Reviewed by: Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred ed. by Peter C. Bouteneff, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Robert Saler Bissera Pentcheva Peter C. Bouteneff, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Robert Saler, eds. Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. 256 pp. This rich collection of essays focuses on the music of celebrated Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and explores the phenomenology of the music’s sound in performance and its links with theology. The range of essays is broad, from the artistic climate in late socialism to medieval plainchant, psychoacoustics, and Sufi spiritual practices. In all of the essays, the center is the reverberation produced by [End Page 144] Pärt’s tintinnabuli music, a compositional technique based on a two-part structure: a melody M-voice accompanied by a T[intinnabuli]-voice of arpeggio triads built on the home note of the governing tonality. The effect of this music is to focus attention on the fragility of the sonic decay—the reverberation. Reverberation is dependent on the acoustics of the space, and it refocuses the attention of the listener on the aural decay rather than the individual pitch played. Sound studies, with its interdisciplinary methodology, offers an appropriate platform from which to examine and theorize the aural in its temporal and spiritual dimensions. As the editors write, “sound studies is concerned with the phenomenology and materiality of the auditory event that is sound” (3). The introduction explains the concept of translation as seen in many different manifestations of Pärt’s music—as medieval plainchant poured into a modern idiom, sacred text into music, and theology into sound. Walter Benjamin’s essay on translation, while not referred to by any of the editors or authors, could help flesh out the concept of translation and uncover its relationship to Scripture and the sacred (“The Task of the Translator,” Translation––Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader, 2006). A good translation is form, inviting the original to resound in it. Benjamin writes, “genuine translation is translucid: it does not veil the original text, nor shadow it. Rather it allows the radiance universal language, a radiance intensified by the particular idiom, to fall the more brightly on the original” (305). Translation as form is a reverberant space that amplifies and brightens the original, allowing the universal language––the divine––to resonate. Benjamin’s definition connects to the two major ideas of this volume: reverberation and the sacred. A more intensive engagement with these two concepts and a clearer recognition of the link between them in the introduction would have helped the reader understand this project better and follow the subsequent arguments. Bouteneff’s essay, which follows the introduction, continues with the concept of translation, arguing that “what we are hearing then is the sound of the composer’s faith made accessible through its translation into music” (19). Toomas Siitan, too, recognizes Pärt’s spiritual-driven tintinnabuli style, articulating its manifestation in some of Pärt’s Soviet-period film-music compositions and in his experimentation with text setting and medieval Flemish polyphony. The focus on Pärt’s Soviet-period production is maintained in the next two essays, by Christopher May and Kevin Karnes, respectively. May draws attention to Pärt’s film soundtracks as a creative laboratory of what eventually emerges as the tintinnabuli style. May’s findings challenge the established narrative, promoted by the composer himself, of the rupture between the tintinnabuli style and his other music compositions. Karnes explores alternative or underground venues, little known in the West, where Pärt sought to unveil his new compositions, such as Lediņš Student Discotheque club in Riga in the 1970s. Both May and Karnes reconstruct a much more complex and polyvalent late socialism, drawing on the work of anthropologist Alexei Yurchak and music historian Levon Hakobian. Both essays encourage research into Pärt’s film music, which, despite the current dominant narrative, shares in the artistic objectives of his concert music and developed below the radar of censorship (45). The next section, on phenomenology, opens with Bouteneff’s conversation with Paul Hillier about what it means to sing Pärt’s music of sparse scores, which require exacting purity...
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Sep 19, 2024
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