Browsing by Author "Karnes, Kevin C."

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    Arvo Pärt, Hardijs Lediņš and the Ritual Moment in Riga, October 1977
    (Eesti Muusika- ja Teatriakadeemia, 2019) Karnes, Kevin C.; Kõlar, Anu, koostaja
    Drawing on archival research and oral history, this article reconstructs events surrounding the premieres of Arvo Pärt’s first openly sacred tintinnabuli-style compositions, including his Missa syllabica, at the Festival of Contemporary Music held in Riga in October 1977. It highlights the work of the Latvian artist and architecture student Hardijs Lediņš (1955–2004), whose discotheque at the Riga Polytechnic Institute hosted the event. Tracing the reception of the festival and Pärt’s music by participants, notably the pianist Alexei Lubimov, the composer Vladimir Martynov, and the violinist Boriss Avramecs, the article suggests that an informal network of students and alternative artists played a crucial role in nurturing and supporting this most ideologically problematic corner of Pärt’s compositional activity of the period. For a little over a year, Lediņš’s disco provided an underground space for the presentation of experimental art and the experience of creative freedom. That experience, however, was short-lived, as festival organizers were charged with distributing religious propaganda shortly afterwards, and they were barred from engaging in future organizational work of the sort.
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    Tintinnabuli and the Sacred: A View from the Archives, 1976–77
    (Eesti Muusika- ja Teatriakadeemia, 2022) Karnes, Kevin C.; Siitan, Toomas, koostaja; Arvo Pärdi Keskus; Kõrver, Kristina
    Drawing on Arvo Pärt’s musical diaries and other archival materials, this article examines three key discoveries that were crucial to the coalescence of the composer’s tintinnabuli style in 1976–77: (1) the two-voice contrapuntal structure of melodic and triadic lines, (2) algorithmic methods for generating musical structure, and (3) the so-called syllabic method of transforming poetic texts into melodic lines. The third of these discoveries, which occurred on the single day of 12 February 1977, culminated Pärt’s yearslong search for a musical language capable of accommodating his vision of the divine. The syllabic method, the article suggests, was uniquely capable of accommodating Pärt’s Orthodox Christian practice, by offering a way of setting sacred texts that required him to cede any urge to interpret, reflect, or express his own ideas about their meanings. Charting parallels between Pärt’s syllabic method and the working methods of the Orthodox Russian painter Eduard Steinberg (1937–2012), the article closesby suggesting that in both cases, the radical abstraction of the works they created opens spaces for the Orthodox notion of apophatic knowledge to take hold, through which a listener or an observer might feel themselves just a bit closer to the divine.