Neo-Mythologism in the Music of Arvo Pärt, Veljo Tormis, and Bronius Kutavičius

Abstract

The music of Arvo Pärt, Veljo Tormis, and Bronius Kutavičius written since the 1970s has previously been accommodated under various descriptive terms, such as “holy”, “magical”, or “Baltic” minimalism, to mention just a few examples. This article aims to outline some of the common features between the ethnographic/ritual creative practices of Tormis and Kutavičius on the one hand, and Pärt’s music on the other, drawing on the concept of neo-mythologism—a term for the trends in 20th-century music (Adamenko 2007) characterized by a preoccupation with repetition, symmetry, binary oppositions, and special (visual) symbols (mythologems). Neo-mythologism is a threefold phenomenon, which encompasses topics (literary allusions), musical structure, and presentation/reception. Therefore, it is important to observe neo-mythologism also in the visual representations of music, such as theatrical and video productions (Adam’s Passion by Arvo Pärt and Robert Wilson, 2015). Carl Jung’s notions of the “collective unconscious” and “archetypes”, with an emphasis on the intuitive and elusive, had a considerable impact on the Estonian cultural scene in the late 1960s and 1970s, and served as a driving force of the innovative literary and theatrical movements in that period. Neo-mythologism can be proposed as a general term for the various ethnographic, religious, and ritual phenomena of creativity in the Baltic countries in the 1970s and 1980s.