Tintinnabuli and the Sacred: A View from the Archives, 1976–77

Abstract

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.