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Arvo Pärt in Conversation
All that I had to go on was a book of Gregorian chant, a Liber usualis, that I had received from a church in Tallinn. When I began to sing and to play these melodies I had the feeling that I was begin given a blood transfusion. It was terribly strenuous work because it was not simply a matter of absorbing information. I had to be able to understand this music down to its very roots: how it had come into existence, what the people were like who had sung it, what they'd felt during their lives, how they'd written this music down and passed it on through the centuries until it became the source of our music. In some way or other I succeeded it getting into contact with this music. But I never used this closeness as a quote, with the exception of one early piece that I wrote for Bologna Cathedral: Statuit ei Dominus. In Gregorian chant the succession of notes forms something like real speech, the notes offer concrete information, something that is comparable to birdsong. We do not understand them, but they understand each other. Monodic music has a certain informal content, it has arisen like a cathedral from ground that bears within it the ruins of earlier temples, probably a heathen temple that in its turn was erected in early pre-history on that site for quite specific reasons. This chan of forms, temples, and chants, each built upon the ruins of the other, is something more potent than we can imagine.
In my daily work, too, I came up against tremendous difficulties. For a time I succeeded in writing a single musical line, but then I didn't know how to go on. Should I have written just monodic music? What would have become of polyphony and harmony? What should I have done with the second and third voice? Where should a second voice come from? Tormented by these questions, I began to think about the beginning of polyphony. It became clear to me that it was far more complex and profound than the rigid rules with which Knud Jeppesen had analysed and explained this music would have us suppose. The second voice must be something independent, like the husband and wife in a family. This relationship of independent parts can, in my opinion, already be seen in the beginning of ancient polyphony.
I tried to realise this intuition in my third symphony where I conceived the entire form of the composition through the metaphor of the building of a town: small, increasingly numerous centres that spread out until they touch each other and form a unity. The same thing happens with the harmonic progression in the piece that is evolved from a series of short cadences. Upon this idea is based the ideas of polyphonic complexity. Nonetheless, my experience with the third symphony left me dissatisfied. It became clear to me that I was caught within my relationship to musical history, which was too much one of debt. And that my work somehow lacked a style of its own. But I had succeeded in building a bridge within myself between yesterday and today - a yesterday that was several centuries old - and this encouraged me to go on exploring. During those years I filled thousands of pages with exercises in which I wrote out single voiced melodies. At home there is a cupboard full of exercises like this.
N.P.: What he was trying to do was to create a new way of hearing. That was why he didn't listen to any other sort of music during this period. Arvo wanted to find this mysterious source within himself and let the sounds flow freely out. He tried to gather all the information that might be helpful towards this end. He would read psalms, and immediately afterward try to write a melodic line without a break, without control, as if he was blind, in order to be able to transform the impressions of his reading immediately into music.
A.P.: Yes, I read a psalm and filled a whole page, without thinking much about it, in the hope that there might be some sort of connection between what I read and what I wrote. Then I got on with reading the next psalm. I'm sure that between the psalm and my melody there was no connection at all. At least I didn't notice any. However, I still hoped for some sort of osmosis, and so I went on and repeated the same process with one hundred and fifty psalms.
N.P.: Arvo wanted to develop his spontaneity, and not just through this experiment with the psalms - I can remember that he observed flocks of birds, sketched them in a book, and wrote a melody next to the drawing. In other cases he used photos of mountains as inspiration to find a musical phrase. He had the feeling that the observation of cold, dead rules from years gone by had extinguished his own free, creative impulse.
Now he was trying to rediscover it. It's interesting to note that Arvo later imposed rules upon himself again, albeit of quite a different kind.
A.P.: Yes, that is true enough. With the tintinnabuli style I went back to rules.
N.P.: You can't imagine how important this period was, with all its pages of exercises and psalms. He didn't know if he had found anything at all, and if he had, what it was. But he would certainly have given up composition if he had found nothing. I was very worried about him, and saw how much he was suffering. I knew that he would not have been able to go on living without that music, which was the real content of his life. I saw that he was about to implode, and didn't know if he would manage to bring these labour pains to a happy conclusion.
-- Arvo Pärt in Conversation, pp. 27-30.
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