Arvo Pärt
Arvo Pärt (11 September 1935) is an Estonian composer of classical and sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-invented compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music is in part inspired by Gregorian chant. Pärt has been the most performed living composer in the world for 5 consecutive years.
Arvo Pärt was born in Paide, Järva County, Estonia. His musical studies began in 1954 at the Tallinn Music Secondary School Read Full BioArvo Pärt (11 September 1935) is an Estonian composer of classical and sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-invented compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music is in part inspired by Gregorian chant. Pärt has been the most performed living composer in the world for 5 consecutive years.
Arvo Pärt was born in Paide, Järva County, Estonia. His musical studies began in 1954 at the Tallinn Music Secondary School, interrupted less than a year later while he fulfilled his National Service obligation as oboist and side-drummer in an army band. He returned to Middle School for a year before joining the Tallinn Conservatory in 1957, where his composition teacher was Professor Heino Eller. Pärt started work as a recording engineer with Estonian Radio, wrote music for the stage and received numerous commissions for film scores so that, by the time he graduated from the Conservatory in 1963, he could already be considered a professional composer. A year before leaving, he won first prize in the All-Union Young Composers' Competition for a children's cantata, Our Garden, and an oratorio, Stride of the World.
Today Arvo Pärt is best known for his choral works, which he started to produce in the 1980s, after his emigration from the former Soviet Union to Germany, Berlin. Before that he had written his most recognised works from the 1970s, Fratres, Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, and Tabula Rasa. In 1978 Pärt composed Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in Mirror).
Pärt's oeuvre is generally divided into two periods. His early works ranged from rather severe neo-classical styles influenced by Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Bartók. He then began to compose using Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique and serialism. This, however, not only earned the ire of the Soviet establishment, but also proved to be a creative dead-end. When early works were banned by Soviet censors, Pärt entered the first of several periods of contemplative silence, during which he studied choral music from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.
The spirit of early European polyphony informed the composition of Pärt's transitional third symphony (1971); thereafter he immersed himself in early music, re-investigating the roots of western music. He studied plainsong, Gregorian chant, and the emergence of polyphony in the Renaissance. The music that began to emerge after this period was radically different. This period of new compositions included Fratres, Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, and Tabula rasa.
Pärt describes it as tintinnabuli: like the ringing of bells. The music is characterised by simple harmonies, often single unadorned notes, or triad chords which form the basis of western harmony. These are reminiscent of ringing bells. Tintinnabuli works are rhythmically simple, and do not change tempo. The influence of early music is clear. Another characteristic of Pärt's later works is that they are frequently settings for sacred texts, although he mostly chooses Latin or the Church Slavonic language used in Orthodox liturgy instead of his native Estonian language. Large-scale works inspired by religious texts include St John Passion, Te Deum, and Litany. Choral works from this period include Magnificat and The Beatitudes.
A new composition, Für Lennart, written for the memory of the Estonian President Lennart Meri, was played at his funeral service on 2nd April 2006. In response to the murder of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow on 7th October 2006, Pärt declared that all his works performed in 2006-2007 would be in commemoration of her death.
Pärt was honoured as the featured composer of the 2008 RTÉ Living Music Festival in Dublin, Ireland. He was also recently commissioned by Louth Contemporary Music Society to compose a new choral work based on St Patrick's Breastplate, to be premiered in 2008 in Louth, Ireland.
Arvo Pärt was born in Paide, Järva County, Estonia. His musical studies began in 1954 at the Tallinn Music Secondary School Read Full BioArvo Pärt (11 September 1935) is an Estonian composer of classical and sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-invented compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music is in part inspired by Gregorian chant. Pärt has been the most performed living composer in the world for 5 consecutive years.
Arvo Pärt was born in Paide, Järva County, Estonia. His musical studies began in 1954 at the Tallinn Music Secondary School, interrupted less than a year later while he fulfilled his National Service obligation as oboist and side-drummer in an army band. He returned to Middle School for a year before joining the Tallinn Conservatory in 1957, where his composition teacher was Professor Heino Eller. Pärt started work as a recording engineer with Estonian Radio, wrote music for the stage and received numerous commissions for film scores so that, by the time he graduated from the Conservatory in 1963, he could already be considered a professional composer. A year before leaving, he won first prize in the All-Union Young Composers' Competition for a children's cantata, Our Garden, and an oratorio, Stride of the World.
Today Arvo Pärt is best known for his choral works, which he started to produce in the 1980s, after his emigration from the former Soviet Union to Germany, Berlin. Before that he had written his most recognised works from the 1970s, Fratres, Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, and Tabula Rasa. In 1978 Pärt composed Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in Mirror).
Pärt's oeuvre is generally divided into two periods. His early works ranged from rather severe neo-classical styles influenced by Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Bartók. He then began to compose using Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique and serialism. This, however, not only earned the ire of the Soviet establishment, but also proved to be a creative dead-end. When early works were banned by Soviet censors, Pärt entered the first of several periods of contemplative silence, during which he studied choral music from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.
The spirit of early European polyphony informed the composition of Pärt's transitional third symphony (1971); thereafter he immersed himself in early music, re-investigating the roots of western music. He studied plainsong, Gregorian chant, and the emergence of polyphony in the Renaissance. The music that began to emerge after this period was radically different. This period of new compositions included Fratres, Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, and Tabula rasa.
Pärt describes it as tintinnabuli: like the ringing of bells. The music is characterised by simple harmonies, often single unadorned notes, or triad chords which form the basis of western harmony. These are reminiscent of ringing bells. Tintinnabuli works are rhythmically simple, and do not change tempo. The influence of early music is clear. Another characteristic of Pärt's later works is that they are frequently settings for sacred texts, although he mostly chooses Latin or the Church Slavonic language used in Orthodox liturgy instead of his native Estonian language. Large-scale works inspired by religious texts include St John Passion, Te Deum, and Litany. Choral works from this period include Magnificat and The Beatitudes.
A new composition, Für Lennart, written for the memory of the Estonian President Lennart Meri, was played at his funeral service on 2nd April 2006. In response to the murder of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow on 7th October 2006, Pärt declared that all his works performed in 2006-2007 would be in commemoration of her death.
Pärt was honoured as the featured composer of the 2008 RTÉ Living Music Festival in Dublin, Ireland. He was also recently commissioned by Louth Contemporary Music Society to compose a new choral work based on St Patrick's Breastplate, to be premiered in 2008 in Louth, Ireland.
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Spiegel im Spiegel
Arvo Pärt Lyrics
We have lyrics for these tracks by Arvo Pärt:
Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten (Instrumental)…
De Profundis De profundis clamavi ad te Domine Domine exaudi vocem meam f…
Es sang vor langen Jahren Es sang vor langen Jahren (Clemens Maria Brentano) Es sang …
Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus. Dominus deus Sabaoth. P…
The lyrics can frequently be found in the comments below, by filtering for lyric videos or browsing the comments in the different videos below.
ehabs07
To me, this evokes images of somehow being able to travel thousands of miles and enter my beautiful but war-torn country of Syria, traversing invincibly through the bullets, shells, rubble, and bodies to reach my childhood home, and the long demolished house of my grandmother, in a world where she is somehow alive again, in a world when I can still smell the beautiful aroma of her jasmine tree and her morning coffee, and hear the wind whistle through her tree-filled backyard in the star-filled night sky. Embarking on this journey through time is impossible except in my dreams, as I keep waking up to the realization that things have changed. They always do...
This piece simply but perfectly portrays the mystical realization, through an out-of-body experience, of somehow glancing at your own physical being as well as your surroundings and the whole world, with an almost impossible paradoxical dichotomy of simultaneous attachment and detachment. That beautiful dichotomy state that draws you to observe, through a bird's eye view, the oddly sad irony of our world's randomness, makes you also deeply appreciate the ephemeral nature life as a whole, the briefness of episodes in our lives of that we thought will never end, the transient physical being, and the omnipresence of what is left behind, after we are physically gone...
You can be a believer in a supreme being and believe that, after we depart our physical bodies, we will be ultimately souls that will traverse our boundless universe on a trip to the heavens, like a feather that the wind carries far away. You can also be a skeptic and believe that we are but atoms that will someday become part of a tree or otherwise aimlessly travel the deep ends of space on a haphazard quest to a planet far away, where we will be part of a new physical body in an alien world.
That dichotomy leads to other dichotomies, those of hope and despair, those of fear and comfort, those begging to know the whys of the complexity of being human and those realizing that being human is simply about living in voluntary and involuntary dichotomies, after all. Amid all the randomness emerges a common theme, that of entropy and the constancy of change. It makes me peacefully cope with the fact that I will likely no longer be able to enjoy those poignant evenings at my family's peaceful summer house, which is now illegally occupied by foreign fighters and their families. It makes me more steadfast in planting my roots and leaving my footprints all over again, in a different place, at a different time, never looking back for fear of crying.
Only a genius like Arvo Pärt can take you on this trip through the powerful simplicity of his piano notes. And only a transformative artist can make one piece mean something different to each of us.
Greenred Productions - Relaxing Music
Simple and impressive example of minimalism by a true master!
lilly rivera
Yes is true
Eliza Tozaru
@Ronan Deniel qq1
Ronan Deniel
R
J Walters
I work at a coffee shop. We usually play jazz and folk music throughout the day. One day, after I told everyone that we were closing up and that they had to go, I put on this song. Everone shuffled out the door and there was only one woman left. She was cleaning up a stack of papers that she was reading and she told me she would be on her way out. I told her to take her time. As I was counting the till she came up to the counter and asked if she could stay until this song was over. I told her that would be fine. Ten minutes later she came up to the counter, with small tears on her cheeks and said, "Thank you, I needed that." I've always felt a profound attachment to this song. A kind of solace, a place to go to think; just about anything. I still wonder what was going on inside of her listening to this. It seemed important. More important than what goes on inside of me while listening to this, although both are puzzling. I still keep coming back to this song trying to figure out what it's all about.
Philippe Van den Sande
You might have looked God straight in the eye that day, answering there was a guest room and she could stay. Luke 2:7
ROBERTA ROSTELLATO
I could be that woman
Connie Terluin - van Assen
It's not a song. It's a piece.. Also when you see the sheet music you can see that the notes are mirrored (spiegel means mirror)
Marianna Tafuri
<3
emily meg
Don't worry. You know what it's all about.