Arvo Pärt
“I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.”
Since the release of the epochal recording of Tabula Rasa in 1984, the music of Arvo Pärt has been a constant, irradiating presence at ECM. Indeed, Tabula Rasa was the very first album in the label’s New Series; ECM founder Manfred Eicher heard the piece on a late-night radio broadcast while driving, pulled over and was so immediately impressed that he resolved to record it.
In Horizons Touched (2007), Paul Griffiths wrote of Pärt’s music offering “a light by which the label could venture ever further into other repertoires… Meanwhile, successive ECM albums have maintained and confirmed the cherishing of Pärt’s eloquent simplicity worldwide”. Pärt’s music has been characterized as conveying directness of feeling, transparency [...]
“I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.”
Since the release of the epochal recording of Tabula Rasa in 1984, the music of Arvo Pärt has been a constant, irradiating presence at ECM. Indeed, Tabula Rasa was the very first album in the label’s New Series; ECM founder Manfred Eicher heard the piece on a late-night radio broadcast while driving, pulled over and was so immediately impressed that he resolved to record it.
In Horizons Touched (2007), Paul Griffiths wrote of Pärt’s music offering “a light by which the label could venture ever further into other repertoires… Meanwhile, successive ECM albums have maintained and confirmed the cherishing of Pärt’s eloquent simplicity worldwide”. Pärt’s music has been characterized as conveying directness of feeling, transparency of form, austerity of mood, and economy of gesture – all combined with a unique force and intensity. These qualities have made his music both instantly recognizable worldwide and wholly inimitable.
Arvo Pärt was born in 1935 in Paide, a small town south-east of the Estonian capital Tallinn. He had a voracious appetite for discovering music from an early age and began composing in his mid-teens. In 1957, he became a student at Tallinn Conservatory, where he was taught by leading Estonian composer, Heino Eller. Pärt’s career as a composer began during his Conservatory years with film and theatre commissions. He also worked as a recording engineer with Estonian Radio.
Pärt’s early compositions were neoclassical, but that style was soon supplanted by a uncompromisingly modern idiom that employed serialism and collage techniques. His first orchestral piece, Nekrolog (1962), earned the condemnation of the redoubtable Tikhon Khrennikov, secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, a portent of a difficult relationship with the Soviet authorities for many years to come. A greater uproar followed the premiere of Pärt’s choral piece Credo in 1968. Its overt declaration of belief in Christ offended the country’s atheist authorities and official commissions dried up.
By the time of Credo, the composer felt he had reached a creative impasse, and a period of crisis followed. During this time of intense reflection, Pärt made a meticulous study of early music, which would profoundly influence his subsequent development. He has described a chance encounter with Gregorian chant on the radio as being like “a window opening onto another world”. The result of the composer’s study and reflection was the creation of his tintinnabuli style (from the Latin for “small tinkling bells”), which Pärt has described thus: “I work with very few elements – with one voice, with two voices. I build with the most primitive materials – with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of the triad are like bells. And that is why I call it tintinnabulation”.
This creative breakthrough enabled him to resume composing and a stream of masterpieces has followed. Since Tabula Rasa’s release, all first recordings of Pärt's major works have been made for ECM, with the composer's committed participation. This catalogue of masterpieces includes Miserere (1990), Te Deum (1993), Litany (1995), Kanon Pokajanen (1997), Passio (1998), Lamentate (2005), and Adam’s Lament (2012).
Pärt’s tintinnabuli is style is much more than a compositional technique; it is also an ideology, a personal and profoundly felt attitude to life, based on Christian values, religious practice and a quest for truth, beauty and purity. Pärt’s sensitivity to the meaning of silence is highly distinctive, as is the subtlety of his approach to the texts he sets. His body of compositions has become one of the most significant and widely appreciated musical achievements of the past half century, a fact acknowledged in the host of international awards and accolades he has received.
In 2015, on the occasion of Arvo Pärt’s 80th birthday, ECM New Series issued Musica Selecta, a collection of recordings newly sequenced by Manfred Eicher, his producer of more than 30 years.
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| YEAR | DATE | Artist | VENUE | LOCATION | |
| 2025 | April 29 |
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
w/ Tõnu Kaljuste, Kadri Toomoja |
ECM Explorations- Philharmonie | Paris, France | Event |
| 2025 | May 16 |
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
"Arvo Pärt Nacht" w/ Tõnu Kaljuste |
Prinzregententheater | Munich, Germany | Event |