Arvo Pärt's White Light: Media, Culture, Politics ed. by Laura Dolp (review)

Researching living musicians and their music has its share of both difficulty and opportunity. There is no benefit of hindsight, no long span of reception history, but there is a chance for scholars to grasp the music as it first comes to life, finding meaning in its time and space. Composer Arvo Pärt is very much alive and also quite popular, but fame has a way of perpetuating misconceptions. This diverse collection of essays from a team of Pärt scholars, led by Laura Dolp, strongly advances the understanding of Pärt's music while filling gaps in current scholarship and grappling with the various, often erroneous, perceptions of the composer and his music. While each contribution is distinct in emphasis and in methodology, four common themes seem to recur throughout.

Cliché. Nearly every contributor takes note of the popular tropes surrounding Pärt's music, personality, and image: "timelessness" (p. 21), "spirituality" (p. 122), "mysticism" (p. 98), and so forth. For some, they form a central theme. Michael Palmese connects Pärt's struggles in 1960s Soviet Estonia to the composer's post-2006 protests against corruption and repression in Vladimir Putin's Russia. Disputing the stereotypical impression of Pärt's compositions as "holy relics" (p. 155) and instead understanding the composer as fully engaged in geopolitical events and culture, Palmese surveys events, from the banning of Pärt's Collage teemal B-AC-H and his eventual forced emigration to the arrests and murders of critics of the Russian government. He situates the Fourth Symphony as a protest work and analyzes it for musical instances of dissidence (and dissonance). Lamentate, Pärt's compositional contribution to a multidisciplinary installation at London's Tate Modern gallery, was widely received as a turn away from the "ritualistic style" of tintinnabulation (p. 76). Sander van Maas explores this apparent shift and the piece's resultant narrative potential. In an intriguing twist, he argues that the music is best understood in the context of something often seen as antithetical to Pärt's ethos: technology. Investigating neutrality, Palmese researches Pärt's comments on interval signals (radio transmissions—ranging from mechanical tones to orchestrated melodies—that maintain a broadcaster's presence on a particular frequency in the absence of content) and how the premiere of Lamentate directly engaged the specific resonating frequency of a nearby electrical transformer, humming within earshot of the Tate.

Meaning. Film and television have introduced Pärt to new audiences and have shaped the music's meaning along the way. Observing "consistent and repeated cinematic patterns" (p. 29) in the use of Pärt's music in television and film, Maria Cizmic identifies a common "empathy trope" (p. 23). She describes how music from the early tintinnabuli style often plays following a traumatic event (on screen or implied), thus highlighting not the violence itself but its response or consequences. The listener may be compelled by the music and its setting to identify in some instances with the victims of the trauma, in others, its perpetrators. Engaging recent work in empathy studies, psychology, and film scholarship, Cizmic adduces three specific examples, demonstrating not only how this trope works but also how specific compositional aspects of Pärt's works directly assist the listener in the empathetic process. She also astutely raises the possibility of a "closed semiotic loop" (p. 22), whereby the success of Pärt's music in underscoring particular scenes is due, in part, to its similar use in previous films. The meaning, then, may not rest entirely in the music but may develop tautologically, over time, in the ears of music supervisors as well as moviegoers. Robert Sholl contemplates active and introspective meaning-making on the part of viewers confronted by the static nature of Pärt's music, especially when it is deliberately foregrounded in film. Building...