Now
resounds
creation.
Both north and south
rain turns land to sea.
The truth is tailor cut.
Imperceptibly steady
the M-hand is nearing midnight.
A glimpse of daylight tinges
Mateo’s portico.
Silence is not filled.
Thumbs freely turn.
Close at hand
comforts
lay.           

Let us start over. We are in Petrograd, December 1915. Among the paintings exhibited at the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10 (Zero-ten), one stands out. 79.5 cm × 79.5 cm, it depicts a black square on a white background, and represents the will to give up ‘the unessential attributes that had always afflicted it’ (Riout, 2002, p.27). In a historical moment in which the definition, the goals and the subject of painting were at the centre of the artistic debate, it is thus that Kazimir Malevich founded the suprematist movement, choosing to abandon all representation and creating a form of art that comes alive as it is freed from the imitation of nature.

In 1977, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, having experienced a stylistic evolution parallel to that of the artistic avant-garde (that is, an academic training followed by several experimentation periods), and having reached its highest point of tension in his twelve-tone pieces, had chosen to step back and ponder the state and strata making up contemporary music, and consider its future possibilities. To do this, Pärt chose to remove the outermost façade and return to Western music’s ‘Romanesque’ structure by studying plain song, Gregorian chant, and early polyphonies. This, together with his conversion to Russian Orthodoxy in the same period, meant that the ideas behind his new style of music would have been based and surrounded by a strong spiritual sensibility.

However, it should be noted that Pärt's is not a neoclassical turn, with purely imitative and collage connotations, but is rather Pre-Raphaelite in nature. It is in fact aimed at the recovery and reinvention of the musical language itself, setting aside a quotation-based approach, found in works such as Credo (1968) and Collage sur B-A-C-H (1964) and which will return in later years, deeply transformed by his minimalist period, in Tribute to Caesar (1997) and Mozart-Adagio for Piano Trio (1992/2005). In the same way, while Malevich does lay the foundations for abstraction, Minimalism, and Colour Field art, his tabula rasa does not prevent him neither from exhibiting Black Square in a corner, according to the tradition of the ‘little red corner’ (the krasnyj ugol, the domestic altar of Orthodox Christianity), nor from returning to figuration around the 1930s. Therefore, the painting takes on the universal and timeless value of a religious icon as well as its guiding function despite and because of the negation it contains and the potential developments that may subsequently manifest themselves. The choral piece Adam's Lament (2009), based on the writings of Simeon Ivanović Antonov, replicates this connection with the religious tradition and is an example of that applied theology that is often referred to as ‘sacred minimalism’. This places Pärt in contact with other contemporary composers such as Górecki and Tavener. 

The pieces that are most emblematic of this stylistic change (Fratres, Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, Für Alina, Variations for the healing of Arinushka, and Tabula Rasa) rely on a semi-automated composition system conceived by Pärt and known as ‘tintinnabuli’ (from the Latin tintinnabulum, ‘little bells’): having set the key of the piece, the accompaniment (the ‘tintinnabular’ voice, or ‘T-voice’, which Pärt identifies as ‘the objective realm of forgiveness’) is limited to the notes of the tonic triad; one then chooses whether the T-voice will take the base note, the first or the second inversion compared to the ‘melody’ (also called ‘M-voice’, the ‘subjective world, daily life made of selfishness and pain’), which will be followed diatonically in a stepwise motion. By joining the two voices, Pärt’s new approach expresses ‘the eternal dualism of body and spirit, earth and heaven’ (Hillier, 1997, p.96), as their ‘mathematically exact connection... where the melody and the accompaniment [accompanying voice]... is one. One plus one, it is one – it is not two’ (Pärt & Pitts, 2000).

Having exhausted the creative possibilities the avant-garde had made possible, both Malevich and Pärt sought new solutions in a formally unadorned language, one whose form could fully express itself while preserving its connection to the world of things. This leads to juxtapositions of basic, often binary elements: a limited range of colours and shapes in Malevich (in his first Suprematist triptych, black and white, the square, the circle, and the cross), and the relationship between the two voices in Pärt, with particular attention paid to the contrast between sound and silence. 

Among modern composers, John Cage is credited with introducing the ‘performance’ of silence within a piece of music. With 4’ 33’’ (1952), he did not wish to replicate absolute silence, nor to describe a pause between musical moments as expressed by a caesura or a fermata. Rather, he emphasised the environment made up of the audience and that in which the audience finds itself, as a reflection on void and the content one can project there, probably inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings series (1951), which was in turn influenced by Suprematism. Although it is possible that Pärt was influenced by Cage, it was not through his music, but from what was happening in the world at that time, to which Pärt was particularly receptive for the fact that ‘at that time in the Soviet Union (...) the hunger for information was so great that at times it was enough to hear just one or two chords and a whole new world was opened up’ (McCarthy & Pärt, 1989). What is certain is that both composers use prepared pianos to change the instrument’s tone quality (with percussive effects in Cage, and tintinnabular in Part).

4’ 33’’ is considered an automated composition because the duration of the notes not to be played had been generated by drawing from a homemade deck of cards based on tarots (Fetterman, 2010). The configuration and the adherence to such a method are completed by the composer’s preconceived idea regarding the piece’s approximate duration. In Pärt, this pre-composition phase is key, often setting a method that precedes the compositional moment, establishing the piece’s guidelines and sometimes outlining its structure or basic ideas through graphs. However, the rigidity of this preliminary stage is softened, besides the human aspect of the piece’s interpretation and execution, by the several revisions made over the years, meaning that the tabula rasa has now become a tabula in fieri. ‘Well-formulated principles of construction (...) must not be the most important part of the music [but] are only the skeleton. (…) One never knows what music lies behind those notes. (...) Then suddenly an interpreter comes along, who plays something out of this empty space in such a way that you feel within yourself that this is really no longer your music’ (McCarthy & Pärt, 1989, p.133).                                                                                                                      

On the one hand, there is a need for a harmonising method; on the other hand, the need to rediscover traces of humanity, even in the form of imperfection, within the artistic work. This brings us back to the use of basic elements. Malevich's square is not geometrically perfect, nor do its materials allow for a fully saturated black. Our very perception of white, black, silence and sound in natural conditions will always be influenced by environmental interference caused by their simultaneous contrast with other elements. It follows that the artificial reproduction of their most extreme forms can only occur with modern developments in chemistry (hyper-absorbent black and hyper-reflective white pigments) and acoustics (anechoic and reverberation chambers). 

The commission of Lamentate (2003) as a tribute to Marsyas, Anish Kapoor’s installation at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (2002), creates an interesting network of connections between the two artists and the environment that hosted the works: Kapoor is known for his monochrome works, the use of Vantablack and the contrast between volume and void, and Marsyas references Greek mythology; Pärt conceived Lamentate as a reflection on the contrast between the ephemeral and the eternal; the Turbine Hall is characterised by a background humming (an intrinsic drone music) due to the original Bankside power plant’s surviving electrical substation, in an urban context that is becoming less and less perceptibly neoclassical. Over-saturation, sub-audible noise, and fretwork are harmonised in these three elements.

Cantus in Memoriam for Benjamin Britten contains many of the ideas presented so far. The piece has the form of a prolation canon for strings, meaning that, having established a voice of x duration, the voices gradually joining it present the same melody while doubling its length (voice1 = x, voice2 = 2x, voice3 = 4x). Here, Pärt introduces a high level of complexity by having the melody (a simple descending scale) unfold itself gradually, returning to the beginning for each new note added. Such an idea is also found in Arbos, and we think it may have been inspired by the Now the Great Bear aria from Britten’s Peter Grimes, the British composer whose death the piece commemorates. Each voice then presents its own tintinnabular accompaniment. Regarding the role of silence, the piece itself begins with a pause. A tubular bell on the pitch A rings three times, accompanied by its own overtones, before the canon begins. The content of the canon includes the pause that precedes the descending scale, so that in doubling the length of the melody, the value of that silence is also included. This silence presents itself again at the end of the piece with the final tolling of the bell. This time it is coloured, as in the cells of a cloisonné inlay.

What emerges is how the notes being effectively played are allowed to resound through the presence of silence and a certain poetics of breath. This is equivalent to giving meaning to a binary string of exclusively ‘1’ digits by interposing them with ‘0’ digits, all the while following the syntactic rules that had been established. In Für Alina, this is accomplished by the lack of any indication of time and expressing the note length purely indicatively, through semibreves and a kind of stemless crotchets, leaving the interpreter to animate the piece according to their own inner motions. The Variations for Healing of Arinushka, though technically in 2/2, are transcribed in an altered score that might be described as graphically representing a syncope between the two hands on the piano. The chord being depressed and held but not performed in the theme, together with the overtones freed by the held notes and the use of the sustain pedal, enrich the audible and ‘performed’ dimension with what lies at the threshold of the perceptible.

In the pieces dating from his breaking point and in those that followed, Pärt conjoins the staff to the iconostasis, guiding the musician and the audience through the elements arranged on its five orders. In this manner, he reveals what lies beyond the veil, as articulated through moments of signifying silence. These are complex themes for the general public, especially if they are unfamiliar with the religious sentiment that permeates these works. In spite of this, Pärt’s music continues to be immensely popular and appreciated, fulfilling ‘a deep human need that has nothing to do with fashion’ (Hodgkinson, 2004). What is certain is that the strongly litanic character of his works and the overtones’ ecphonesis at the end of the rite can set in motion a whole series of internal processes that by virtue of themselves have the power to console, transform, and heal.