A Snowfall, a Bell, and a Piece of Sorrow: My Introduction to Arvo Pärt's Life

I remember the first time that Arvo Pärt ’s music enchanted me. Concert reports were required for many semesters in my undergraduate studies, and, like a responsible student, I waited until the last month to find performances or livestreams to listen to. I was ecstatic to find that schools like Carnegie Mellon and Curtis uploaded livestreams of their concerts and recitals. And under one of them, I don’t believe it is still posted, was a performance that changed my life. 

No, it was not Spiegel im Spiegel or Fur Alina. It was instead a piece of absolute sorrow. It was performed in December or late November. And once the first bell struck, it began to snow. The piece was Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten. And for seven minutes, time stopped.

Minimalistic music was foreign to me at that time. As this piece progressed, the strings layered over each other, creating such a suffocating and thick sound that it was consuming, with the occasional bells that reminded me of a funeral. And it was primarily just a descending scale in canon, so simple, but it gave me a hunger for more. 

The next piece I discovered by him was Festina Lente, whose beginning starts with three sections playing the same melody, but at different speeds, creating a whirling texture pulling the listener in retrospect and forcing them to push forward. Not being able to truly process the overwhelming amount of present emotions.

I then found his Tabula Rasa, a two-movement piece, which shook me to my core. There is a feeling of inevitability in Ludus and a dancelike pulse throughout the piece. There is a moment of silence after a trembling descending scale, then a soul-shattering, repeating stab of sound from the strings. Then, Silentium, which during the rehearsals for the premiere, the conductor desired to play it faster, but Arvo Pärt stated that it must sound like it will last an eternity. 

Through research, I discovered his Credo.

To provide context, Arvo Pärt is a composer from Estonia who lived in the Soviet Union. His initial compositions were atonal, and he was a prominent film scorer. However, he did not seem to feel fulfilled with his compositions and was dealing with a religious crisis. Religion was not necessarily banned in the Soviet Union at the time. But many believers were penalized, and many practiced their religion in private. Orthodoxism was the primary religion in this region of Europe, and his real introduction to it was with his grandmother. 

He decided to write this Credo and incorporated Bach’s arguably most famous prelude as the main theme of this 15-minute piece, Prelude BWV 846 in C major.

The beginning is peaceful and features a piano, orchestra, and full choir. But as it goes on, a few instruments start clashing against the harmonies of the orchestra, and more instruments follow the dissonant path. Soon, the pianist is smashing the keys across the entire keyboard, the percussion is hitting their instruments erratically, and the choir is almost screaming. Then a singular bass instrument plays a stabilizing, deep note, and more join to create a fuller sound, forcing calmness back into the ensemble. And soon, that prelude emerges again. 

Credo was a piece designed to reflect Pärt’s internal journey—from the peace of his early youth, through confusion, chaos, and loss of control, to the moment he gathered himself. This piece publicly declared, “I believe in Jesus Christ,” before an audience of hundreds in the Soviet Union.

As the chaos of the music unfolded and then gradually healed, the choir sang Matthew 5:38–39: “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil.” The Soviet government was outraged to learn that the audience at the premiere was so moved that they demanded the piece be played again.

Arvo Pärt pursued the field of music, which is to represent the human soul and its experience, but the oppressive Soviet Regime demanded that certain statuses be upheld. Eugen Kapp was the head of the Estonian Composers’ Union at the time and demanded that it be censored and blacklisted, a composer whom people now do not remember in comparison to Arvo Pärt. 

After this, Pärt did not compose, or at least publish, for years. Instead, he studied Gregorian chants and developed his genre of music, tintinabuli, which means little bells, hence his extensive use of canons, simple melodies, and an ancient feeling. And I haven’t even discussed his choral works, which include dozens of masterpieces dedicated to the voice. 

During a speech, he recalled a memory when he was composing at a cathedral, frustrated with the process.

A little girl approached him and asked, “Aren’t you grateful?”.

Confused, he responded, “Grateful for what?”.

She simply said, “Aren’t you grateful for this mistake?” and left. 

Pärt’s music creates a sense of peace for me. It chases my anxiety away. And that little girl’s question rings in my mind frequently. I make mistakes every day, in life, music, studies, and relationships. I make miscalculations that don’t lead to the results I want. But I never would have learned what I have without them. His music has changed how I hear music and how I hear silence. It’s taught me to appreciate the simple presence of sound itself, without always needing direction or structure.

And because of his music, I’ve learned to better enjoy the simplicity of existing more than I knew how to before. I wouldn’t have found that kind of meaningfulness in the way I needed, if I hadn’t stumbled across that video, a performance of a piece written in memory of a beloved fellow artist who had just passed away.