Arvo Pärt was born in Paide, Estonia on September 11,1935 and graduated from the Tallinn Conservatory in 1963 while working as a recording director in the music division of the Estonian Radio. A year before leaving the Conservatory he won first prize in the All-Union Young Composers' Competition for a children's cantata and an oratorio. In 1980, he emigrated to Vienna, where he took Austrian citizenship. Since 1982, he has made his home in West Berlin.
Pärt's earliest works show the influence of the Soviet music of Prokofiev and Shostakovich. But beginning in 1960 with Necrology for Orchestra, he adopted the serial principles of Schoenberg. This procedure quickly exhausted its interest for him and, for a fruitful period in the mid-1960s during which he produced a cello concerto, the Second Symphony and the Collage on Bach for Orchestra, he explored the techniques of collage and quotation. Part was still dissatisfied, however, and he abandoned creative work for several years, during which time he devoted himself to the study of the music of such Medieval and Renaissance composers as Machaut, Ockeghem, Obrecht and Josquin. Guided by the spirit and method of those ancient masters, Part broke his compositional silence in 1976. With the small piano piece Fur Alina, he used quiet dynamics, rhythmic stasis plus open-interval and triadic harmonies to create a thoughtful mood of mystical introspection reflecting the composer's own piety. His subsequent works have been written in this pristine, otherworldly style inspired by Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony, and seek to unite ancient and modern ages in music that seems rapt out of time.
Pärt calls his manner of composition "tintinnabulation," from the Latin word for bells. "Tintinnabulation," the composer explains, "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 my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises — and everything that is unimportant falls away. Tintinnabulation is like this. Here, I am alone with silence. I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comfort me. I work with very few elements — with one voice, with two voices. I build with the most primitive materials — with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells. And that is why I call it tintinnabulation."
Fratres was composed in 1977 for string quintet and wind quintet, and first performed by the Estonian early music ensemble "Hortus musicus." Part has subsequently adapted the work for many other solo and ensemble combinations of strings, winds and percussion. Fratres is based on the repetitions of an austere, hymnal theme played above a continuous drone on the interval of an open fifth. The repetitions (eight in the original version), separated by notes played as or simulating drum taps, are transposed downward a minor or major third on each appearance, so that the sonority grows lower and richer as Fratres unfolds. The dynamic peak is reached in the middle of the work, after which the music is gradually overtaken by silence to end in a state of hushed spirituality. The work's title — " Brothers " — suggests that this music was inspired by the vision of a solemn procession of Medieval monks, wending their way by flickering candlelight along the ambulatory to the abbey's chapels for another of the endless succession of services that regulated their monastic lives.
-- Kendall Durelle Briggs
