Eight years of searching

The year of 1968 was a turning point. After Credo Pärt decisively gave up all his earlier compositional techniques and styles, sensing the deeper need for his own musical language. Arvo Pärt:

I was left completely naked. It was like turning the new page in my life, or in music at least. It was a decision, a conviction in something very significant, that in order to be born for the new, you have to die for the past. All ideals must be revaluated.

 [Arvo Pärt 70. A radio series by Immo Mihkelson, Klassikaraadio, 2005, part 6]

This process of revaluation had already begun for some time earlier involving spiritual searchings, finding his belief and joining the Orthodox Church. These eight years of creative crisis were full of new ideas and experiments, but also disappointment and growing frustration. Arvo Pärt:

“I didn’t know at the time was I going to be able to compose at all in the future. Those years of study were no conscious break, but life and death agonising inner conflict. I had lost my inner compass and I didn’t know anymore, what an interval or a key meant.”

 [Interview by Georg Koch and Michael Mönninger, Berliner Zeitung, March 1-2, 1997]

These sufferings are documented in Pärt’s musical notebooks or so-called musical diaries that Pärt started to use in 1974 to write down both his musical and verbal ideas. From these pages we see that the composer has drawn inspiration from many things, like Gregorian chant and early polyphony, scripture and prayers.

Pärt found his long searched own musical language in February, 1976 with a little piano piece Für Alina and in next two years he composed plenty of new works, like Cantus, Tabula rasa, Fratres, Spiegel im Spiegel, etc. He had created his original compositional technique which he called tintinnabuli and which has been the basis of his musical style up until today.