Magnificat- Pärt

I have really enjoyed spending time preparing Magnificat by Arvo Pärt.  I'm not completely ready yet, but my paper about him is just about ready to be revised.  The following is not my paper, but rather a very unscholarly free-style writing about Pärt and his music.

Arvo Pärt was born in 1935 in Estonia.  His earliest works were mainly for piano and were neoclassical.  He also composed using serial technique, which he learned from a handful of scores and textbooks that happen to find their way into the USSR.  He did not study early music during this time, and certainly did not study sacred music.  While he was a student, he supplemented his income with being a sound engineer and by writing music for theater and films.  From 1968-1976, he begin a period of compositional silence, during which he attempted to find his own voice.

When he started composing again, he wrote using the tintinnabuli technique.  This is the technique in which my recital piece, Magnificat, was written.  Tintinnabuli technique is (and this is a simplification) two voices- one voice generally stays static on a central pitch (often, but not always, tonic), the other voice moves stepwise around the static note.  There is a way to determine how many pitches the moving voices moves away from the central pitch (normally determined by syllables in word or phrase), but that's a bit more complicated.  It requires things such as graphs and charts to understand (or at least for me to understand).

Magnificat was written in 1989 and premiered in 1990.  The piece has no solid, single bar lines.  It has double bar lines with a breath mark, double bar lines without a breath mark, and dotted bar lines.  The dotted bar lines simple delineate between words.  Truly, this piece is shaped by the text and phrase stress.  Double bar lines normally denote the end of an idea, and double bar lines with a breath (which I give the most of amount of silence to) normally denote the end of a text phrase.  The entire piece alternates between two-voice tintinnabuli and three voice tintinnabuli (a melodic voice moving, while the other two voices only sound chords in a given triad).  The final phrase ends in augmentation of the opening rhythm, and the final chord, Ab flat major with added 4th (or Db major seventh in second inversion) gives it a feeling that the music continues, the music is timeless.  Due to the "crunchiness" of some of the intervals (many seconds), intonation has to be of the utmost important.  In Magnificat, he gives relatively few dynamic or expressive markings.  This is more than he gives many of his other pieces.  He seems determined to encourage the conductor to make musical decisions.

Speaking of encouraging others to make decisions about his music, he also rarely grants interviews and does not speak about his own music.  He said he "prefers to leave that to the musicologists and theorists."  Additionally, he said, "You have to have good musicians who are conscious that they are really giving birth to music, who invest as much in the music as I do when composing it..."  There is a certain dedication the singers must feel to the serene energy of the piece.  It has to feel and be transcendental, otherwise it's simply 7 minutes of long, boring notes.

He has been credited with influencing Björk, Keith Jarrett, Radiohead, and Lupe Fiasco.  He also wrote film music most recently for Fahrenheit 9/11 and There Will be Blood.