So for a long while I think, we're going to talk about the Baltic region. If I had to say where the greatest music was written in living memory, the plurality is almost without a doubt in Northeastern Europe. Whichever side of the Iron Curtain every country landed on, both the crises of Europe's 20th century and the glories of Europe's 19th are seared onto their DNA. There are so many names that deserve recognition in this small region, and if one can find so many composers this good in this small region, then there are clearly more which await discovery, perhaps many more.
So let's start in Estonia, why not?.... and to start with, since so many people think they know him so well already, let's start with Arvo Pärt, who is probably the most internationally famous living composer. The reason we're starting with Pärt is simple: I kinda can't stand his music. Everyone finds Pärt's music so beautiful and meditative, I find so much of it just simple, unchallenging, boring.
And yet there's a different composer in Arvo Pärt, scrawled all over in works from when he was a young man, before he discovered his famous idea of 'Tintinabulation.' Hearing Pärt's Credo in concert was, to my shock, one of the most musical experiences I've ever had in my life. I don't really know if a recording can do it justice. Pärt, like so much religious music, depends on being able to hear the overtones, and it's almost impossible to hear them on a recording, or if you're hearing a badly tuned ensemble. But by contrasting Pärt's simple harmonies which made the bulk of his career with extreme dissonance, Pärt is taking his music out of the spheres and putting it into the world. Credo was written in 1968, perhaps in response to the Soviet invasion of Prague. Like so many Cathedrals, it has layer built atop layer built atop layer. First Bach's Prelude no. 1 from the Well-Tempered Clavier, which every knows even if they think they don't. Then, Gounod's Ave Maria, which everybody also knows even if they think they don't. And then, atop that, Pärt replaces the text of the Ave Maria with a text of the Nicene Creed, spoken by every Christian denomination for 1700 years, and set as a declaration of faith in a region where Christian faith had largely been banned since even before Pärt was born. And against the forces of that faith comes the extreme dissonances of atonality and serialism, meant here not to represent false musical equality or musical Marxism, but rather, pure chaos and agony, from which a simpler divine order can emerge which takes in the vibrations of the universe in an infinite manner chaos can never approach
I am no Pärt acolyte, but this is one of the great scores ofthe 20th century, and a transcendent experience in the concert hall. It is an affirmative statement of faith and freedom in an era in a time and place that had neither, and a statement of belief that all the suffering upon earth is not for naught.
(Also, this is easily the best performance on youtube I could find, but please ignore the stupid visuals as you listen.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mfg6-qGdw4
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