author, Patrick Giles, spent the 1980s and 90s working as an AIDS activist,
journalist, and caretaker, often collaborating with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.2 From the
end of the 1990s until his death from cancer in March 2005, Giles pursued a career as a
freelance writer in New York City, publishing articles about literature, music, and the
Catholic Church and gay rights. Though reviewing the 1999 CD positively, Giles focuses
primarily on his experience of listening to the first album on which Tabula Rasa appeared, a
1984 recording of a set of early Pärt works on the ECM label. This album includes a 1977
performance of the work featuring violinists Gidon Kremer and Tatjana Grindenko, with
composer Alfred Schnittke playing the prepared piano. Giles discovered the ECM disc while
working at an AIDS clinic, and he reflects upon the meaning this music held for himself and
the patients.
1 See Giles, ‘Sharps & Flats’. For details of the CD and for other recordings of Pärt’s works mentioned in the text see
Discography, Filmography below.
2 See two online eulogies: ‘In Thanksgiving for the Life of Our Friend and Colleague Patrick Giles (1957–2005)’; and
Gessen, ‘On Patrick Giles’.
45
46 Cizmic Spirituality and Postmodernism in Pärt’s Tabula Rasa and Spiegel im Spiegel
I was a crisis worker at an AIDS organization in the mid-’80s, a time when that
plague knocked down swaths of people I knew and the future didn’t seem to hold
much hope. [. . .] In those despondent months, when even AZT was still an
experimental drug, some of us discovered not a treatment, but at least a balm: a
1977 album of music by an Estonian classical composer with the peculiar name
Arvo Pärt.
The most powerful cut on the record was the second movement of the title piece,
‘Tabula Rasa.’ [. . .]
The music brought comfort to many of us after we’d given up on the very
possibility of it. People played it at night, during meditation and, especially, when
they were in the hospital and feared they were dying. We had learned that even
patients in comas were still capable of hearing, and several people with AIDS
requested Pärt on their deathbeds. ‘He keeps asking for ‘‘angel music’’ ’, said the
baffled mother [. . .].3
Giles parallels Tabula Rasa and the experience of illness and death at the AIDS clinic. He
describes the music’s ‘constant yet often barely perceptible progress of time – and, by
extension, of life itself ’, and explains that ‘the gravity of time’s passing in ‘‘Tabula Rasa,’’ the
sense of an ending definite but not to be feared, is a principle reason so many of my sick
friends and their loved ones found solace in the work’.4 The AIDS patients chose to listen to
Pärt’s music – and not Sondheim or disco, as Giles mentions – because its static quality
created a space of musical safety that supplied comfort. Tabula Rasa’s construction of time –
a slow-moving process that foregrounds diatonic dissonance and stasis – resonated in a
meaningful way with the AIDS patients and their friends and family as they dealt with the last
stages of illness.
Pärt explored a variety of compositional styles during the 1950s and early 60s before
composing Tabula Rasa, including neoclassicism and socialist realism.5 His interest in
serialist and collage techniques in the 1960s placed him among a burgeoning group of young,
‘unofficial’ composers.6 The use of serialist techniques in his Nekrolog (1960) and Credo
(1968) resulted in a negative response from the cultural authorities, who deemed Western
avant-garde musical styles to be ‘formalist’.7 During the early 1970s Pärt moved away
from modernist composition: he converted to the Russian Orthodox Church, studied
3 Giles, ‘Sharps & Flats’. Giles’s reference in this quotation to ‘a 1977 album’ appears to be a small error. The recording
of Pärt’s composition Tabula Rasa on the 1984 ECM issue was made in 1977 by the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra in
Vienna with soloists Kremer, Grindenko, and Schnittke (see Ivashkin, Alfred Schnittke, 140). Since Giles situates his
memory in the mid-80s and references Gidon Kremer by name in the article, it is highly likely that this is the recording
to which he is referring.
4 Giles, ‘Sharps & Flats’.
5 For an overview of Pärt’s early career see Savenko, ‘Musica Sacra of Arvo Pärt’, 155–9. For biographical information
and a survey of Pärt’s serialist and collage works see Hillier, Arvo Pärt, 24–85.
6 ‘Unofficial composition’, and particularly the influence of serialism via Andrei Volkonsky, is the subject of Schmelz’s
essay ‘Andrey Volkonsky and the Beginnings of Unofficial Music in the Soviet Union’. For an overview of Pärt’s serial
works and their Soviet reception see Schmelz, ‘Listening, Memory, and the Thaw’, 230–46.
7 For accounts of the controversies surrounding Nekrolog and Credo see Hillier, Arvo Pärt, 35–8, 58–63; Savenko,
‘Musica Sacra’, 155, 157–8; Schmelz, ‘Listening, Memory, and the Thaw’, 183.
Cizmic Spirituality and Postmodernism in Pärt’s Tabula Rasa and Spiegel im Spiegel 47
medieval and renaissance music, and developed his own ‘tintinnabuli’ style of composition,
which has shaped his musical creativity ever since.8 The Latin-derived term ‘tintinnabuli’
references bells and connects Pärt’s music to the Orthodox tradition of bell ringing; his
often spare, intertwining polyphonic textures bear traces of the early music traditions he
studied.9
After Pärt left the Soviet Union in 1980,10 his music found several champions, including
singer and choral conductor Paul Hillier, who has performed and recorded Pärt’s music
around the world and written the only book so far published about the composer. Manfred
Eicher, president of the Munich-based ECM record company, has released approximately a
dozen recordings of Pärt’s music, beginning with the 1984 Tabula Rasa album mentioned
above. As a result of the work of Hillier and Eicher, as well as performances by Gidon Kremer
and others, Pärt’s tintinnabuli music increased in popularity in the mid- to late 1990s.
Western music journalists and scholars have heard Pärt’s music as part of a phenomenon
known as ‘holy minimalism’ or ‘the new simplicity’, which they have also seen as encom-
passing the music of Henryk Górecki and John Tavener. Giles, in his review, writes unasham-
edly as a fan, but he acknowledges that opinions of Pärt’s music are divided: people are either
devoted to it or they dismiss it as ‘New Age’.11
Giles’s reminiscences serve as a gateway into the debates that circle through Western
journalism and musicology regarding Pärt’s tintinnabuli compositions. Those who appreci-
ate the composer’s music hear it as spiritually deep or transcendent. The sceptics voice
suspicion about the music’s purported spiritual quality, finding the ‘flat’ repetition and
commercial success as indicative of a lack of interiority, history, and, consequently, value.
The biases that filter through these two camps of Pärt reception (evidenced in both journal-
istic and scholarly writing) demonstrate the ways in which musical value is constructed,
experienced, and debated.
We seem to place especial value on music that represents how we understand ourselves;
perhaps we need to do this because it helps us create who we think we are or want to be. If you
believe that you have interiority and are an autonomous individual, you might value music
that enacts that model of subjectivity. But, as philosopher Charles Taylor points out in his
Sources of the Self, however pervasive this modernist model of subjectivity may be, it is not
universal.12 You may think you have interiority, but only value it because you perceive a
turning inwards as a path to God. Or you may not think of yourself as autonomous within the
world, but bound by elaborate relationships on the levels of family and community. Or, if
8 For a survey of the tintinnabuli style and Pärt’s early pieces see Hillier, Arvo Pärt, 86–121; Savenko, ‘Musica Sacra’,
159, 166–7; Whiteman, ‘Passio’, 15–29.
9 For more information about the influence of early music on Pärt’s compositional style see Savenko, ‘Musica Sacra’,
158–9, 165, 170–1. Hillier provides a biographical account of Pärt’s interest in early music and mentions other
contemporary Russian and Estonian composers who were attracted to early music; see Hillier, Arvo Pärt, 66–8,
77–85.
10 In 1980, as a result of the USSR’s agreement with Israel and the US to allow Jews to emigrate, Pärt, his wife Nora (who
is Jewish), and their two sons left the USSR, first for Austria and ultimately Germany. See Hillier, Arvo Pärt, 32.
11 Giles, ‘Sharps & Flats’.
12 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 111.
your sense of self has been fundamentally rocked by an experience of trauma or illness, you
may find value in creating or listening to music that speaks to, mirrors, or ameliorates that
disorientation.
In the reception of Pärt’s tintinnabuli music, writers have ascribed value on the basis of
two implicit models of subjectivity: a Neoplatonic Augustinian model and an autonomous
modernist model. Taylor offers a philosophical history of Western subjectivity, focusing on
one of its important characteristics: inwardness. He begins with Plato, pointing out that
to be ‘good’ for Plato means orienting one’s soul towards the higher ideal of ‘goodness’.13
Augustine translates this spatial metaphor into Christian terms, substituting God for Plato’s
ideals and at the same time introducing the role of interiority: turning inwards is a path to the
Higher Being.14 This schematic of transcendence can be seen throughout Orthodox praxis:
all material aspects of worship are understood as conduits to the Eternal.15 Pärt takes very
specific Orthodox Christian ideas and incorporates them into his compositional strategies;
Tabula Rasa in particular performs a narrative of transcendence.
Positive reviewers implicitly perceive Pärt’s music in terms of this model of subjectivity,
consistently describing it as ‘deep’, ‘otherworldly’, and ‘transcendent’:
It has become a cliché to call Pärt’s very commercially successful music ‘spiritual’;
still, clichéd or not, it is certainly music that seeks to reflect something higher in its
own tight, contrapuntal perfections.16
Pärt offers beautiful, otherworldly harmonies, particularly in the upper ranges

where the sopranos reach for heaven. Despite the subject matter (e.g., the lamen-
tation of sins), this is a warm, curiously comforting world that softly envelops a
living space.17
In a deceptively uncomplicated musical setting, these 24 prayers – from St. John

Chrysostom – offer strong aural appeal and genuine spiritual depth;18
starts out sounding simply religious but winds up transcendent [. . .].19

While those who advocate Pärt’s music recognize that it embodies some quality of ‘depth’
or ‘transcendence’, the major pitfall of positive Pärt reception has been the impulse to turn
the influence of religion into a mystical and mythologizing aura. Nicholas Williams, for The
New Statesman and Society, writes: ‘But followers of the new spirituality, preferring chant-
like melodies, placed the meaning outside the music altogether. Without the sacred back-
ground, these pieces would be merely beautiful. Charged with the holy mysteries, they

15 See Vladyshevskaia, ‘On the Links Between Music and Icon Painting in Medieval Russia’, 18, 20.
16 Kennicott, ‘A Bach High with the Brooklyn Philharmonic’.
17 Andrews, ‘Pärt: Canon Pokajanen (Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir)’.
18 Cariaga, ‘Kaljuste Leads Uplifting Program’.
19 Diliberto, ‘Pärt: Kanon Pokajanen’.
become testaments of faith.’20 Instead of pointing to the concrete musical techniques that
resonate with Pärt’s religious beliefs, Williams separates music from ‘the sacred background’
and finds that the extra-musical bestows a mystical charge. Once the music is deemed a
spiritual experience, then Pärt himself becomes a holy figure. One writer asserts that Pärt ‘is
the most saintly of the holy minimalists’.21
Hillier begins his monograph by distancing both Pärt and himself from the holy minimal-
ist rhetoric of music journalists, noting that their consistent references to the influence of
religion are ultimately cursory and superficial. Hillier rectifies this superficiality later in his
book by discussing the central precepts of Orthodox theology relevant to Pärt’s tintinnabuli
music: the practice of meditative prayer, called hesychasm, and the significance of prototypes
and patterns to all elements of the Orthodox faith, from icon painting to architecture.22 But,
as both Peter Phillips (founder of the Tallis Scholars) and Carol Matthews Whiteman note,
Hillier does not draw any direct or interpretative connections between specific compositions
and Orthodox Christianity.23 Again, spirituality is left ‘outside’ the music, and Hillier
explicitly writes that his account of religious practices is presented ‘not as an ‘‘explanation’’
of Pärt’s music, but as a potentially useful corollary of it’.24 However, Hillier cannot
completely avoid drawing some connections between Pärt’s spirituality and his music: he
describes Pärt as ‘a composer for whom these [religious] texts are the very breath of life, and
who probably cannot imagine himself working with any other kind’.25 Instead of demon-
strating a concrete link between religion and music, Hillier opts for the vague ‘breath of life’
– and thereby mystifies Pärt’s compositional process and succumbs to the very pitfalls of holy
minimalism he had sought to avoid.
Hillier also sees Pärt as engaging with tradition, as extending aspects of early music and
Russian Orthodox Christianity, a faith that valorizes the immutability of their practices since
almost the beginning of Christianity. Hillier acknowledges that claims to long historical
continuity are rarely true, but still asserts tradition as the one concrete connection between
Pärt’s religious beliefs and his music.26 Peter Phillips reads Hillier’s claim to tradition as a way
to argue for a ‘timeless’ quality on behalf of tintinnabuli:
but either way the argument is too simple, Pärt’s aspirations to infinity notwith-
standing, his music is created in a particular time and place, in a concrete historical
and artistic context; and in Hillier’s pious linking of ‘timeless’ religious artistic
expression and Pärt’s (and Tavener’s) ‘continuation’ of a tradition, a myth is being
created that needs to be carefully examined.27
Phillips’s comments apply to a broad spectrum of Pärt reception beyond Hillier’s book:
20 Williams, ‘Songs of Praise (Religious Music in UK)’, 32–3.

22 Hillier, Arvo Pärt, ix, 3–10, 18–23.
23 Phillips, ‘Holy Minimalism!’; Whiteman, ‘Passio’, 4.
24 Hillier, Arvo Pärt, 3.
25 Hillier, Arvo Pärt, x.
27 Phillips, ‘Holy Minimalism!’, 51.
Pärt manages successfully to bring past and present together here without the one
contradicting the other: indeed, his music has a rare contemplative, prayerful
quality, that seems to be genuinely timeless (in both senses of the word).28
Although Pärt’s music arrives as if out of a more sacred past, it ultimately speaks
beyond time.29
His music not only suspends the passage of time but stands apart from history – a
fragile, wideeyed, devout art created in a cynical and secular century.30
These critics elide musical stasis and the influence of early music and religion to declare
tintinnabuli to be ‘timeless’ in a universalizing sense. While the positive reception of Pärt’s
music recognizes its attempt to express a quality of timelessness linked to spirituality, the
myth-making impulse is strong. The notion of Pärt as a semi-holy figure whose music is
imbued with a mystical charge will hold readers’ attention and encourage them to go to the
record store, or even to the concert hall. While I highlight this myth-making impulse in an
effort to avoid it myself, I believe that the influence of religion does not lie entirely ‘outside’
the music. Orthodox praxis prompted Pärt to create a musical narrative of transcendence
that shapes the structure and events of Tabula Rasa. Nor is Pärt’s static music ‘timeless’ in a
historical sense: his turn to stasis was part of a culturally and historically situated search for
alternatives to Soviet ideology and musical modernism during the 1970s.
The anti-Pärt camp finds that although the tintinnabuli approach purports to express
some kind of spiritual ‘depth’, it actually lacks this very quality. Critics repeatedly formulate
observations like the one made by Joshua Kosman in the San Francisco Chronicle: ‘all along
there have been dissenters who wondered aloud whether there was less to Pärt’s music than
met the ear – whether what lay at the heart of its determinedly simple utterances was not so
much profundity as mere plainness’.31 Others find the repetition pretty but ultimately too
static: ‘One’s spiritual experience, evidently, can be another’s long, long evening in the
concert hall.’32 Often the holy minimalist rhetoric is heard as a New Age overcompensation
for music that is not actually expressive of spiritual depth. Kosman writes: ‘Sadly but
unmistakably, the work of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt is beginning to resemble a musical
equivalent to the New Age self-help books that clog the best-seller charts.’33 Not only is Pärt’s
music not authentically spiritual (as indicated by the New Age reference), but its market
success (relative within the world of classical music record sales) makes it even more suspect.
Justin Davidson writes for Newsday:
With its neo-antique aura, its glistening harmonies that throb occasionally with
discreet dissonances, its drones and its mantra-like reiterations, Pärt’s music is
meant to be an aid to transcendence. But there is a latent this-worldliness in his
28 Cross, ‘Beatus Petronius’.
30 Schwarz, ‘Pärt: De Profundis, Solfeggio’.
31 Kosman, ‘Musical Footnote for ‘‘Prospero’s Books’’ ’.
32 Henahan, ‘Theater of Voices in Enthralling Pärt Premiere’.
33 Kosman, ‘Few Artistic Awards in Pärt’s Music’.
ethereal sounds and affectations of timelessness. Pärt’s career has benefited in the
West, thanks largely to the political quakes of the last six years and the market’s
adroit exploitation of post-Communist chic [. . .].34
While Pärt’s music creates stasis that has genuine roots in religious practice, its success in the
marketplace belies a ‘this-worldliness’ that is supposedly at odds with authentic spirituality.
Moreover, Davidson’s cheeky reference to ‘post-Communist chic’ perceptively points out
the exoticizing impulse found in Western reception and marketing of former Soviet bloc
artists, musicians, and writers.
These critics expect Pärt’s music to express ‘depth’, in part because of the claims to
genuine spirituality and transcendence that are made on its behalf. Their implicit standards,
though, reflect a model of modern subjectivity that understands interiority as autonomous –
inner depth as a self-sufficient repository that stands in opposition to the vagaries of the
outside world.35 This model of subjectivity, described by Taylor, has its musical expression in
both functional tonality (via the manipulation of teleological drive and motivic develop-
ment) and serialism.36 Pärt’s early tintinnabuli works, like Tabula Rasa and Spiegel im Spiegel
(1978), employ tonal materials that thwart these expectations through their adherence to
process and stasis. As a result, writers hear this musical resistance to functional tonality and
denial of serialism as a lack of depth; writing for the Hudson Review, Josiah Fisk explicitly
states that holy minimalism lacks an ‘inner life’.37
The scholarly literature also has its share of vocal sceptics. David Clarke, with an Adornian
modernism in hand, critiques Pärt for a regressive turn towards tonality. Although he
acknowledges that Pärt’s use of a non-functional, process-driven tonality performs a critique
of progress narratives, Clarke still maintains the modernist progress narrative as the measure
of value. Consequently, Pärt’s tintinnabuli music is held to be regressive in the wake of
atonality and serialism.38 In a 1994 article for Music and Letters Clarke described Pärt’s music
as nostalgic; in his essay for Musical Times, written one year earlier, Clarke concludes that
Pärt’s music mourns on behalf of modernism for what modernism itself has lost and can no
longer legitimately perform.39 Both readings view the turn back to any, even non-
teleological, tonal material after the advent of serialism as necessarily retrograde.
Clarke explicitly references Adorno as the source for his understanding of a musical
modernist progress narrative. Clarke does not address what I think is a more crucial
component of Adorno’s modernism: that the latter sought depth and meaning in a world
that seemed to lack those very qualities.40 The critics who voice suspicion of the commercial
success of Pärt’s music echo (unwittingly) this aspect of Adorno’s thinking: Can genuine
depth – or in this case spirituality – exist embedded in commodification? Taylor describes
34 Davidson, ‘Pärt’s Music Serene, but Not Transcendent’.

36 See McClary, Conventional Wisdom, 67; Fink, ‘Going Flat’, 103; Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations, 155;
Dell’Antonio, ‘Introduction: Beyond Structural Listening?’, 2–4.
37 Fisk, ‘The New Simplicity’, 397.
38 Clarke, ‘Parting Glances’, 682.
39 Clarke, ‘Summa, for String Quartet’, 658; Clarke, ‘Parting Glances’, 684.
40 See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment, 130–1.
this search-for-meaning-by-turning-inwards as central to modernism, but ultimately such a

search can lead to many different sources of meaning: to nature for the Romantics; to an
autonomous subjectivity for modernists like Adorno; or, for those who believe, to God.41 The
evaluation of Pärt’s music hinges on how one understands ‘depth’ and subjectivity. I believe
that most critics, Clarke included, implicitly hold to the standards of a musical, autonomous
subjectivity that pieces like Tabula Rasa and Spiegel im Spiegel resist. Pärt’s music does not
seem ‘deep’ to such critics because it turns away from the musical markers of autonomous
interiority. Those who evaluate tintinnabuli music positively are more willing to accept that
Pärt’s music echoes a model of subjectivity in which interiority leads to transcendence,
although, unfortunately, many use this as the justification for myth making.
There may be some grounds for arguing a kind of geographical specificity regarding
perceptions of ‘depth’: Taylor clearly positions modern subjectivity as a set of experiences
specific to the West.42 As an example of a different model of subjectivity, Svetlana Boym
argues that an inner/outer dichotomy is not a culturally operative binary for Russians.
Instead, she outlines a specifically Russian model of subjectivity that struggles with the daily
grind (byt) but searches for a more meaningful transcendent experience (bytie) – a binarism
that has its basis in Orthodox theology.43 But a sensitivity to geographic specificity should
acknowledge that geocultural boundaries are never absolute. Svetlana Savenko outlines
Pärt’s early career and mentions that other Estonian and Soviet avant-garde composers did
not immediately or unanimously react positively to Pärt’s tintinnabuli style. ‘The heresy of
euphony into which Pärt lapsed is really forbidden for a contemporary artist who has been
trained in the Adornian system – and particularly so for the Soviet avant-garde composer
who cries out against totalitarianism using dissonance.’44 Savenko’s comment shows the
cultural relevance of modernist progress narratives within unofficial Soviet compositional
circles of the 1970s. Her reference to dissonance as a cry against totalitarianism echoes
Adorno’s desire to resist oppressive systems through a turn inwards – atonality and serialism
are expressions of deep subjectivity that constitute cries against external dehumanizing
forces.
Musicologists who have interrogated the assumptions of musical modernism have
pointed out that both functional tonality and serialism perform an autonomous, interior
subjectivity that become criteria for establishing value. In Conventional Wisdom Susan
McClary addresses functional tonality, pointing out that, as ‘critics as different as Robert
Morgan and Jean-François Lyotard have argued, the gap between the spontaneous-seeming
events of the surface and the underlying structure produces the illusion of depth’.45 McClary
indicates that this expression of musical depth influences determinations of value when she
writes that ‘we tend to dismiss as primitive any cultural practices (whether blues or Philip
Glass) based on other assumptions’.46 Rose Subotnik’s Deconstructive Variations explores the
43 Boym, Common Places, 29–31.
44 Savenko, ‘Musica Sacra’, 160.
45 McClary, Conventional Wisdom, 67–8.
46 McClary, Conventional Wisdom, 67.
assumptions of modernist subjectivity as they inform the premises of structural listening. As

Andrew Dell’Antonio succinctly points out in his Introduction to Beyond Structural Listen-
ing?, structural listening considers musical works as autonomous structures through some
‘implicit and intelligible principle of unity’.47 Those who believe in this model of subjectivity,
music, and listening use it as a means to judge both individual works and to create a canon.48
Constructions of subjectivity become the means by which we assess the value of music.
The music that we take the time to create, listen to, or perform engages some aspect of our
experience of ourselves. Conflicts and debates arise when, for example, those with modernist
assumptions encounter music that operates according to different models of subjectivity – or
is simply not concerned with subjectivity at all. The Western reception of Pärt’s tintinnabuli
music demonstrates one such conflict: those who implicitly understand subjectivity in
modernist terms will never be satisfied with Pärt’s music; those who accept that interiority
can lead to some form of transcendence evaluate Pärt’s music more favourably.
Pärt’s early tintinnabuli pieces self-consciously reject modernism and progress narratives
in order to engage in a different model of subjectivity. In Part II of this essay I consider Tabula
Rasa as a musical narrative of transcendence that performs a Neoplatonic, Augustinian
model of subjectivity built directly from Orthodox praxis. Although the second movement of
Tabula Rasa offers a musical performance of timelessness, the piece is not ahistorical. Pärt’s
religious and musical conversions occurred during a time when religious revivalism offered
a possible alternative to dominant Soviet cultural narratives. Consequently, Tabula Rasa’s
tendency towards stasis is grounded in both religion and a rejection of musical and cultural
progress narratives. In Part III my argument will turn to another early tintinnabuli piece,
Spiegel im Spiegel, which I consider in terms of Western marketing and postmodern percep-
tions of ‘depth’ and ‘flatness’. Adorno is certainly right to interrogate the effects of commodi-
fication on subjectivity, but his stance does not account for experiences like the one Patrick
Giles describes at the outset of this essay. Giles’s story about AIDS patients prompts questions
that apply to anyone listening to Pärt’s music: What does this music perform? What value do
listeners who take a CD home and then live with it on a day-to-day basis find in Pärt’s music?
I use the AIDS story to prompt these questions, but the answers are applicable beyond those
who are suffering. Giles and his friends indicate from within Western capitalism the value of
Pärt’s music as it travels from one time and place to another.
II
Pärt’s supporters and detractors alike seem to interpret musical form as a metaphor for
history: tintinnabuli’s constructions of musical stasis inspire both sides of the debate,
47 Dell’Antonio, ‘Introduction’, 2.
48 Suggesting an alternative path to structural listening, Mitchell Morris points out that musicology as a discipline
implicitly debates the ‘goodness’ of particular musics; he argues that new critical avenues lie in transforming this
implicit debate into an explicit attention to ‘musical virtue’. Morris also draws on Taylor’s descriptions of modernist
subjectivity in terms of autonomy and instrumental reason, setting aside the issue of interiority. While there is some
sympathy between our arguments, my discussion of Pärt’s music and reception primarily picks up the issue of
interiority in order to explore constructions of subjectivity and ‘depth’ as criteria for musical value. See Morris,
‘Musical Virtue’.
providing grounds for either a positive, ‘timeless’ interpretation or a negative, ‘ahistorical’

one. By succumbing to the temptations of homology, both factions ignore the fairly obvious
fact that Peter Phillips raises – that Pärt’s music, and really all music, occurs at a particular
place and time. Pärt’s religious and musical conversions occurred during a moment when a
search for alternatives to Soviet ideology took the form of religious revivalism among young,
urban, Soviet intelligentsia.49 While those interested in spirituality were drawn to a range of
religious practices (from Buddhism to yoga),50 a contingent turned to the Orthodox Church
– including Pärt. As a consequence, the ideas of Orthodox Christianity directly shape the
processes of Pärt’s early tintinnabuli pieces.
Although it was marked by de-Stalinization and thaw, the Khrushchev era saw a radical
increase in repressive measures against all religions.51 Most of Khrushchev’s policies were
focused on the education system, in the belief that better-educated people would be more
inclined towards atheism. Courses on ‘scientific atheism’ were required at the secondary
level, which served to make schools the frontline in the battle against religion.52 Despite the
fact that the Soviet Union sought to erase religious activity, Vello Salo mentions moments of
increased religious interest in Estonia immediately following the Second World War and
again after Stalin’s death in 1953.53 The 1960s and 70s saw another period of religious
revivalism in the Soviet Union.54 John Anderson speculatively writes that ‘it is perhaps worth
noting that many of those young intellectuals who began to find religion attractive in the
1960s and 1970s had at least in part been educated under Khrushchev’.55 Born in 1935, Pärt
belongs to this generation: while attending Tallinn Conservatory in Estonia in the late 1950s,
he studied the obligatory subjects of ‘political economy, history of the Communist Party, and
the ‘‘science’’ of atheism’ as well as music.56
Historically, religion in a specifically Estonian context has been pulled between Luther-
anism, associated with the German occupation of the Baltic region, and Orthodoxy, intro-
duced by Russian Imperialism in the early eighteenth century.57 The nineteenth century
witnessed a wave of Orthodox conversions, which had ebbed by the turn of the twentieth
century; in the mid-1930s the majority of Estonians were Lutheran, while only twenty per
cent were Orthodox.58 In 1941 the Estonian Orthodox Church, like all regional Orthodox
Churches in the Soviet Union, was divested of its Estonian leadership and required to
recognize the Moscow Patriarchate.59 In terms of Estonian Lutheranism, the introduction of
49 Johnston, ‘Religio-Nationalist Subcultures Under the Communists’, 19.

50 Ellis, ‘The Religious Renaissance’, 252–3.
51 See Anderson, Religion, State and Politics, 6–37.
52 For more on education and atheism under Khrushchev see Sapiets, ‘Anti-Religious Propaganda and Education’, 103.
53 Salo, ‘The Struggle between the State and the Churches’, 199–201.
54 Several writers note that the beginnings of a religious revival seemed to coincide with Khrushchev’s renewed attack
on religion in the late 1950s. See Sapiets, ‘Anti-Religious Propaganda’, 98–9; Ellis ‘Religious Renaissance’, 256. Jane
Ellis, in The Russian Orthodox Church, provides a history of the religious revival during the 1960s and 70s and a
history of dissent within the Orthodox Church.
55 Anderson, Religion, State and Politics, 41.
57 Raun, Estonia and the Estonians, 24, 53.
58 Raun, Estonia and the Estonians, 135.
59 Goeckel, ‘The Baltic Churches and the Democritization Process’, 206.
Soviet communism to Estonia left the Lutheran Church weak. Robert F. Goeckel notes that
in the early 1940s the Lutheran Church ‘pursued a policy of accommodation toward the
[Soviet] regime’, and therefore Lutheranism in Estonia was seen as complicit with the Soviet
government and not associated with dissent before the 1980s.60
The relationship between Orthodox Church and Soviet State was marked by both violence
and complicity: the government’s drive against religion led to the burning of churches and
violence against believers.61 Although the Orthodox Church suffered state-sponsored
attacks, it was officially recognized by the government and was therefore required to uphold
Soviet policies.62 As early as the 1920s, this complicity drove many Orthodox faithful
underground.63 By the early 1960s, though, a few Orthodox priests reacted to Khrushchev’s
particularly repressive measures against religion and began to give voice to human rights
violations within the Soviet Union.64 The 1970s saw the flowering of an unofficial Orthodox
religious subculture, which arose partly as a result of informal discussion groups that grew
around individual priests and believers.65 A turn to Orthodoxy took on a spectrum of
possible meanings: a response to trauma, which prompted spirituality; a Russian nationalism
pervading the Orthodox Church; a dissatisfaction with Soviet religious policy, and with
Soviet policies in general; and support for human rights activism.66 As Jane Ellis points out,
the reasons behind the religious revival of the 1960s and 70s were varied, indicating that this
was not any kind of unified movement.67
In Estonia, Pärt seems to echo the nineteenth-century tradition of Orthodox conversion.
But, as Toivo Raun notes, a strong wave of Estonian nationalism emerged in the 1970s. Raun
describes this nationalist impulse as pointedly anti-Russian and linked to a flowering of
Estonian arts and literature, within which he situates Pärt’s music.68 Whereas non-Russian
states perceived the Orthodox Church as a force of Russification,69 the Lutheran Church,
because of its German source, was not associated with Estonian nationalism.70 Although
religion in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states is often wrapped up with nationalism,
it is not clear to what degree Pärt’s conversion and music have nationalist implications. It
does seem clear, though, that Pärt converted to Orthodoxy at a time when it spawned an
unofficial religious subculture that attracted people searching for alternative ways to create
meaning in their lives.
Pärt’s religious and musical conversions were also shaped by the ways in which spirituality
circulated through Soviet conservatories. In his brief history of Soviet composition after
Shostakovich, Gerard McBurney emphasizes the broad interest in religious musics that
60 Goeckel, ‘The Baltic Churches’, 204; see also Johnston, ‘Religio-Nationalist Subculture’, 26.
61 Anderson, Religion, State and Politics, 60–2.
62 Goeckel, ‘The Baltic Churches’, 206.
63 Ellis, Russian Orthodox Church, 4; see also Davis, A Long Walk to Church, 145–60.
64 Ellis, Russian Orthodox Church, 5, 290–5.
65 Ellis, Russian Orthodox Church, 288, 381–97; Davis, A Long Walk to Church, 146.
66 See Anderson, Religion, State and Politics, 85.
67 Ellis, Russian Orthodox Church, 288–9.
68 Raun, Estonia and the Estonians, 210, 215–16.
69 Goeckel, ‘The Baltic Churches’, 204.
70 Johnston, ‘Religio-Nationalist Subcultures’, 26.
swept the Soviet musical underground in the early 1970s, drawing a circle of influence that
included Pärt, Galina Ustvolskaya, Alfred Schnittke, and Edison Denisov, among others.71
Hillier notes the specific influence at the Tallinn Conservatory during the 1970s of the
Estonian composition teacher Heimar Ilves, who ‘stood out for his bold and original views
on spiritual matters’.72 Religious composition became more mainstream in the late 1980s
and early 90s, after Pärt’s emigration: McBurney writes how ‘astonishing was the spectacle of
erstwhile officials of the Soviet Union, such as Andrei Eshpai, clambering on the bandwagon
of religious music to scribble liturgies and requiems’.73
Pärt integrated religious ideas into his development of tintinnabuli music, creating a
compositional alternative to modernist musical and Soviet progress narratives. We have seen
how most writers, Hillier included, understand spiritual ideas as extra-musical. In a disser-
tation entitled Passio: the Iconography of Arvo Pärt, Carol Matthews Whiteman offers perhaps
the only attempt at a hermeneutic bridge linking religion and Pärt’s music. Comparing Pärt’s
compositional approach with Orthodox and early Roman Catholic iconography, Whiteman
argues that the composer subverts narrative strategies in order to create music that is like an
icon – fixed, unchanging over time, and an object for contemplation.74 While this interpret-
ation is compelling, I shall build my own hermeneutic bridge by drawing attention to an
overarching principle of Orthodox Christianity: governed by predetermined patterns, every
aspect of the Orthodox Church is meant to aid contact with the divine.75 Orthodoxy bears
the mark of Augustine’s Neoplatonism: a turn inwards through prayer, meditation, and
contemplation leads to God.
Hillier explains a basic principle of Christian art: God’s incarnation in the form of Jesus
makes subsequent depictions of the divine possible.76 Icons are not simply representations of
holy figures, although they act as sites of divine presence; their materiality in this world allows
a believer to gain access to the depicted holy figure. Using the physical as a means for
transcendence is relevant to all aspects of Orthodox praxis: Tatiana Vladyshevskaia explains
that icons, as well as vocal chant, bell ringing, and church buildings, all function as symbolic
conduits to the heavenly world. The hesychast tradition of prayer applies this model of
transcendence to the body. Both Hillier and Whiteman explain hesychasm as an ascetic
practice, preoccupied with meditative stillness and executed through the repetition of Jesus’s
name or a declaration of belief hundreds of times, if not indefinitely.77 Hesychasm is also a
very physical form of prayer, intended to provide a path to the divine beyond. Håkan
71 McBurney, ‘Soviet Music After the Death of Stalin’, 133–7.
72 Hillier, Arvo Pärt, 67–8.
73 McBurney, ‘Soviet Music’, 136.
74 Whiteman, ‘Passio’, 6–9.
75 My ensuing discussion of Orthodox Christianity focuses on praxis as a way of accessing theological/philosophical
ideas. This division between praxis and philosophy is one that has long occupied Orthodox thinkers. Håkan
Gunnarsson, in his study of Gregory Palamas, explains that while praxis and theory were conceptualized as separate
activities, Orthodox Christianity has often emphasized the material practice of faith (through icons, prayer, etc.) as
a way to engage philosophy; see Gunnarsson, Mystical Realism in the Early Theology of Gregory Palamas, 36–7.
76 Hillier, Arvo Pärt, 3–5. Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov also discusses God’s incarnation and icon painting; see
Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church, 139.
77 Hillier, Arvo Pärt, 6–10; Whiteman, ‘Passio’, 35. For a discussion of hesychasm see also Bulgakov, The Orthodox
Church, 147–8.
Gunnarsson writes: ‘Certainly the body was involved in a concrete way, but this could be seen
as yet another expression of the mutual relationship between outer and inner observance.
The prayer is, as it were, where the outer and inner aspects of hesychia meet.’78 Gunnarsson’s
description of hesychasm echoes Augustine’s spatial metaphor: turning inwards leads out-
wards to God.79
The use of prototypes ensures the spiritual authenticity of all representations (and
therefore the direct experience) of the divine.80 Icons purposefully avoid all markers that
would place them in particular times and places. Instead, icons ‘must remain formal,
abstract, schematic’, ensuring their power as sites of the ‘Gracious Presence’.81 The formulaic
style and technique of painting also pulls the viewer into the image’s world. Michel Quenot,
an icon scholar, argues that the refusal of depth – the flat backgrounds and lack of scenery –
indicate that the icon can be viewed as ‘outside of either time or space’.82 Much painting since
the Renaissance depends upon perspective, conceptualizing the vanishing point to be some-
where behind the canvas and creating the illusion of a separate world embodied by the
painting. Quenot argues that ‘iconic perspective is frequently reversed’: depicted holy figures
look out from the canvas, locating the vanishing point in front of the painting.83 The
two-dimensional ‘flatness’ of an icon enables a temporal continuity between the image, the
present reality in front of it, and the eternal, facilitating an experience of transcendence and
linking time and timelessness for the believer.
Tabula Rasa expresses a kind of inwardness that resonates with Orthodox, particularly
hesychastic, praxis. Without seeking a particular musical connection, Hillier references
Leonid Ouspensky to describe hesychasm as an intensely repetitive form of prayer that, like
many other meditative traditions, aims at establishing stillness, silence, and inner peace.84
Composed as a double concerto for two violins, string orchestra, and prepared piano, Tabula
Rasa’s first movement, ‘ludus’, opens with a dramatic gesture that almost immediately
foregrounds the role of silence. The solo violinists play two simultaneous fortissimo notes, an
a4 that pushes at the upper edge of the first soloist’s physical capabilities, and an a at the
bottom of the second violinist’s range. The effect is nothing short of a scream that arrives out
of nowhere and then dissolves into eight minims of silence. Not knowing exactly what will
happen next, a listener hears the initial jarring notes dissipate and then sits in a protracted
space of silence (see Example 1).
‘ludus’ (Latin for ‘game’) unfolds by alternating such periods of silence with a process-
driven canon. After the first silent eight minims, the string orchestra enters, organized into
78 Gunnarsson, Mystical Realism, 41.

79 For a concise explanation of Augustine’s Neoplatonism see McEnhill and Newlands, eds, Fifty Key Christian
Thinkers, 41.
80 Vladyshevskaia describes the use of prototypes with regard to painting, music, and architecture; see Vladyshevskaia,
‘On the Links’, 18, 20. Ouspensky addresses this issue specifically in terms of icon painting in the second volume of
his Ideology of the Icon, 486. Edward Williams focuses primarily on chant and bell ringing and the use of patterns and
prototypes; see Williams, ‘Aural Icons of Orthodoxy’, 3.
81 Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church, 140–4.
82 Quenot, The Icon, 106.
83 Quenot, The Icon, 106; see also Ouspensky, Ideology of the Icon, 495.
Example 1 Tabula Rasa, ‘ludus’, bb. 1–2.
three sets of pairs: the divided first violins; the second violins and violas; and the cellos and
basses. These pairs enter every half bar, beginning with the first violins on a2; each subsequent
pair plays the same musical material displaced an octave below the previous duo. The
behaviour of these pairs exhibits the defining characteristic of the tintinnabuli style: in each
pair one voice ascends and descends stepwise through the A minor scale while the other voice
freely plays the notes of the A minor triad. The canon grows through a process of addition
generated by the scalar voice of each pair: cycle 1 begins with four crotchets on an A; cycle 2
adds the B above and the G below; cycle 3 adds two notes above and below the first A; and so
on through eight cycles that finally expand to reach two octaves (see Example 2).
Example 2 Outline of the process for Tabula Rasa, ‘ludus’.
These incrementally growing waves of music bound by silence begin each cycle, the string
orchestra entering canonically in descending order and the basses then playing an A pedal
point while the two soloists return. The string orchestra ascends canonically in a fashion that
mirrors their entrance, while the prepared piano and one of the two soloists perform a final
duet that trails off into silence. ‘ludus’ operates according to this modified structural
repetition, within which listeners exclusively hear the diatonic pitches of the A minor scale.
Tabula Rasa’s constantly changing sameness privileges repetition and silence in order to
create, at least at first, a sense of stasis and stillness (see Example 3).
Tabula Rasa’s use of repetition and silence engages a kind of inwardness that moves
towards transcendence: ‘ludus’ fills its own ‘blank slate’ through the repetitive, additive
process, ultimately exceeding the parameters of tintinnabuli to reach a space of musical
transcendence in the second movement, ‘silentium’. As each cycle in ‘ludus’ incrementally
expands, the subsequent length of silence shrinks by one minim, creating the sense that the
additive process slowly fills in the regular, silent aporias until they disappear altogether. The
soloists’ initial screaming As set the parameters of A minor; each canon fills in this diatonic
Example 3 First canonic cycle, Tabula Rasa, ‘ludus’, bb. 3–10. © Copyright 1980, 2001 by Universal
Edition A.G., Wien. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.
space by linearly expanding through the A minor scale. As the scalar voice climbs up and
down, the triadic lines freely supply notes of the A minor triad. Pärt voices his pairs as closely
as possible; the largest interval between an individual pair is a fourth, and seconds predomi-
nate. This accretion of diatonic texture grows with each cycle, at times creating stacks of
minor seconds – what David Clarke calls ‘emancipated diatonic dissonance’.85
The solo duets that occupy the middle of each cycle also participate in the predominant
movement of expansion (see Example 3, bb. 3–7). The force of the additive process plus
the increasing complexity of each solo part causes a somewhat irregular lengthening of the
internal duets; by the last cycle the two solo violinists begin and end simultaneously with the
canon, having grown to fill the same space as the canon itself. As the expansion of the canon
and internal violin duet creates an ever denser, louder texture, the additive process causes the
trailing prepared piano and violin duet to become ever more delicate. Alternating with each
cycle, one of the two solo violinists performs an inverted version of the canon’s additive
‘theme’, with the bell-like prepared piano supplying notes from the A minor triad (see
Example 3, bb. 9–10). These solos, involving one accompanied solo violinist, seem vocal and
private in quality; the trailing duets extend their span incrementally, reaching higher and
sounding more fragile, providing a delicate deliverance to the inevitable interval of silence.
85 Clarke, ‘Parting Glances’, 682.

The final and eighth canon fills the blank slate that is Tabula Rasa: each canonic pair and
solo violinist extend through two octaves of A minor, engulfing the ever-shrinking gaps of
silence and obliterating the trailing solo violin and prepared piano duets. Just as a prototypi-
cal icon projects a vanishing point outwards in order to absorb the viewer into the icon’s
world and connect it to the divine, so Pärt’s expanding process absorbs both the silence and
the duets into its fabric, only to exceed its limits and find a space of transcendence. At the end
of the eighth cycle (letter Z), Pärt marks a cadenza that begins with all the players descending
one bar at a time through three octaves of the A minor scale. Both prepared piano and violin
soloists play agitated tremolos and harmonize each step of the scale with notes of the triad.
The orchestra, likewise, alternates the descending-scale notes between the sections of the
orchestra, each section sustaining its last note until its next turn to play. Within this wash of
trembling A minor, a section of the string orchestra occasionally plays and sustains an E out
of turn, as if the orchestra were trying to turn this descent down the A minor scale into a
dominant moment.
This fortissimo, unruly scalar descent never reaches its final a: after the penultimate note,
the prepared piano enters on an F Q1–F Q octave and the string orchestra plays a diminished
seventh chord based on D Q; dropping the D Q after one crotchet, the orchestra hammers out
crotchets on an F Q-based diminished triad. After the systematic working through of A minor,
Tabula Rasa exceeds the boundaries of tintinnabulation – these pitches should never occur
(see Example 4).
As ‘ludus’ drives towards its conclusion, the soloists play their most agitated music: voiced
a third apart, they arpeggiate the orchestral chords, always changing a bar after the orchestra.
At Fig. 9+3 the orchestra continues to beat out crotchets, now on an A-based diminished triad
with an added E O; two bars later they add the F Q back in, creating an inverted F Q-based
diminished seventh chord, but still holding on to E O. Not only has Tabula Rasa exceeded the
notes of A minor, but it pounds away at these minor seconds, building up a level of tension
that finally resolves back to A minor: first the orchestra resolves in 9+9, and one bar later the
soloists capitulate. This is not a turn to peaceful resolution – at least not yet; ‘ludus’’s
penultimate three bars continue the textural strife even through A minor, pulsing in crotch-
ets with the soloists’ fast and agitated arpeggios. At Fig. 9+13 the two soloists play the same
opening scream that began the entire movement; the orchestra lands on an A–C third and
holds it, fff, for a protracted four bars – too long and too loud to seem like a resolution.
The second movement, ‘silentium’, begins with the prepared piano playing a D minor
arpeggio in second inversion, offering the melodic move from a to d1 as the opening event of
the movement. It seems that only now, in the motion from A minor to D minor, does Tabula
Rasa find a sense of resolution. Listeners will again find a process of addition at work, but
‘silentium’ turns what had been an iterative canon into a mensuration canon, thereby
constructing time and musical surface in a strikingly different manner. The three sets of pairs
– now formed by the solo violinists beginning on d3, the first and second violins of the string
orchestra beginning on d2, and the violas and cellos beginning on d – each successively add
two notes, one above and below their respective central pitches. The pairs move at different
rates of time, the solo violinists playing the longest note values while the viola and cello play
Example 4 Tabula Rasa, ‘ludus’, Fig. 9+1–5. © Copyright 1980, 2001 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien.
Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.
the shortest. Through this process, ‘silentium’ offers a musical approximation of transcend-
ence. Pärt’s layering of time invokes the coexistence of lived time and the eternal – icons
depict a world that exists in some divine space while engaging a viewer trapped in the
day-to-day living of life. In The Perennial Philosophy Aldous Huxley argues that many of the
world’s religions perceive a connection between the body that is lived in real time with a spirit
that is timeless.86
While ‘ludus’ had drawn attention to its processual growth through the structural repeti-
tion and passages of silent demarcation, ‘silentium’ creates a musically ‘silent’ space where
the dynamic level, texture, and pace are unwaveringly constant. Pärt’s mensuration canon
pulls the listener’s ear away from tracing obvious, process-driven growth to the unrelenting
wash of diatonic lines rubbing up against one another without need for resolution. The
prepared piano and bass mark off intervals of time that regularly increase by two bars; as
these intervals become longer, the music continuously works through its D minor diatonic
polyphony, creating a sense of changeless stasis.
‘Silentium’ also creates a space of transcendence by smoothly exceeding ‘ludus’’s previous
boundaries. As the process plays itself out, the first solo violin reaches a3 by its fourth cycle –
in the earlier orchestral canon, this pitch had constituted the orchestral first violins’ upper
boundary in their last cycle. The note that had marked a limit in ‘ludus’ is now effortlessly
played as ‘silentium’ continues, and both solo violinists spend much of their time playing
artificial harmonics in order logically to work out the musical formula. While the soloists
ascend to their peak and subsequently descend, the lower voices begin to bleed into each
other in order to accommodate their ever-growing cycles. The requirements of the musical
formula mean that all the members of the string orchestra reach the limits of their aural
boundaries rather quickly. Boundaries no longer matter, for the scalar and triadic lines slide
from the instrument to which they belong, to an instrument that can play the needed notes,
and then return to the ‘proper’ instrument almost inaudibly with smooth and effortless
fluidity.
The pairs of voices drop out one by one as ‘silentium’ winds through its sinuous
polyphony. While ‘ludus’ had imploded after each pair of voices extended to two octaves,
those kinds of limits no longer operate here. The violas and cellos reach a four-octave span,
dropping out at Fig. 20+3 after playing D, and finally passing down to C. The divided
orchestral violins perform a complete three-octave span and then fade away. This finally
leaves only the two solo violinists, working at the slowest rate of time. As they make their final
descent, the solo violinists reach their lower limit and pass on the paired melodic motion to
the orchestral violas and cellos at Fig. 25+2 and then to the cellos and basses at Fig. 26+2. The
spare and delicate texture of a single pair becomes quieter as the descent continues. Each note
fades away before the next, and as the scalar voice almost inaudibly reaches down to what
should be the penultimate E, the music simply dissipates. Pärt does not provide the final D of
his piece, and the music seems as if it has simply passed on to another realm that we cannot
hear.
86 Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 187–8.

Tabula Rasa is a work deeply grounded in its own historical moment: Pärt’s personal
interest in religion during a time of broader Orthodox revivalism led him to incorporate
religious ideas into his compositional idiom. The emphasis upon prototypes and transcend-
ence within the Orthodox Church provides a concrete hermeneutic path into Tabula Rasa, a
piece that uses process-driven patterns to set limits, exceed them, and offer a musical
expression of a spiritual interiority that leads to transcendence.
In ‘The Present and the Unpredictable Past’ Margarita Mazo includes Pärt in a group of
Soviet composers who turned away from a progressive conception of time: ‘The new
experiential perception of time as time-space, as dlenie (prolongation) is indicative of several
composers (Knaifel, Pärt, Tarnopolsky, for example) for whom time has lost its linear
significance – from the past to the future – and its cyclic significance as well.’87 In terms of its
use of tonal material, Tabula Rasa performs a microscopic view of a single cadence: each
canonic iteration in ‘ludus’ takes listeners deeper within A minor, leading to a dissonant
expansion out of diatonic A minor and a resolution to D minor in ‘silentium’. Pärt prolongs
the movement from one key to another to such an extent that he creates stasis and bypasses
the teleological drive within functional tonality.
By turning to non-functional tonal material, Pärt rejects the music-historical progress
narrative that led to serialism. Savenko notes Pärt’s sometimes heatedly anti-modernist
sentiments,88 and Hillier directly quotes Pärt:
I am not sure there could be progress in art. Progress as such is present in science.
Everyone understands what progress means in the technique of military warfare.
Art presents a more complex situation [. . .] many art objects of the past appear to
be more contemporary than our present art. How do we explain it? [. . .] Art has to
deal with eternal questions, not just sorting out the issues of today.89
In an interview with Geoff Smith, Pärt claims that Tabula Rasa was a direct response to the
Darmstadt School.90 And in fact Tabula Rasa’s systematic repetitions bound to strict sets of
pitches seem to adapt serialism to tonal material in a work that ultimately rejects both
approaches.91
Pärt’s compositional use of polyphony, hints of modality, and techniques like mensura-
tion canon signify a rejection of Soviet music history narratives. His interest in early music
entailed searching beyond the bounds of the music history narrative at Soviet conservatories,
which began with J. S. Bach.92 Mazo couches her account of 1960s and 70s Soviet musical life
in terms of predominant cultural constructions of history and considerations of the past:
In previous years, the official culture set its eyes on ‘the radiant future for the whole
of mankind’, as political doctrine demanded. The past existed but only to the
87 Mazo, ‘The Present and the Unpredictable’, 394.

88 Savenko, ‘Musica Sacra’, 160.
90 Smith, ‘An Interview with Arvo Pärt’, 19.
91 Savenko notes a similarity between Pärt’s tintinnabuli music and serialism; see Savenko, ‘Musica Sacra’, 165.
92 Whiteman, ‘Passio’, 12.
extent it could serve the official line. The past existed as myths made up of remote
facts and episodes, tailored to fit official politics, but not as an unbroken historical
continuum that lived through human experience and culture.93
Mazo sees composers of the 1960s and 70s, including Pärt, Alfred Schnittke, and others, as
creating corrective musical alternatives to a dominant cultural narrative that ignored or
falsified the past in the service of a glorified future. Pärt employs a spiritually inspired stasis
to create an alternative to musical, historical, and cultural progress narratives.
III
It was four years after Pärt’s emigration to Austria and then Germany that Manfred Eicher
released the 1984 ECM New Series album Tabula Rasa, which included, in addition to the
title piece, Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten (1976) and two different arrangements of
Fratres (1977). This album initiated what would turn out to be the far-reaching popularity of
Arvo Pärt’s music in Western Europe and the United States. Eicher’s decisions concerning
the packaging of the album may suggest that holy minimalism began life as a marketing
strategy before filtering into journalistic reception. Wolfgang Sandner’s liner notes present
the twin themes of ‘Pärt as holy figure’ and ‘tintinnabuli as timeless’. Sandner casts Pärt as a
spiritual mystic whose music offers a religious experience: ‘At times, Pärt’s compositions are
like the Hesychastic prayers of a musical anchorite: mysterious and simple, illuminating and
full of love.’94 Pärt’s descriptions of his own music are sprinkled throughout the liner notes,
but his words never stand alone, as Sandner consistently tells listeners how to perceive his
comments. When Pärt explains his ideas about temporality, Sandner leaps from static music
to a transhistorical timelessness: ‘Musically, all the ages mingle at the break of Arvo Pärt’s
dawn.’95
The album’s visual elements reinforce Sandner’s themes. Eicher includes an icon-like
photograph on the second page, depicting Pärt from mid-body up, set against a background
so blurry that markers of time and place are effaced (see Figure 1). Against this indetermi-
nate, almost two-dimensional setting, Pärt’s body rises up from the bottom left corner of the
photo, placing his face roughly in the middle of the frame. Pärt’s eyes are cast downwards in
front of him; as is typical of icons, he seems to look outwards from the photograph to a
reverse vanishing point in front of the page. Sandner describes tintinnabuli as a quasi-
spiritual experience that performs a meditative simplicity – a theme that resonates with the
album’s cover art. In a minimal style, the square, white album cover frames a light grey box
set roughly in the middle (see Figure 2). Within the grey box, white lettering lists the order of
pieces and performers; above the grey box hangs Arvo Pärt’s name and the album title,
Tabula Rasa; beneath the box in tiny lettering sits ‘ECM NEW SERIES’. On the back cover,
in further austerity, a smaller pale blue square hovers without any other lettering or
information.
93 Mazo, ‘The Present and the Unpredictable’, 375.
94 Sandner, liner notes, [17].
Figure 1 Photograph of Arvo Pärt © ECM Records, CD booklet for Tabula Rasa, ECM New Series 1275.
Almost a decade later, the characteristics of ECM’s 1984 Tabula Rasa had become
conventions, themes of simplicity and spirituality as fodder for variations in marketing.
The 1993 ECM album Te Deum includes pictures of Pärt and his performers rehearsing in
a highly vaulted church covered in iconic paintings. Several photographs show Pärt stand-
ing alone against one of the church walls, as if he could be yet another of the religious
figures depicted there (see Figure 3). In 1999 ECM’s New Series issued a recording entitled
Arvo Pärt: Alina, which includes only two early tintinnabuli works, Für Alina and Spiegel
im Spiegel, repeatedly alternating on the CD one after the other. The pale blue square from
Tabula Rasa’s back cover now encompasses the entire Alina CD; with the recording
information listed in a column on the back cover, the front cover sees no clutter of
content. As with the 1984 album, Pärt’s name, the record title, and recording label grace
the top and bottom of the front cover – in between one sees only that square expanse of
pale blue.
The marketing of Pärt’s tintinnabuli music transforms the influence of religion in terms of
icons, transcendence, and timelessness into the visual and linguistic rhetoric of holy mini-
malism. Does commodification and marketing leech out spiritual ‘depth’ from Pärt’s music?
Are Pärt’s tintinnabuli works as ‘flat’ as his record covers? Implicit in these kinds of
questions, and those raised earlier by Kosman, Davidson, Clarke, and Fisk, are the standards
and expectations of a modernist, autonomous subjectivity. By pointing to Adorno as an
example, Taylor explains that modernists understand interiority as a space of authenticity
Figure 2 Front cover of CD booklet for Tabula Rasa, ECM New Series 1275 © ECM Records.
that offers refuge from the dehumanizing machinery of the outside world.96 Adorno and
Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment points to the myriad ways in which capitalism
chips away at an authentic, inner subjectivity. For Adorno, Beethoven is one of the few artists
who successfully creates an autonomous art that acknowledges, and therefore resists, the
vagaries of market forces.97 Decades later, when Fredric Jameson discusses the proliferation
of surfaces typical of late market capitalism and the postmodern condition, he understands
‘flatness’ as a lack of authentic, inner depth. Jameson finds late capitalist market economies
to be a space in which no inner selves can function: there are only simulacra that take the
place of centred, original ideas and selves.98 The anti-holy minimalist stance echoes this
96 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 456–60.

97 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of the Enlightenment, 157.
98 See Jameson, ‘The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, 1–54. This essay was first published in 1984 in the New Left
Review.
Figure 3 Photograph of Arvo Pärt © Tõnu Tormis/ECM Records, CD booklet for Te Deum, ECM New
Series 1505.
suspicion of commodification: How can ‘genuine spiritual depth’ exist when faith becomes
a marketing tool?
Particular strains of musical discourse conceptualize a musical work as if it should
function like modern subjectivity – contain inner depth that is independent from the outside
world. Susan McClary, in her chapter ‘What Was Tonality?’ in Conventional Wisdom, notes
the wide range of theorists (of music and culture) who hear ‘depth’ in functional tonality.
Drawing upon conventions developed in eighteenth-century Europe, McClary describes the
elements of tonality expressive of such ‘depth’: the hierarchical importance of the tonic;
the logic with which modulations are handled and their path of return to the tonic; the
construction of closure through cadences; and the manipulation of desire for closure
through methods of prolongation.99
Surface–depth metaphors maintain a hold over music theory regarding functional tonal-
ity as well as serialism. In his essay ‘Going Flat’ Robert Fink focuses upon Schenkerian
analysis and Fortean set theory, explaining that both systems view the musical surface as a
projection of ‘deep’ structure and hierarchy that guarantee ‘that all great music has hidden
organic unity, no matter how complex, chaotic, or incomplete the listener’s experience of its
‘‘surface’’ may be’.100 Consequently, the musical surface acts as a boundary, demarcating the
difference between interiority and the external world, between what is ‘inside’ the music and
the ‘extra-musical’. In terms of Adorno, Rose Subotnik draws attention to structural ele-
ments, like motivic self-development, which, through their inner logic, ensure a musical
work’s autonomy: ‘The more a musical structure approximates the self-contained intelligi-
bility characteristic of logic, the more it can and does free itself from what Adorno sees as the
deceptions or falsehoods inevitably fostered through social ideology in order to maintain the
power of existing institutions.’101 Like the model of subjectivity Taylor describes, some
musical works express depth and maintain autonomy from the contaminating forces of the
outside world by working through particular kinds of logic – the hierarchical and teleological
systems of functional tonality coupled with motivic development and later serialist strategies.
McClary, Fink, and Subotnik seek to denaturalize such perceptions of musical depth and
highlight their role in constructing musical value. Pärt’s tintinnabuli works, like Tabula Rasa
and Spiegel im Spiegel, operate logically, but Pärt’s imminently logical processes reject both
functional tonality and serialism. Consequently, the static repetition in a piece like Spiegel im
Spiegel, a musically ‘flat’ work, sounds to Pärt’s critics as lacking in depth and, therefore,
value.
Spiegel im Spiegel’s piano and violin duet creeps into audibility.102 Its exclusively F major
texture unfolds slowly via the pianist’s initial F major broken triads and the violin’s entrance
at bar 4. The delicate polyphonic process offers predominantly two, at most four, simul-
taneous pitches at any given moment. Spiegel im Spiegel bears a striking resemblance to
Tabula Rasa: through the systematic addition of two notes, one above and one below the
violin’s central a1, each cycle unfurls incrementally, regularly increasing the melodic span
until roughly two octaves are fulfilled. Each cycle also ascends and descends alternately
through its portion of the scale, always returning to the anchoring, mediant a1 (see Example
5). This crystalline surface reflects within it a parallel process – we are, after all, gazing at, or
rather listening to, a mirror within a mirror. The pianist’s F major triads seemed initially to
supply the requisite triadic voice to the violin’s additive scales. What becomes readily
99 McClary, Conventional Wisdom, 67.
100 Fink, ‘Going Flat’, 103.
101 Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations, 154.
102 Spiegel im Spiegel was composed for piano and violin, but there are several recordings of the piece that change the
instrumentation. For the sake of convenience and clarity I shall refer only to the violin and piano as the instruments
performing this piece.
Example 5 Outline of the process for Spiegel im Spiegel.
apparent, though, is that the bottom note of each triad outlines the same melodic process as
that of the violin, but at an interval of a sixth below. The pianist’s right hand integrates notes
from the F major scale along with its triadic pattern (see Example 6).
Example 6 Spiegel im Spiegel, bb. 1–11. © Copyright 1978 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien.
Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.
Pärt places his composition squarely within the tonal world only to refuse the hierarchical
and teleological conventions of functional tonality. In Spiegel im Spiegel hierarchy seems to
be skewed, flattened, de-clawed even: the pitch of F exists as an implied solar presence, a tonic
so uncontested that it does not need to insist upon its own repetition. Both the violin and
piano perform off-centre F major scales by privileging a1 and c2 respectively as their nodes of
perpetual return. Growing out of the third and fifth scale degrees, the violin and piano play
scales that reach to the outer limits of g and b P2 (for the violin) and b P and d2 (for the piano).
As these scales emanate outwards, F does not serve as a goal in any way, providing instead
another step along the path like all the other notes of the scale. In fact, Pärt organizes a kind
of serialist’s tonality – serialism mirrored within tonality. No pitch repeats until each
subsequent cycle concludes; within F major as the unchallenged terrain, no one pitch
dominates over any other.
While Pärt himself may have slid from the strict diet of atonality to the creamy sweetness
of triadic sonorities, his avoidance of traditional tonal practices moves Josiah Fisk to write:
‘The absence of inherent musical substance in their [the holy minimalists Pärt, Górecki, and
Tavener] compositions is intentional. In the New Simplicity, the development of ideas in the
manner of Western classical music is carefully avoided.’103 Assumptions regarding musical
depth and functional tonality motivate Fisk’s denigration of what he hears as purely surface-
level music. What Fisk finds offensive is not the turn away from atonality back to tonality, as
Savenko pointed to, but the simplicity with which apparently tonal materials are deployed.
Fisk’s comments regarding Górecki’s Third Symphony are particularly telling and represent
his central attitude to Górecki’s music, as well as that of Pärt and Tavener: ‘The listener who
approaches the Górecki Symphony No. 3 with the idea of discovering its inner life quickly
runs into a hard realization: There isn’t any inner life. The monochrome textures of the
music’s surface are not merely the skin enveloping other layers of thought; they are the only
layer.’104 But Pärt’s music is not expressive of an autonomous, ‘deep’ subjectivity; instead, as
we saw with Tabula Rasa, Pärt musically engages a model of subjectivity for which the
contemplation of surfaces leads inwards as a path to God. In seeking to understand how a
piece of late twentieth-century music works, we should acknowledge the biases of modern-
ism and only engage them when applicable. On the other hand, taking Pärt’s tintinnabuli
music on its own terms does not comprise a capitulation to myth making. Instead, a
consideration of Pärt’s musical surface should address its details of temporality and texture
to consider its potential meaning in terms of both Soviet history and Western audiences.
Maintaining a consistently delicate texture, Spiegel im Spiegel marks its own periodic,
processual growth. The pianist’s left hand rings forth only a single note from the F major triad
at any given time – except at the end of each cycle. Marking the boundaries between cycles,
the pianist’s left hand alternately pulls our ear to an F and F1 octave in the bass or crosses over
the ever-arpeggiating right hand and rings forth from the piano’s upper register an octave c3
and c4. The music that unravels between these subtle markers of time seems perpetually the
same despite the systematic addition of notes; consequently, the piece begins to feel like a
single entity unfolding to occupy incrementally more temporal space. Consider a rather
kitschy example of time-lapse photography: a viewer observing a flower grow sees only this
one flower, and yet the flower continuously changes. The line between constancy and change
blurs before our eyes (or, in listening to Pärt’s music, before our ears) – an antinomy in which
the components have latched on to each other in an enmeshed and inseparable embrace.
Listening to Spiegel im Spiegel, one hears the same notes come about repeatedly in exactly the

same manner. Each cycle brings such systematic and regular change that a listener incorpo-
rates these alterations while focusing on the constant (yet growing) musical contour. Regular
change no longer appears like change at all; change turns into its opposite: stasis.
In Seeds of Time Fredric Jameson contemplates the antinomies, as he terms them, of
postmodernism: paradoxes existing in tension with one another with no hope for resolution.
In their tight, oppositional status, these paradoxes flip around and turn into one another. The
antinomy of constancy and change in particular occupies Jameson’s mind, and he concerns
himself with the manner in which this and other postmodern paradoxes play themselves out
through the logic of late capitalist market economies. He argues that modes of economic
production shape a society’s experience of time; as an example he describes the perpetual
demolition and reconstruction of buildings in postmodern urban centres. The continuous
upheaval, the perpetual tearing down of buildings only to put new ones up indicates a social
fabric dependent upon change. Citizens of urban centres experience this unremitting up-
heaval to such an extent that chaos and change become endemic characteristics of day-to-day
life, of the current economic and social system – change transforms into stasis.105 The
systematic, predictable changes brought about in each cycle of Spiegel im Spiegel constitute a
perpetual change so regularized that it sounds like stasis.
Within a single tonal sphere we experience the nuances found therein: the violin’s initial
entry on g1, for example, introduces into what has been a world of thirds the sonority of a
second, the reverberation of a mild, sweet dissonance that pulls at our ear for long enough
that we start to notice the grain of the violin’s sound, the slight swell of this single note, and
then the move to a1, which is sustained for the same amount of time, and again hear those
details of sonority. Pärt’s microscopic exploration of a single key-area plunges us so deep
within F major that functional tonal hierarchies no longer operate; instead of listening for the
long-term build-up of tension and release, we hear each note contain within it the possibili-
ties of both tension and release, the possibilities of being the leading note and tonic all at once.
The process of addition and the alternation of ascending and descending lines efficiently
cause the occurrence of a kind of systemic affective leap: as the scale grows and emanates on
either side of the central a1, the return to a1 requires an ever wider, ever more noticeable, and
ever more poignant leap to bring us back to where we began. As listeners, we always already
have all that we could desire: F is constant; the violin’s and piano’s respective melodic returns
to a1 and c2 are always ensured; each subsequent note in the scale is guaranteed; and we hear
each note of the process both as a resolution of the previous note and creating desire for the
next. We are in a space of constant gratification, a realm of simultaneous and constant desire
and fulfilment. The pacing – the unwaveringly slow speed and rhythmic tempo – provides
time and space for a listener to focus in on a single note and experience it, its overtones, and
any sort of nuance (such as vibrato or lack thereof) that the performer chooses to enact,
before hearing it slide on to the next note.
105 Jameson, The Seeds of Time, 1–21. These essays were originally a set of talks given in 1991 at the University of
California, Irvine.
Spiegel im Spiegel may resist traditional markers of musical ‘depth’, but its surface is
replete with an emotional charge. We have found our way to another of Jameson’s antino-
mies: the projection of depth images upon a flat surface. Jameson offers Proust as an example
of what he terms ‘anamorphic flatness’: through a description of Proust’s room, the objects
owned by Proust, readers infer what kind of person he is – we infer depth and internal
personality from tangible objects. Surface and depth, like stasis and change, again lock into
an indistinguishable embrace.106
In response to Jameson’s Proust, I offer Andrei Tarkovsky, whose film Solaris (1972) can
function as a counterpart to Pärt’s music. Solaris’s narrative of space exploration gone awry
invokes the Cold War. While scientific progress narratives and global competition with the
United States propelled the space race, Tarkovsky’s cosmos is not a realm on to which man
exerts his will with success. Instead, we follow psychologist Kris Kelvin to a space station
where a scientific experiment on an unidentified planet results in a cosmic lake that functions
as an intuitive force field. This cosmic body of water ‘reads’ the minds of the Soviet astronauts
as they work in the space station, making their thoughts and dreams materially and externally
manifest. In fact, Kelvin’s long-dead wife appears – and continually reappears despite his
initial efforts to get rid of her. Surface and interiority collapse: instead of a ‘flat’ world that
lacks subjectivity, the surfaces are replete with subjectivity – material expressions of interi-
ority. In order to film this narrative of space that expresses an intense interiority, Tarkovsky
built a room for the Solaris film set lined entirely with mirrors – Pärt’s ‘mirror’ music, Spiegel
im Spiegel, and Tarkovsky’s mirror-like space both seek to reflect the depths of subjectivity
and interiority on to material and musical surfaces. Tarkovsky takes the optimistic Soviet
cultural progress narrative, described by Margarita Mazo and certainly at work during
the Cold War space race, and turns it inwards to explore Kelvin’s faith and love for his
wife, whose cosmic resurrection exceeds the bounds of his knowledge and understanding.
Likewise, Pärt’s ‘flat’ music pulls away from hierarchical constructions and progress narra-
tives to create an alternative space in which the surface expresses depth.
David Clarke acknowledges that Pärt’s music supplies a critique of progress narratives; he
mentions a broader postmodern critique of progress narratives only to claim quickly that
there is no real alternative to modernism – postmodernism would amount to a quicksand of
relativism.107 Clarke treats postmodernism, which constitutes a whole world of intense
debate and nuance, as if it were simply and only about relativism. In fact, Jameson’s
description of the antinomies of postmodernism allows us to account for the multifaceted
situations that surround Pärt’s tintinnabuli music. Pieces like Tabula Rasa and Spiegel im
Spiegel were composed while Pärt still lived in Soviet Estonia, and they work as responses to
Soviet progress narratives, musical modernism, and religious revivalism that were part of
1970s Soviet culture. When Pärt moves to Western Europe, ECM Records releases, markets,
and sells his music. To ask which side of the holy minimalist debate is correct misses the
historical reality of Pärt’s music: tintinnabuli works through experiences of spirituality at the
106 Jameson, Seeds of Time, 9.

107 Clarke, ‘Parting Glances’, 682, 684.
same time that it is wrapped up with commodification. Simultaneously ‘deep’ and ‘flat’,
tintinnabuli interact with two models of subjectivity. Pärt’s music self-consciously engages in
constructions of musical temporality and surface that deal with stasis, continuity, and
transcendence – a meditative inwardness that leads beyond itself. To evaluate Pärt’s music
negatively in terms of modernism, as Clarke does, is to ignore Pärt’s self-conscious rejection
of modernism and his music’s historical reality.
IV
One could follow through on an Adornian hermeneutic and argue that Spiegel im Spiegel’s
musical surface, because it simultaneously fulfils and generates desire on a note by note basis,
supplies a structural analogy to capitalism.108 In the Dialectic of the Enlightenment Adorno
and Horkheimer argue that capitalism creates desire just as it makes one think it is satisfying
that desire.109 In these terms, holy minimalism would form a variety of false consciousness:
a fan would mistake Pärt’s music as ‘deep’, whereas in fact its musical surface mimics
commodification’s structuring of desire. Although Adorno’s strategies supply powerful
modes of critique and resistance to dominant ideologies, reducing a work like Tabula Rasa or
Spiegel im Spiegel to false consciousness would account neither for Pärt’s position in Soviet
history, nor for the listening experiences of the AIDS patients Giles narrates in his review.
People regularly have meaningful experiences with music that is otherwise recorded,
marketed, and commodified. In Marxism and Literature Raymond Williams recognizes
capitalism’s insatiable capacity for incorporating all forms of culture and counter-culture.
Indeed, holy minimalism is one such example of incorporation, where Soviet history,
religious practices, and musical experiences turn into post-communist and spiritual chic to
sell records. But capitalism can never entirely incorporate a cultural phenomenon; Williams
describes society as an ongoing negotiation between hegemony and individual activity.110
Listeners express individual agency through their experiences of musical meaning.
In a critique of what she terms the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
observes that critical models like ‘false consciousness’ encourage scholarship to unveil a
seemingly static truth. While such tools can powerfully resist ideology, she argues that they
have become so normative in recent critical practice that they are on their way to becoming
the very reified processes that they had initially sought to resist. Sedgwick calls for a
‘reparative hermeneutic’ that would pay attention to the performative aspects of knowledge
and even destigmatize scholarly attention to expressions of hope and comfort.111 Unveiling
holy minimalism as a form of myth making pushes ideology aside in order to address the
historical reality of Pärt’s music. With Sedgwick in mind, though, the question regarding the
spiritual authenticity of Pärt’s music falls away – in fact, judging the value of Pärt’s music
according to modernism, or basing value on a particular model of subjectivity, would fall
108 This kind of structural analogy is the basis of Robert Fink’s discussion of American minimalism in the 1980s; see
Fink, Repeating Ourselves.
109 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of the Enlightenment, 142.
110 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 81–9, 108–14.
111 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 123–51.
away as well. Instead, the question arises: What does Pärt’s music perform in a particular
setting? Such a change in question reflects a change in criteria for assessing musical value,
turning away from modernist standards to consider what particular musical practices do in
specific contexts. In a 1970s Soviet milieu, Pärt’s attention to religion and musical stasis
forms a rejection of musical, cultural, and historical progress narratives. In a late twentieth-
century Western context, Pärt’s early tintinnabuli works are heard as expressions of
continuity that resonate with representations and experiences of illness.
Spiegel im Spiegel figures prominently in the 2001 film Wit, an adaptation of Margaret
Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a literature professor, Vivian Bearing, and her
experience of cancer. Vivian’s desire to end her suffering and her doctors’ desire for further
testing conflict; consequently, her ‘do not resuscitate order’ is neglected and her body is
almost battered in the effort to bring her back to life. Vivian’s nurse arrives to ensure that the
resuscitation efforts cease. As the film concludes, Vivian’s body lies in her hospital bed, the
camera zooms out very slowly, and Spiegel im Spiegel plays in the underscore. Emma
Thompson, who portrays Vivian, recites John Donne’s ‘Death Be Not Proud’ in a voiceover,
the music continuing after the poem’s end and playing out over the closing credits. As
Thompson recites the last line of Donne’s poem, she says, ‘And death shall be no more,
comma, death, thou shalt die.’112 In speaking the punctuation, she recalls a scene remem-
bered earlier in the film, a scene in which Vivian as a young graduate student is taken to task
by her advisor for a poor analysis of this very poem. Expounding upon the metaphysical
implications of punctuation, her professor says to her:
Nothing but a breath – a comma – separates life from life everlasting. It is very
simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something
to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It’s a comma, a pause.
This way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from this poem,
wouldn’t you say? Life, death. Soul, God. Past, present. Not inseparable barriers,
not semicolons, just a comma.113
In this context, Spiegel im Spiegel’s stasis no longer signifies a rejection of modernism.

Instead, Spiegel im Spiegel’s unrelenting continuity as Vivian dies and the film ends reinforces
Wit’s ideas surrounding death and dying: that the boundaries between life and death may not
be as great as we may think them to be.
Hillier opens his Pärt monograph by writing: ‘All music emerges from silence, to which
sooner or later it must return. [. . .] Arvo Pärt’s music seems to me to testify to this concept
in which silence and death are creatively linked, and thereby to reaffirm the spiritual basis of
our existence, in all its frailty and potential beauty.’114 Hillier, at times, seems to be making
rather grand claims on behalf of Pärt’s music; without specific evidence, such claims seem to
shade over into a version of holy minimalist rhetoric. Pärt himself describes tintinnabuli as a
112 The final recitation of this poem is not written into Edson’s play and is only a feature of the HBO film. For details
of the film see Discography, Filmography below.
113 Edson, Wit, 14–15.
space of comfort: ‘This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comfort me.’115
Couched by Sandner’s rhetoric in the 1984 Tabula Rasa liner notes, such a comment also
seems to feed the aura of holy minimalism. And yet, many listeners respond to tintinnabuli
music as both a sonic metaphor for life and death and a space of aural comfort. In an essay for
the New Yorker Alex Ross mentions that several people with serious illnesses have expressed
to him the kind of solace they find in Pärt’s music. He writes: ‘One or two such anecdotes
seem sentimental; a series of them begins to suggest a slightly uncanny phenomenon.’116 Ross
also draws attention to Patrick Giles, whose real-life account of AIDS patients listening to
‘silentium’ during their illness and as they die teases out the very legitimate experience of
continuity and comfort that this music performs, indifferent to commodification and holy
minimalist marketing strategies.
Tabula Rasa resonated with Giles’s group of AIDS patients because they could filter their
experiences of illness through the music. The work’s process creates a stable space, one that
changes consistently (like Spiegel im Spiegel) but creates the overall effect of continuity and
stasis. This musical stability created a safe listening space for a group of people who were in
the last stages of illness. By remaining in a single key-area, Pärt creates constant diatonic
dissonances that do not search for resolution; major seconds and minor sevenths rub up
against one another, producing a mild sense of tension without the pull for resolution
inherent in functional tonality. This kind of poignant musical texture, coupled with continu-
ous repetition, a gradual rate of change, and a high tessitura, are all musical attributes
identified by Elisabeth Le Guin in ‘Uneasy Listening’ as devices that create a space of comfort
and security. Le Guin focuses upon easy listening and smooth jazz radio programming as
affording aural respite from the daily sonic violence that we cannot avoid.117 For Giles, the
AIDS patients he worked with, and their friends and family, Tabula Rasa created a space of
comfort that they heard as ‘a balm’ during a time of intense physical and emotional pain. In
‘silentium’’s final inching towards silence, its layering of time that in a religious context
expressed a kind of transcendence, they heard, as Giles writes, an ‘ending definite but not to
be feared’.
Giles’s review draws our attention away from the value system of modernist subjectivity to
the incredibly important value of comfort that Tabula Rasa performed in his late 80s AIDS
clinic. By letting go of the expectation that Pärt’s music should operate according to a
particular model of subjectivity and musical paradigm, we can start to observe how his early
tintinnabuli compositions perform in particular settings. The process-driven stasis of Tabula
Rasa, composed in the 1970s, engages a narrative of transcendence that adapts Orthodox
praxis and moves Pärt out from under a set of modernist musical and historical progress
narratives. While pieces like Tabula Rasa and Spiegel im Spiegel might seem ‘flat’ according to
functional tonal and serial standards, their musical surface focuses the desire-generating
qualities of tonality into the movement of one note to the next. Pärt’s musical surface, replete
with diatonic dissonance and emotional depth, links the premodern with the postmodern,

116 Ross, ‘Consolations’.
117 Le Guin, ‘Uneasy Listening’, 5–8.
the spiritual with the commodified, in an unresolvable embrace. To understand Pärt’s music,
a critical eye is needed towards the myth-making impulse found in marketing, reception, and
even scholarship. But demystifying the holy minimalist aura accounts for neither the nature
nor the power of Pärt’s works. An acute attention to the performative and contextual aspects
of Pärt’s music supplies a window on the spectrum of values that early tintinnabuli pieces
offer listeners.
Discography, Filmography
Nicholls, Mike, director. Wit [W;t]. TV film based on the play by Margaret Edson (1998), screenplay by Nicholls
and Emma Thompson. HBO 2001.
Pärt, Arvo. Tabula Rasa. Gidon Kremer (violin), Tatjana Grindenko (violin), Alfred Schnittke (prepared piano),
Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra, cond. Saulus Sondeckis (recorded 1977). On Arvo Pärt: Tabula Rasa. CD,
ECM New Series 1275. 1984.
–––––. Te Deum. CD, ECM New Series 1505. 1993.
–––––. Spiegel im Spiegel. Vladimir Spivakov (violin), Sergei Bezrodny (piano). On Arvo Pärt: Alina. CD, ECM New
Series 1591. 1999.
–––––. Tabula Rasa. Gil Shaham (violin), Adele Anthony (violin), Erik Risberg (prepared piano), Gothenburg
Symphony Orchestra, cond. Neeme Järvi. On Pärt: Tabula Rasa; Fratres; Symphony No. 3. CD, DG
B00001IVON. 1999.
Tarkovsky, Andrei, director. Solaris. Mosfilm, 1972.
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twentieth-century music 5/1, 45–78 © 2008 Cambridge University Press

doi: 10.1017/S1478572208000601 Printed in the United Kingdom

Transcending the Icon: Spirituality and Postmodernism in

Pärt offers beautiful, otherworldly harmonies, particularly in the upper ranges

In a deceptively uncomplicated musical setting, these 24 prayers – from St. John

starts out sounding simply religious but winds up transcendent [. . .].19

13 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 123.

20 Williams, ‘Songs of Praise (Religious Music in UK)’, 32–3.

34 Davidson, ‘Pärt’s Music Serene, but Not Transcendent’.

this search-for-meaning-by-turning-inwards as central to modernism, but ultimately such a

assumptions of modernist subjectivity as they inform the premises of structural listening. As

providing grounds for either a positive, ‘timeless’ interpretation or a negative, ‘ahistorical’

49 Johnston, ‘Religio-Nationalist Subcultures Under the Communists’, 19.

78 Gunnarsson, Mystical Realism, 41.

Example 1 Tabula Rasa, ‘ludus’, bb. 1–2.

Example 2 Outline of the process for Tabula Rasa, ‘ludus’.

85 Clarke, ‘Parting Glances’, 682.

86 Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 187–8.

87 Mazo, ‘The Present and the Unpredictable’, 394.

96 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 456–60.

Example 5 Outline of the process for Spiegel im Spiegel.

103 Fisk, ‘The New Simplicity’, 402.

106 Jameson, Seeds of Time, 9.

In this context, Spiegel im Spiegel’s stasis no longer signifies a rejection of modernism.

115 Sandner, liner notes, [19].

Giles, Patrick. ‘Sharps & Flats’, 18 November 1999. <http://www.salon.com/ent/music/review/1999/11/18/tabula/

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