Kevin C. Karnes

Each of the volumes in the Oxford Keynotes series is dedicated to a particular musical work or album from the fields of classical, jazz or popular music and is accompanied by a dedicated website which provides multimedia materials, including audio clips. In this particular book, Kevin C. Karnes explores Tabula Rasa, one of Arvo Pärt’s iconic works. A double concerto for two violins, prepared piano and strings, this was amongst the first compositions which Pärt wrote in his distinctive tintinnabuli style or ‘method’. Karnes’s explanation of how tintinnabuli works is admirably lucid, and I will not even attempt to put it into my own words. To get a feel of its sound (short of reading the book) I suggest listening to Für Alina (amongst the earliest of his tintinnabuli pieces ) or to Tabula Rasa itself. Here's a live performance and here's a link to the cult 1984 ECM album which launched the label’s “New Series” and brought the piece (and its composer) to the attention of a wider public.

Concise as it is, this monograph casts its web wide. Indeed, only one of the book’s five chapters is dedicated specifically to a “theoretical” analysis of Tabula Rasa. Before tackling the work head on, Karnes delves into the cultural context in which this concerto, and by extension, Pärt’s tintinnabuli approach, were first conceived. This involves an examination both of Pärt’s earlier compositions and of the Soviet musical world in which he worked. The volume ends with a chapter on the reception of Tabula Rasa outside the “Soviet” bloc and Pärt’s own emigration to the West.

Along the way, Karnes provides several insights which will likely challenge lazy assumptions about Pärt and his music. Pärt’s development of tintinnabuli or, as he prefers to describe it, his ‘discovery’ of it, is often portrayed as a sort of Damascene conversion which led the composer to abandon his serialist, avant-garde past. Karnes however presents us with a “hermeneutic of continuity” (to borrow a theological term), teasing out several parallels between Pärt’s earlier and later pieces. Thus, whilst it might not be immediately evident to the listener, the composer’s tintinnabuli pieces often follow a strict mathematical process, making them not unlike the serialist works of his youth. Moreover, an interest in early music and forms, and a penchant for ‘polystylism’ could be felt even in pieces pre-dating Pärt’s tintinnabuli phase.

Karnes also convincingly shows that despite his distinctive mode of expression, Pärt is very much one of a piece with the post-war avant-garde: the mathematical formulae remind one of serialism, the “process” aspect of tintinnabuli is not far removed from the experiments of Steve Reich (although both composers were working independently) and the importance Pärt gives to silence is reminiscent of the musical philosophy of John Cage, whom Pärt often references in interviews.

There are other surprising discoveries in store. Influenced by the “marketing” people, many listeners tend to classify Pärt as a “holy minimalist”, lumping him with other (very different) composers such as John Tavener and Henryk Gorecki. So it might be surprising to discover that the earliest “Western” listeners, as yet lacking such preconceived references and easy categorizations, found in Tabula Rasa echoes of “Far Eastern music” and compared this strange, new, static music to “the effects of highly skilled pop groups such as Pink Floyd”.

Karnes does not eschew technical analysis and yet his style remains remarkably accessible throughout, making this an absorbing book for general readers as well. The text is enriched not only by the multimedia element, but also by illustrations and references (some of them difficult to find) and copious footnotes. In other words, this volume is a must-read for anyone interested in Arvo Pärt and tintinnabuli.

***

Postscript : The day I met Arvo Pärt

Yes, I really met Arvo Pärt. And that fleeting meeting – like Karnes’s book – challenged my impression of the composer.

Pärt has been a musical idol for me ever since a hazy summer afternoon in the early nineties when I caught a recorded broadcast of “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten” on Rai Radio 3 (played, incidentally, at half the speed and lower pitch because of a technical mishap). In July 2016, the composer was invited to Malta to attend a concert of his music presented by the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra as part of the Malta Arts Festival. The highlight was to be the European premiere of Greater Antiphons, the orchestral arrangement of his choral piece Sieben Magnificat Antiphonen. It had only been performed once before – by Gustavo Dudamel at the helm of the LA Phil. It was, to a Pärt fan, a historic occasion which I couldn’t let pass. I dragged along my good friend Nick. To be honest, he is more into jazz and rock but is, like me, an ECM groupie. And a good sport. Concealed in an inner pocket of my jacket was a Naxos recording of Pärt’s Passio, held close as a talisman, in the vague hope that I could get the composer to sign it.



Aesthetically, the golden Baroque splendour of a packed St John’s Co-Cathedral seemed miles away from Pärt’s pared-down style, just as the heat of the Mediterranean summer was hardly redolent of ‘Estonian cool’. Yet, when the descending scales and tolling bell of Cantus cascaded like a sigh over the audience, it seemed as if we were being propelled beyond time and space. I had listened to recordings of the piece tens of times, but hearing it live in those sacred surroundings felt like discovering it anew. The hushed atmosphere was temporarily torn asunder by the sound of a "festa" band marching outside, to the consternation of musicians and organisers. It was a facepalm moment. What must the composer be thinking? I later heard through the grapevine that Pärt was quite amused by it all. A touch of Ives?

When the concert ended, I lagged behind hopefully. Would Pärt be spirited away for after-concert canapés? Would I get a glimpse of him? Yes, as it turned out. There was the Great Composer, in the middle of the aisle, smilingly signing programme after proferred programme. I smugly pulled out my Passio CD, handed my camera-smartphone to my long-suffering concert buddy (who promptly placed himself in a strategic position), and joined the queue.

As I got nearer to Pärt, I couldn’t help feeling that the image of the benign man who stood before me seemed quite incongruous with that of the ‘prophet’ propagated by magazines and CD adverts. He was wearing a rather flamboyant, open-necked shirt with a surreal print (little blue birds, if my memory serves me right). “What’s your name?” Pärt asked a little boy who was being egged on by his mother. “Saviour”, the boy replied. “Ah, Saviour...”, the composer sagely nodded, “like Our Lord Jesus Christ”. I couldn't tell whether he was in earnest or whether this was his idea of humour. Or both.

It was my turn then. My recollection becomes hazy, but Nick’s photos show me grinning sheepishly as Pärt scrawls his signature on the CD cover. It’s on the shelf in front of me right now.



https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2018/09/happy-birthday-arvo-part.html… (mais)

Tintinnabuli Begins
Review of the University of Chicago Press hardcover edition (December 2021)

Close followers of the music of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt will likely know of the October 27, 1976 concert in Tallinn, Estonia which is considered the official premiere of his earliest tintinnabuli (Latin: little bells) compositions. The music journalist Immo Mihkelson has written about it in the article rel="nofollow" target="_top">The Cradle of Tintinnabuli - 40 Years since a Historic Concert (2016) five years ago. The Estonian version of the article includes facsimile copies of the concert booklet which are not seen in the English language version.

What is less known is that one of these same works (Sarah was Ninety Years Old aka Modus) was actually premiered earlier in April, 1976 in the neighbouring Baltic country of Latvia, which, like Estonia, was then still under Soviet Russian occupation. Further premieres (Missa Syllabica, Arbos, Cantate Domino, Summa, Fratres) occurred again in Latvia in October 1977 at a Festival of Contemporary Music. Both of these occasions were organized by then architecture student/part-time disc jockey Hardijs Lediņš (1955-2004) through his discotheques and lectures at the Student Club at the Riga Polytechnic Institute.

See photograph at https://deepbaltic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/hl4.jpg
Lediņš organising his first discotheques in Latvia in the 1970s. Image sourced from Appreciated at last, Latvia's Visionary Artist Hardijs Lediņš at Deep Baltic

Musicologist Kevin C. Karnes has researched these early concerts through interviews and expeditions to examine both Latvian and Estonian music archives in order to reconstruct this history as best as possible. This includes hearing the documentation from the private recordings of Hardijs Lediņš (now with his family in Latvia) and of Arvo Pärt (now at the Arvo Pärt Centre in Estonia). Along the way we learn how Lediņš organized his discotheques to present a 1st half which provided a lecture on contemporary music (ranging from avant-garde classical to progressive rock, music mostly inaccessible in the Soviet Union) with a 2nd half devoted to dancing.

Arvo Pärt's early tintinnabuli music is discussed in detail, providing much needed information on the composition and public premiere dates of these works. It is particularly interesting to read about how the early more simple tintinnabuli style evolved into Pärt's syllabic style where the text of a work could be used as the basis for an algorithm to create music from it. Much of this sort of cryptography was required in order to disguise the religious inspiration behind these works in the officially atheistic Soviet state. Texts would then often be sung on solfeggio syllables rather than in their Latin or other original languages.

This is a major publication that adds much early history to Arvo Pärt's creative shift from exploring avant-garde stylings such as dodecaphony, collage and aleatoric music to his tintinnabuli and syllabic music from the 1970s onwards.

Kevin C. Karnes is also the author of the excellent monograph Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa (Oxford University Press, 2017) about the composer's breakthrough work which first made him widely known beyond the Soviet Union and became the cornerstone of the composer's first ECM Records album Tabula Rasa (orig. 1984/enhanced hardcover book edition 2010).

Trivia and Links
Kevin C. Karnes earliest version of Chapter 4 "Ritual Moments" in Sounds Beyond appeared in the journal Res Musica as Arvo Pärt, Hardijs Lediņš and the Ritual Moment in Riga October, 1977 (2019).
A further interim version of Chapter 4 appeared in [book:Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred|51155699] (Fordham University Press, 2020) as the conference paper Arvo Pärt’s Tintinnabuli and the Soviet Underground.… (mais)

Arvo Pärt's Journey

"I don’t remember anything about what there was around me, I can only say that when that sound which became increasingly quieter and quieter and quieter as it faded away… That was it… that was where we were being transported to. And then, when you could no longer understand whether there was still any sound to be heard or not to be heard, the difference between them had disappeared. Then suddenly, I had to grasp firmly onto my chair as I had this sensation that this final sound was going to lift me into the air and simply carry me away." - audience member at the premiere performance of Arvo Pärt's "Tabula Rasa" September 30, 1977*.

Kevin C. Karnes' "Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa" is the first English language monograph on a single work in the Estonian composer's oeuvre. The only other such book publication is the German-language "Die Johannespassion von Arvo Pärt" (2015) on the composer's "Passio" aka "St. John Passion" by Michaela C. Hastetter & Beate Kowalski. These have joined the recent steady flow of Pärt-related publications (e.g. "The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt" (2012), "Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence" (2015), "Arvo Pärt's White Light: Media, Culture, Politics" (2017), "Arvo Part's Resonant Texts: Choral and Organ Music 1956-2015" (2018) which have seen print in recent years while the composer has consistently been noted as the most performed living composer by the classical music event database Bachtrack**.

Karnes spent time in Estonia at the archives of the Arvo Pärt Centre, the Estonian Radio, the Estonian Academy of Music and the Estonian Theatre and Music Museum while also interviewing related Estonian musicians and music authorities. He has thus assembled as thorough a guide to Pärt's early music career in Estonia from the 1950's to the 1980 emigration as has ever been presented in English. Although the double-violin concerto Tabula Rasa is the main central topic there is a quite thorough overview of many of the early pre-tintinnabuli works. This is particularly to show Pärt's progression through various 20th century styles/techniques such as dodecaphony, serialism, collage, aleatoric, and graphic scores. This also serves to present a well-argued case that Pärt's tintinnabuli-style can be viewed as a logical conclusion to his search which actually incorporates more of the past than a simple conclusion of minimalist influences might think.

It is left unexplained why the September 30, 1977 premiere performance used a harpsichord in place of the score's prepared piano and why ECM's 1984 premiere recording has consistently been reissued with several clunkers of unedited audio errors in the final quiet passages of the concluding Silentium movement. Some mysteries must remain, even in as thorough a study as this one.

* Translation from the original Estonian in the radio documentary "Arvo Pärt at 70" by Immo Mihkelson:
"Mina ei tea ümbrusest mitte midagi, ma võin ainult öelda et see hääl mis ikka vaiksemaks ja vaiksemaks ja vaiksemaks niimoodi nagu hääbus... See oligi see… see kuhu meid viidi. Ja siis kui sa enam ei saanud aru kas veel on mingit häält mida sa kuuled või enam ei ole, kadus ära see vahe. Siis järsku, ma võtsin võpatades toolist kinni, sest mul oli tunne et see viimane hääl tõstab mu õhku ja viib mind lihtsalt ära."

** For six years running as of January 2017, see http://estonianworld.com/culture/arvo-part-worlds-performed-living-composer-sixt...… (mais)