Arvo Pärt, a 90-year-old flower

Pablo Espinosa

La Jornada Newspaper, Saturday, September 6, 2025, p. a12

The world improved half a century ago with the emergence of a musical form that changed the lives of entire generations: the Tintinábuli system, invented by Arvo Pärt. Since then, legions of young people have enthusiastically sought out everything written and written by the man considered the greatest living composer in the world.

The Bachtrack website, which lists the latest developments in the world of concert music and is the quintessential reference, ranks Arvo Pärt year after year as the most frequently performed living composer in concert halls, followed sometimes by John Williams, the composer of the music for the Star Wars saga, and in other years by Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

The world may be rotting, but there is music that brings light, comfort, and hope to humanity: Arvo Pärt's Tintinábuli music.

This September 11th, Arvo turns 90 and the world rejoices.

Various activities have been announced, including, as the main event, a major festival in Pärnu, an Estonian holiday resort on the Baltic Sea coast where Arvo spent many happy childhood moments with his family and friends, including Estonian conductor Neeme Järvi, who remembers Arvo as a child, always wearing jeans and a baseball cap.

There is another image of Arvo's childhood and youth: wearing that outfit, which he alternated with corduroy trousers, riding his bicycle around the small central park of Tallinn, the town where Arvo spent his early years.

While cycling, Arvo listened to Beethoven's symphonies and Johann Sebastian Bach's music, which the city played in the park through speakers mounted on lampposts.

The festival celebrating Arvo's 90th birthday includes several concerts, the main one conducted by his childhood friend Paavo Järvi, son of Nemee Järvi, with a set of works released on Spotify yesterday from Arvo Pärt's new album.

On this album, Paavo Järvi conducts the Estonian Festival Orchestra. The works included will be performed live during four concerts, while Kristjan Järvi, his brother, will conduct a special program two days later entitled Pärt in Mirror, a clear allusion to one of Järvi's most important Tintinábuli works, Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror).

Arvo Pärt's new album, then, brings together 10 scores representative of the Tintinábuli style he invented: an algorithmic system whose goal is the total reduction and strictest organization of musical resources. Arvo put it this way: "It's pure mathematics."

As we know, mathematics is the structure of all music. The most important example in history is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which is the same as saying: perfection.

Bach's music reproduces the natural mathematics of nature. Listening to his works, we clearly see—because it is a natural synesthetic music—the structure of tree leaves, the astonishing architecture of those trees, the mathematical translation of the flow of a stream (Bach, in German, means stream), and the light of the sunset.

Arvo Pärt has always been aware of this. I was fortunate enough to know him in person, and he granted me one of the few interviews he has ever given. In these conversations, he explained to me the influence of Bach's work on his music, especially its clear mathematical vocation.

Arvo Pärt's initial creative period falls within the dodecaphony, a musical system invented by Arnold Schönberg with strictly mathematical foundations, especially the use of the algorithm as an element of structure, repetition and construction.

After a long period of retirement from composition, Arvo converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity in 1972 and devoted himself entirely to the study of different traditions of sacred music, including Gregorian chant, Notre Dame School polyphony, and Renaissance polyphony.

At the end of that period, in 1976, he composed a set of works in which he implemented a new compositional system he called tintinábuli, the Latin name for the handbells used by medieval monks to call to work and prayer. This system consists of accompanying a main melody with a tintinábuli voice that uses only notes belonging to a triad chord. It is a technique for structuring tones in which the voices are connected according to a set of strict contrapuntal rules.

The main components of the texture consist of the melodic voice, rationally constructed and mostly scalar, and the tintinnabuli voice, sculpted around a central triad. It represents a novel unity of counterpoint, harmony, and form in music, where the simplicity of the aural parameters, as well as the clarity and rigor of the music, merge with the numerical programming of the musical material.

The goal is to achieve the essential. Arvo Pärt explained it to me this way: "It's the flight into voluntary poverty." Arvo's scores have very few notes, just enough to understand the world. It's a sonic asceticism linked to the philosophical and theological tradition of the Orthodox faith. It's a new understanding of simplicity. The use of few notes, chords that seem to repeat themselves. And the effect is hypnotic, like when we concentrate in the countryside to observe how a river flows, or how the waves of the sea move.

Arvo told me when he visited Mexico a few years ago: “My music is born from the immutable truths and mirrors the immeasurable serenity imparted by a mountain landscape.”

He added: "It resolves itself in a way that is infinite in time, but outside the flow of infinity. I had to gently draw this music out of silence and emptiness."

Arvo Pärt's works are essentially non-discursive, displaying processes that arise and disappear with the naturalness of a chemical reaction. They are neither subjective nor rhetorical, as are almost all the works of Romanticism and post-Romanticism. The ultimate example is Gustav Mahler's symphonies, so affected, so rhetorical, so full of emotional and bizarre effects.

To this day, there are orchestras, or even composers, who find it very difficult to interpret Arvo Pärt's work because it is composed of very slow music, with very long notes, but above all, lacking emotional or discursive effects. It is very disconcerting for musicians so accustomed to the dynamic effects (intensity) and agogic effects ( tempo) of Romantic music.

It's an extraordinarily ecstatic kind of music. It aspires to silence as the ultimate expression of humanity. Its effect is immediate: the listener immediately enters a state of serenity, of harmony. They smile within. It's also music with, let's say, psychedelic effects; not for nothing was it once, especially when his first Tintinábuli works were released, compared to the music of Pink Floyd.

In the strictly mathematical order of Arvo Pärt's manuscripts, I was able to observe a detail that deeply moved me: the morning we locked ourselves in for the interview, Arvo was hugging a score he wrote in Mexico: Virgencita, dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, and which he premiered in Guanajuato.

It is a Tintinábuli work, with its strict triad arrangement, and what I noticed in the file of scores that he fervently embraced is that the main note of each phrase, Arvo, marked it with a flower, which he drew on the score.

Let's celebrate the 90th birthday of the world's greatest living composer. Let's listen to his music, and every time our ears identify each important note in each phrase, let's pick up that flower and throw it to the wind in the direction of Estonia, where at this moment Arvo catches it, holds it close to his chest, and embraces it.

And he smiles at us.

X: @PabloEspinosaB

[email protected]