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The Fullness of Emptiness: Riffing on Arvo Pärt
Arvo Pärt’s minimalist soundscapes are a major feature of the Twentieth Century’s musical terrain; his is a particularly windblown and barren, starkly beautiful land, with grand vistas and time-carved expanses. It’s rare that an artist evokes such obvious and linear geographic metaphors for me, but I love Pärt’s music for the exact same reason that I love the badlands of Wyoming. Both are vast and open and take ages to cross. Both are dotted by the miniature embellishments of dry and rugged plants or the occasional orchestral flourish, and are riven by the traces of scarce water’s seasonal flow or a change of key, equally sudden and embraced.
The hugeness of the American West has inspired countless poets and cowboy philosophers, and I count myself among them. So it is little wonder that I experience the same hugeness in Pärt’s symphonies as a giant sky, into which my attention spills and spills, with a beckoning horizon just faint enough to yield to my conjectures. He demonstrates in human craft what being in such a place will tell you: that emptiness makes room for form. Absence is suggestive. All sound arises from silence.
What follows are quotes from Pärt I found in the liner notes to a collection of his recordings (Pärt: Tabula Rasa/Fratres/Symphony №3a, 1999 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg) — and, in the tradition of the commentators on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War or Lao Tzu’s Book of Changes, here are my own embellishments on what he has to say. I think his musings and those of the Eastern sages are equally profound. Hopefully some of you will find my contributions worthwhile, as well.
“I need to withdraw in order to depict something objective. The greater our ability to stand back and feel the wing-beat of time, the more powerful will be the impact of the work of art. Time’s beating wing affects us in two ways: on the one hand creating uncertainty, endless complications, chaos; on the other hand, order. It is the simultaneity of life and death.” (p.3)
Creativity requires a balance between detachment and immersion — the forest and the trees. In the moment of inspiration, the composer is not separate from the composition. Improvisation requires one to be completely within the music, but this is balanced with a period of revision, of review. If you are to make a…
