by Ken Myers
[This article originally appeared in the July/August 2015 issue of Touchstone magazine.]
The term “tonality” is used to refer to a harmonic system whereby a sense of home is established in a piece of music on a particular note. Melodies and harmonies within a tonal composition are ordered around that home note and the home key (major or minor) that grows out of it. Think of the tune to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The first note, the one on which Judy Garland sang “Some-”, is the home note. The second note — “-where” — ascends a full octave, to a note which is vibrating exactly twice as fast as the first note, and thus is a higher version of home. As it happens, that higher home note is also the very last note in the song, as Dorothy wistfully wonders “Why, oh why, can’t I?” When she sings that last note, the melody comes back home, even if she and Toto still aren’t in Kansas anymore. Music with a tonal center can come home, often repeatedly, and each arrival is usually aesthetically satisfying.
Many Western composers in the twentieth century expressed anxiety, skepticism, or disdain toward the practice of tonality. Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, composed at the end of the century’s first decade, announced (in Leonard Bernstein’s words) “the death of tonality.” Bernstein hears in the last movement of Mahler’s Ninth a prayer “for the restoration of life, of tonality, of faith. . . . But there are no solutions.” The twentieth century was the century of death, proclaimed Bernstein in his 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard, “and Mahler is its musical prophet.”
Anton Webern, a leading practitioner of serialism — the most radical form of atonal composition — once observed that tonality didn’t just die. “We broke its neck.” The homeless spirit of atonality sometimes continued to express musical rage. The notes to the performer in the score to Pierre Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata (1947–48) include “more and more staccato and brutal,” “still more violent,” and “pulverize the sound; quick, dry attack, as if from bottom to top; stay without nuances at very high volume.”
Pärt’s Two Conversions
The earliest compositions of Arvo Pärt (born 1935 in Estonia) displayed his agility in using the vocabulary of atonal techniques. But as his career developed, his works increasingly displayed a deliberate contrast between tonality and atonality. His 1966 Pro et Contra, for example, includes alternating passages of complex dissonance and simple, delicate consonance. Conductor Paul Hillier suggests that this work is an exercise of conflict and contrast “between the ‘ordered’ world of tonality and the increasingly disturbed chaos in its absence.” Credo (1968), scored for piano, chorus, and orchestra, is a pivotal work for Pärt, the last of his “collage” compositions in which tonal and atonal passages compete. “The glimpses of tonality in these earlier works,” concludes Hillier, “are like intimations of a paradisiacal garden from which exile is felt to be increasingly futile.”
In the early 1970s, Pärt underwent two conversions. He joined the Russian Orthodox Church and he began an intense study of early music: Gregorian chant, the earliest Medieval polyphony, and the early Renaissance masters, especially those from the Low Countries. Finally, he interacted with Palestrina and Victoria, the two giants of late Renaissance polyphony. He thus experienced these “mature” composers as the culmination of centuries of melodic and harmonic development, and not (as they are often perceived) primitive predecessors of the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In engaging these works, Pärt set about to recover a sense of what melody is. Like a painter re-learning the basics of drawing, he devised exercises to retrain his musical imagination. “Sometimes he would draw a shape,” Paul Hillier explains, “such as the outline of wings or a landscape, and then create a melodic line that would fill that shape. Or he would quickly read a text, set it aside, and then immediately write music to mirror what he had just read.”
And texts were important to the melodic sensibility that restored tonality for Arvo Pärt, since all of the music he submitted himself to was written for use in the liturgy. This music is first and foremost prayer (remember St. Augustine’s declaration that “he who sings well prays twice”), composed to accompany the wordless mystery of the sacraments of the Church. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger has observed that “at the beginning of great sacred music there is of necessity awe, receptivity, and a humility that is prepared to serve by participating in the greatness which has already gone forth,” that is, in the rich legacy of the Church’s sacred music, East and West. Pärt’s compositional practices were retuned in accordance with these virtues, with remarkable consequences.
Tintinabuli
Readers who have not yet heard his music might be impatiently waiting for me to describe it. Paul Hillier (who has conducted and recorded many of Pärt’s compositions, recordings I commend) suggests that Pärt’s later work is typically marked by “directness of feeling, transparency of form, austerity of mood, [and] economy of gesture.” But that is still not sonically descriptive. Try “bell-like.” Not clanging or gonging, but harmonically pure, patient, and uncluttered. The method of composition that Pärt discovered he eventually dubbed (in homage to bells) “tintinnabuli.”
A new recording by The Tallis Scholars, best known for dozens of recordings of Renaissance choral music, is called Tintinnabuli, and it features over an hour of a cappella music written in this style. The purity and strength of vocal style that conductor Peter Phillips has learned to draw from his singers in over forty years of conducting is the perfect instrument for these mysteriously compelling pieces. All of the works on Tintinnabuli are based on biblical or liturgical texts, and each is unpredictable, possibly strange to some ears, but each — in this rejuvenated form of tonality — will welcome listeners home.
Below is an interview with Tallis Scholars conductor Peter Phillips
about Arvo Pärt’s music.