♫ Tintinnabulation

"That is my goal: time and timelessness are connected. This instant and eternity are struggling within us. And this is the cause of all our contradictions...."
- Arvo Pärt

Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten

Arvo Pärt was born in Paide, Estonia on September 11, 1935 and grew up in Tallinn.

Pärt refers to this new style as "tintinnabuli." This can be defined as the application of various inversions of a certain chord. Also, it is a word "which evokes the pealing of bells, the bells' complex but rich sonorous mass of overtones, the gradual unfolding of patterns implicit in the sound itself, and the idea of a sound that is simultaneously static and in flux." Pärt explains the term this way:

"Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers - in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find myway to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises - and everything that is unimportant falls away. Tintinnabulation is like this. . . . The three notes of a triad are like bells. And that is why I call it tintinnabulation."

Source

Arvo Pärt and the New Simplicity
In music there are only three intervals which are called "perfect." We have the prime and its octave, the perfect fourth and the perfect fifth. Pärt's music, like that of the medieval composers he sometime reminds us of, is built around these perfect intervals. Acoustically, these intervals are based upon very simple ratios: 2-1 for the octave, 3-2 for the fifth. When we hear these intervals sung in a large resonant space, like a cathedral, they have a miraculous effect. The two notes a fifth apart, C and G, for example, start to generate other sounds. They fill in the chord. We glance around the cathedral, wondering, looking for an angel choir.
Well. The physicists can explain all of this in terms of mathematics: we're hearing overtones, they tell us. Angels or overtones? It doesn't matter. Arvo Pärt's simplicity touches us deeply."
Source

Listing of Arvo Pärt's works: Internet Edition compiled by Onno van Rijen