Tabula rasa

Arvo Pärt was born in Paidain independent Estonia, and now lives in the Estonian village of Laulasmaa. He wrote Tabula rasa, Double Concerto for two violins, string orchestra, and prepared piano, in 1977 at the request of the conductor Eri Klas. Pärt dedicated the score to Klas and the violinists Gidon Kremer and Tatjana Grindenko, all of whom gave the work’s world premiere performance on September 30, 1977, with the Tallinn State Academic Theater Chamber Orchestra in the Tallinn Polytechnic Institute Assembly Hall in Tallinn, Estonia. Helju Tauk performed the prepared piano part. First Boston Symphony Orchestra performances: March 27-29, 2025, Dima Slobodeniouk conducting, with BSO violinists Alexander Velinzon and Lucia Lin as soloists and Vytas Baksys performing the prepared piano part.

The score of Tabula rasa calls for two solo violins, prepared piano (amplified if possible), and string orchestra (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). Pärt also created a version replacing the second violin soloist with solo viola. The piano is prepared via screws between some of the strings to create bell- or gong-like timbres.

Estonia gained its independence from Russia in 1920, while Russia was going through its own transition to become the central republic of the Soviet Union. Estonia maintained its sovereignty for just over twenty years, but during World War II was caught between the USSR and the encroaching German Third Reich. Having liberated Estonia from Nazi occupation at the end of the war, the Soviet Union “kept” it, with the rest of the Baltic States, behind the Iron Curtain until the Soviet system collapsed; Estonia became independent once again in August 1991. Historically, Estonian society thrives on mergings and clashes among disparate political, religious, and cultural influences, for example in the tension between the Russian Orthodox and Lutheran traditions and between Russian versus German and Swedish intellectual and cultural heritages. Estonia’s distinct Finnic language and heritage is a foundation of its cultural sovereignty.

Arvo Pärt developed as an artist in an Estonian society that remained somewhat intact within the Soviet Socialist system. As a child, he attended music school in addition to his regular education, becoming a competent pianist and oboist while also experimenting with composing. His late teenage years coincided with a relaxation of strict Soviet political and aesthetic agendas for a time following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. Pärt’s apprenticeship continued after high school at an intermediate music school, interrupted by his obligatory two-year military service. In 1957 he entered Tallinn Conservatory, where he studied with Heino Eller, one of his most important influences. Concurrently he worked at Estonian Radio as a recording engineer and began writing music for the theater and for film. By the time he graduated the Conservatory in 1963, he had established enviable professional credentials and a mastery of a range of compositional techniques.

During the late 1950s, composers gained greater access to music by Western European and American composers working with progressive techniques including serialism (ordered series of pitches and other parameters, an expansion of Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique), chance processes, and other new ideas. More powerful than the specific techniques involved was the very idea of artistic freedom represented by the serious and breathlessly exuberant activity of the avant garde. Pärt himself was probably the first Estonian to write a significant piece using the twelve-tone method, his Necrology (1961), which was performed several times outside of Tallinn but received even greater attention as the object of public condemnation from Tikhon Khrennikov, the First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers.

Pärt’s use of serialism throughout the 1960s demonstrated his broader interest in formalism and process, prefiguring the stylized ritualization of his later works. His Credo (1968) served as an endpoint of his first stylistic period. This watershed led to a crisis of aesthetic vision, resulting in a ground-up rethinking of his aesthetic purpose and language over the first half of the 1970s. Process, repetition, unequivocal gestures, and a new approach to tonality are the basis of Pärt’s work of the 1970s to the present. Pärt’s work paralleled in some ways that of other composers whose styles developed independently in similar directions at the same time, including John Tavener in England and Henryk Górecki in Poland, and to some degree also Sofia Gubaidulina in Russia. The asceticism found in the late works of Dmitri Shostakovich resonated particularly with composers in Eastern Europe, and the work of Olivier Messiaen may have been part of a general influence in these composers’ rethinking of musical time.

The constraints of Arvo Pärt’s musical language in particular reflect the formalized structures of religious rites, particularly those of the Orthodox churches where a vernacular Reformation never occurred. The conductor and singer Paul Hillier, who wrote an incisive study of Pärt’s music and has performed many of his pieces, drew a striking parallel between Pärt’s conceptual approach and the Russian Orthodox religious icon painting. These works employ sets of artistic formulae, a core visual language that recurs in the work of many different artists—a gilded crown, a type of costume, an arrangement of animals, even the shape of a face. Hillier relates the stylized lack of depth and perspective in icon painting to the timeless quality of Pärt’s music, achieved through repetition and eschewal of the “traditional,” that is, Western classical, passage of musical time. Pärt’s return to the familiar triad and simplified tonality parallels the visual formulae of icon painting. The composer sought a historical foundation for his new ideas via extensive study of medieval and Renaissance music, which had made an audible contribution to his Third Symphony.

Pärt calls the later pieces “tintinnabuli” (from the Latin for “bell”) works. The repetitive patterns and harmonic language of his work since the early 1970s can be heard as abstractions of bell sounds and of the patterns of ringing changes of church bells for various church functions. In very brief, in the tintinnabuli works Pärt limits the harmonic language to simple triads (e.g., the pitches of an A minor chord in the first movement of Tabula rasa) set against melodic lines within the same harmony’s base scale (the white keys of a keyboard from A to A). Though dissonances are possible, the listener perceives the overall groundedness of the harmonic world. In its purest form, there is no modulation. Tempo is strict, steady, and unchanging, but changes in texture and dynamics can be abrupt and dramatic; particularly effective are passages that alternate between the larger body of an ensemble and a smaller group or soloists, a contrast found frequently in Baroque concertos as well as in responsorial readings in Christian liturgy.

The first of Pärt’s tintinnabuli works were Modus (later revised as Sarah Was Ninety Years Old), Calix, and Für Alina, composed in 1976. Performances of some of his new works throughout the USSR by the conductor Andres Mustonen led to greater exposure, as well as to the composer’s increasing confidence in his new aesthetic path. Unable and unwilling to conform to official Soviet Union restrictions on artistic freedom, in 1980 Pärt—as had so many others—left Estonia for Vienna, where he lived for more than a year before relocating to Berlin. This ultimately led to much broader recognition of his work. His worldwide reputation expanded enormously following the release in 1984 of an album on producer Manfred Eicher’s ECM label featuring Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, Fratres, and the double violin concerto Tabula rasa. Since then, ECM has been responsible for best-selling and Grammy-nominated albums of many of Pärt’s important works, including Passio, Miserere, Stabat Mater, the Berlin Mass, and his complete symphonies. These include one of his relatively recent major works, his Symphony No. 4, Los Angeles, a Los Angeles Philharmonic commission. Other recent major works include Adam’s Lament for mixed chorus and strings, commissioned for a concert honoring the composer during the International Istanbul Music Festival, and La sindone (“The Shroud”) for orchestra, premiered at the Turin Cathedral as part of the opening ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympics. In 2015 the director Robert Wilson created an evening-length theater work based on Pärt’s music, Adam’s Passion, which premiered in Tallinn.

The immediacy, accessibility, and profound spiritual sincerity of his work have made Arvo Pärt one of the most distinctive and recognizable composers of the past half-century. His music has a degree of pop culture currency, appearing in the soundtracks for There Will Be Blood, The Thin Red Line, and Avengers: Age of Ultron, Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme and In Praise of Love, and the television series The Good Place and Ted Lasso. The Arvo Pärt Centre in Estonia houses the composer’s archive and also serves as an important cultural center for the country, where Pärt returned to live in 2010.

Pärt’s relationships with individual musicians including Andres Mustonen, the violinists Gidon Kremer and Tatjana Grindenko, and the conductor Paul Hillier have had a powerful impact on both the trajectory of his later career and on the music he writes. It was the conductor Eri Klas who requested the double concerto Tabula rasa in 1977 as a companion piece to the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No. 1, which calls for similar orchestration. Like Schnittke’s work, Tabula rasa recreated a virtuosic Baroque genre—in Pärt’s case, a double violin concerto akin to those of Vivaldi or Bach—in a modern setting, signaled by the presence of the amplified prepared piano. As Paul Hillier points out in his study of Pärt’s music, Tabula rasa was an expansive manifestation of the composer’s relatively brief tintinnabuli explorations of the previous year, e.g., Für Alina and Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten. Tabula rasa—the title of which, meaning “blank slate,” was quite deliberately chosen to mark this new phase in Pärt’s career—is a substantial work of more than 25 minutes’ duration, on the scale of a Mozart concerto.

The two contrasting movements of Tabula rasa are “Ludus” (“game” or “play”) and “Silentium” (“silence,” “stillness”); the first has a tempo marking of “con moto” (“with motion”), the second “senza moto” (“without motion”). The opening of the first movement establishes several ideas: the two soloists play the pitch A five octaves apart, delimiting a pitch range for the piece while also suggesting the two instruments could be considered as one voice. The silence that immediately follows the first measure is another marker that returns throughout the movement to separate its sections; this silence shrinks with each recurrence, while the musical sections grow longer. The music rises and falls in broad waves as the orchestra and prepared piano, sounding gong-like, propel the movement with a steady pulse, the two soloists intertwining in different figurations, with or without the accompanying ensemble. Near the end of the movement, a sudden textural and harmonic shift, marked “Cadenza,” feels catastrophic, as though the carefully cultivated environment can no longer sustain itself. “Silentium,” the second movement, is centered on D minor. Although a pulse is here also evident, the slow tempo has the effect of stilling forward motion, despite irregular impulsive arpeggios in the piano. This movement, too, expands from its opening in ever-widening arcs, but unlike the first movement sustains its character throughout until fading into silence in the final bars.

Robert Kirzinger

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.