Arvo Pärt: This music even lowers your blood pressure

2024-01-30 14:44:47

As always in life, you shouldn’t let appearances put you off. The cover is stone gray. It looks severe. Arvo Pärt is written there in white letters. And “Tractus” in black letters.

This could be misleading, especially in Germany, where the treatise, as a rhetorical form of scientific and religious communication, has such an overtone like nowhere else, smells of instruction in every letter and gives rise to fears of intellectual ivory-cladding and moral finger-pointing. So basically everything that you are quite rightly allergic to right now.

also read

But nothing is stranger to the music of Arvo Pärt, and perhaps especially to that on “Tractus,” than wanting to abuse people, with lectures, with pointing fingers. “Tractus” wanders through Pärt’s sacred compositions from the past quarter century.

Recorded by the Estonian Pärt expert Tonu Kaljuste at the podium of the Pärt-experienced Tallinn Chamber Orchestra with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the angelic soprano Maria Listra in the Methodist church in Tallinn where Pärt’s “Tabula rasa”, the legendary first album from Manfred Eicher’s ECM, was recorded New Series was created.

It could be one of the great mysteries of contemporary music why Pärt, the Estonian mystic of silence, the genius of the expectation of salvation and the fear of God, is reported every year as the most performed living composer – in a society that is increasingly distant from God, at least in the global north .

At least whenever it wasn’t Pärt’s secular counterpart: John Williams, at 91, still three years older than him, classic radio station favorite and master of all kinds of cinematic explosions. Like the sun and the moon, Williams and Pärt, the positivist from the cinema and the God-seeker from the Church, in the same sky opposite contemporary music.

also read

The mystery is of course not that big. The man who went from extreme avant-gardist to saint of musical simplicity a generation before Max Richter probably left even more of a mark on our everyday lives than Hollywood’s chief cinemascope composer. It feels like every second ecologically correct commercial that aims to convey some kind of spiritual depth is accompanied by a minimal soundscape that must seem strangely familiar to a Pärtian.

And without the guiding principle of Pärt’s spiritually charged minimalism, the film music of recent years would have been different – Pärt’s traces can be found in Max Richter and in the subterranean soundtracks from Johann Johannsson’s “Theory of Everything” to Hildur Guðnadóttir’s “Joker”.

Invocations to the Guardian Angel

“Tractus” brings together – starting with the “Littlemere Tractus” a prayer at the end of the day and perhaps the life of Oxford Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801 to 1890), from whom the album takes its title – a collection of invocations, dialogues and Alternating songs, religious scenes such as the legend of “L’abbé Agathon”, who helps a leper who turns out to be an angel of God, and occasional spiritual works such as Pärt’s “Cantique des degrés” for the 50th anniversary of the throne of the Monegasque Prince Rainier.

It is gestural, speaking music. One that has such an immediate effect because it not only accompanies language, but rather inhales it, so to speak. “The words,” Pärt once said, “write my music.”

She lives the words, brings them to life, even if you don’t hear them at all, if they only served as inspiration like an old Church Slavonic prayer for “These Words”. In it, string hatchings appear out of nowhere, something pulses, rings, sound surfaces begin to sing, talk, tell of threats, people’s mistakes and call on the guardian angel for help.

also read

In a good hour something is created that has rarely been needed as urgently as it is today, and not just because it helps lower blood pressure for some people. “Tractus” is a vade mecum for the noisy present. A reminder that words only have meaning, can only have an effect, when they come from silence, are surrounded by silence. A small philosophy of being human, gained from difficult times for difficult times, a gentle, always hymn-ready handout of the art of a successful life. With faith in God. And without.

You don’t have to believe in God to believe in Pärt. Pärt is a seeker of connections, between times, between musical eras, between people. And of course between us and God. But his music never proselytizes, never gets too close, hugs you from a gentle distance. The Pärt invites you. And it makes you hopeful and calm. You just need it.