The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt ed. by Andrew Shenton (review)

The purpose of this volume, so Andrew Shenton states in the introduction, is ‘to elucidate the essential and phenomenal traits of this remarkable composer and his music’ (p. 1). To that end, the nine essays on Arvo Pärt that follow describe a rough but familiar trajectory that proceeds from the biographical to the hermeneutic, by way of the analytical. Despite being a fundamentally scholarly publication—indeed, Shenton deliberately notes the comparative lack of explicitly musicological attention given to Pärt over the last twenty years—The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt is avowedly aimed at the non-specialist. That much seems only fair, given that Shenton also chooses to emphasize Pärt’s unusual degree of success both within and beyond the classical music establishment. A nod to the singularity of Pärt’s tintinnabuli idiolect completes the argument that the time for this book is ripe.

Immo Mihkelson offers both biographical riches and reflections on scholarly method in his opening piece, which concentrates on Pärt’s life and work in Soviet Estonia during the 1960s and 1970s. Of particular interest are passages dealing with the ebb and flow of the ideological pressure facing Estonian composers in these years: Mihkelson discusses Pärt’s work at Estonian Radio, his relationship with the Composers’ Union, his uncertain channels of access to proscribed Western music, and the difficulties caused by his use of serialist and religious elements in Nekrolog (1960) and Credo (1968) respectively. Mihkelson rightly reminds us that conditions across the Soviet Union varied greatly, and warns against overly general comparisons between Pärt and other leading avant-gardists such as Schnittke or Gubaidulina. At the same time, his unapologetic insistence on approaching Pärt through a set of unique biographical conditions may be problematic in its own way. As Pärt’s wife, Nora, has observed, such information cannot necessarily be linked directly to musical detail—on which Mihkelson is, disappointingly, rather light.

Jeffers Engelhardt’s contribution, ‘Perspectives on Arvo Pärt after 1980’, opens with an extended account of Pärt’s ubiquity within ‘the soundscapes of twenty-first century musical life’ (p. 29). Engelhardt describes the regular use of his music by filmmakers, his presence on social media platforms, and the many ‘digital repurposings’ (p. 31) and other samplings and metamorphoses of his works. These he associates with the ‘transitions and transformations effected by [Pärt’s] emigration’ (p. 34) to Austria in 1980, leading him to consider the circumstances prompting that event (including Pärt’s compositional crisis of the 1970s), and the opportunities and collaborations of which he availed himself thereafter. Engelhardt cautions astutely against lapsing into ready-made émigré narratives placing in opposition the encrusted associations of free West and communist East, observing that ‘amid the ruptures and traumas’ (p. 34) of Pärt’s displacement there were also crucial continuities, including his personal and professional relationships, his Orthodox faith, and the tintinnabuli style. (Curiously, there is no acknowledgement that tintinnabuli itself preserved numerous technical habits from the serial and collage phases that preceded Pärt’s own stylistic rupture.) Especially valuable within Engelhardt’s article is the passage on Kanon Pokajanen (1997), Orthodoxy, and the icon as sacred prototype, and it is heartening to see critical attention given to works post-dating Paul Hillier’s somewhat canon-defining book on Pärt.

Leopold Brauneiss’s survey of tintinnabuli mechanics invokes musical archetype as a central metaphor for the style’s ‘basic elements’ (p. 49). This may well chime with Pärt’s own aesthetic preferences, aspects of which Brauneiss cites, but here it fails overall to convince, instead perhaps underlining the perils of reliance on composers’ remarks about their own music. A paragraph on the universality of scales as a ‘globally prevalent, pre-existing and supra-individual musical resource’ (p. 54), for instance, is broadly linked to the idea of limitlessness. When...