Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Joonas Sildre's "Between Two Sounds" - Review by Bradley Jersak

Joonas Sildre’s Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to his Musical Language (trans. Adam Cullen (Plough Publishing, 2024).

I confess that I had not recalled previously hearing of Arvo Pärt, the subversive Estonian musician and Soviet exile, nor of ‘tintinnabuli,’ the distinctive musical technique he created. It’s unlikely I would have happened upon him were it not for my friends at Plough Publishing, who graciously sent me a beautiful copy of a graphic novel about his work. That led me to a deep dive of reading the book, listening to hours of Pärt’s compositions, digging into his history as a dissident, and studying his technique. What tied it all together for me was his faith and the remarkable story told so creatively by Sildre and his graphics.

Please purchase your copy >> HERE. 

What worked for me so well: first, the 220+ page biography moves quickly because the various sized panels don’t bog down the reader with excessive text. The narrative flows smoothly through the well-written dialogue and clean artwork. The black, white, and greyscale was appropriate to the era and Joonas Sildre is a master of drawing music.    

The story itself caught my attention because of my own heritage—a family of faith that knew the communist era persecutions of Czechoslovakia and their musical resistance to the hammer and sickle with bow strings and brass. It was beautiful to hear how Pärt could proclaim the ancient themes of Emmanuel, the Nativity and the Passion in a new musical language.

When I first sampled Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli works, it sounded like a brooding form of classical songwriting. But there’s more to it than that. On one hand, it derives in part from early polyphony and Gregorian chant. On the other, tintinnabuli was truly invented by Pärt in 1976 (in a piano piece titled Für Alina. In a fascinating article, “Tintinnabuli – technique, style or ideology? Music In Movement,” it is defined as

… a distinct technique, which in essence unites two monodic lines of structure – melody and triad – into one, inseparable ensemble. It creates an original duality of voices, the course and inner logic of which are defined by strict, even complicated mathematical formulas…

Tintinnabuli music can also be described as a style in which the musical material is extremely concentrated, reduced only to the most important, where the simple rhythm and often gradually progressing melodies and triadic, so-called tintinnabuli voices are integrated into the complicated art of polyphony, expressing the composer’s special relationship to silence.

In addition, tintinnabuli is also an ideology, a very personal and deeply sensed attitude to life for the composer, based on Christian values, religious practice and a quest for truth, beauty and purity.

In Arvo Pärt’s own words,

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.

More technically, he adds,

“Tintinnabuli is the mathematically exact connection from one line to another…. the rule where the melody and the accompaniment is one. One and one, it is one – it is not two. This is the secret of this technique.”

For my own part, the graphic novel taught me how to listen (and ‘see’!) the importance and function of silence—both in the musical compositions and in the spirit/Spirit of faith-based resistance (external and internal). I’ll leave you with
a sampling here of Sildre’s art and then Pärt’s music below:

 

From Darkness, Comes Light - A Poetic Response to Dante's Inferno by Luke Schulz

From Darkness, Comes Light -or- How I Learned to Love My Fate
A personal, poetic response to Dante’s Inferno

By: Luke Schulz

This poem is written as a personal reflection on the relationship between Virgil and Dante I could never hope to approach the grandeur of The Commedia. I should be glad if I could even live up to Lewis’ Great Divorce. However, I have attempted here to creatively capture the sense I felt in Inferno, and what that would look like in my own personal experience. Nietzsche has meant a lot to me, and he was, though a self-styled antichrist, a light in my darkest hour. The ironic prophet in my return to the light, and his teaching has returned me to the Christian fold. Like Virgil, he cannot take me all the way to that multi-folate rose, yet he is an invaluable guide on the journey, and in my view certainly deserves to be awarded the status of Prophet. He is prophecy reads like the Old Testament at times, but that is in some sense his mission, to reboot the West, an OT renaissance sans what the Christian religion has become. I hope the value of his vision is conveyed in these verses.

Because I am no high romantic writer, at least not at this stage of the game, I chose to stylistically reflect the time and place this has been written. Borrowing in some ways from the style of T. S. Eliot, there is no set rhyme scheme in the poem. In fact, the first section contains few rhymes, if any. But as the teaching takes hold of the student, the poetic speech begins to flourish. This happened naturally as I wrote, but I understand why. It is the same with my own thinking. As my personal views become more clarified, they also become more poetic. Many of the verses here occurred to me just as they remain written, knowledge

comes to me in little, metered, pieces, and the next thought, the next idea, often rhymes with the last as it occurs to me. I have allowed this process to be laid bare in the text. So what we have here is a post-modern prose of seven line stanzas, why, I am not too sure, but that was the only rule I followed. The rhyme and meter come and go, but increase as the Prophet’s vision becomes more clear.

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Review of Martens & Niskanen's "The Transcendental Mystery of God's Word" - by Ron Dart

John W. Martens and Paul V. Niskanen (eds.), The Transcendent Mystery of God’s Word: A Critical Synthesis of Antioch and Alexandria (Saint Paul Seminary Press, 2024).

There has been, in the history of Christian exegesis, at one level, a consistent yet unhelpful tension, simplification and polarization between the literal, grammatical, historic and linguistic approach to exegesis that Antioch (both as a place and metaphor for a type of exegesis) embodies and the more allegorical, tropological, anagogical and mystical exegetical approach of Alexandria (both as a site and icon) of an alternate approach to exegesis. Needless to say, such an either-or attitude should not dominate—in short, there is plenty of Alexandria in Antioch and Antioch in Alexandria.

I should note, before I comment on this fine book, that it was dedicated to Ben D. Meyer (1926-1995). When I was doing my PHD at McMaster University in the mid-1980s, I was Ben’s TA for a semester. I shall never forget the way he assigned, for a lower level class, Bernard Lonergan’s (1904-1984) Insight: A Study in Human Understanding---we who were his TAs had to interpret Lonergan to students who had not the slightest idea of what Lonergan was saying, doing and why, his opposition to “field specialization-subject specialization”, most young students not mature enough to comprehend. But, Ben’s thinking had been deeply impacted by Lonergan and Lonergan-Meyer were grappling, in a significant and nuanced way, with the challenges of the Enlightenment’s historic, empirical and rationalist approach (that was used by many in their approach to the Bible) and a more classical layered method (that was true to modern methods but also acutely alert to how such approaches both revealed and concealed the motherlode and mystery of the text).

The Transcendent Mystery of God’s Word brings together essays from a conference in June 2022, highlighting eight packed and challenging chapters that engage, in an updated way, layered ways of defining both Antioch and Alexandria and a lively and healthy dialogue between them. Specific texts are chosen from limited passages in the Bible that reflect both Antioch and Alexandria and massage the nature of both “letter” and “Spirit”. The varied approaches of Patristic exegesis and how Psalms can be interpreted and applied are wisely covered just as New Testament texts that reflect on the baptism of Jesus and “the Johannine Farewell Discourse”. Each of these chapters, when read slowly and thoughtfully, reread and sat with for days, walks the attentive reader into a way of reading the Bible in a way that asks of the reader a thoughtful and receptive mind and imagination. A rather dated and, perhaps, irrelevant notion of Antioch versus Alexandria or Alexandria versus Antioch vanishes in such a judicious approach and multiple probes. I have no doubt that Ben Meyer would be amply pleased with those who have been given the torch he once carried and carried it yet further.

The front cover of the book has splendid painting of St. Jerome as a portal of sorts into the sanctuary of insights. It might have been valuable, given the Antioch-Alexandria dialogue to have Origen gracing the cover also. 

Ben Meyer was at McMaster at the same time as the much respected Canadian political philosopher George Grant. Both Grant and Meyer would have agreed with Lonergan’s questioning of “field specialization-subject specialization”--all three would have been committed to multiple methods to approach the more comprehensive whole and mystery of the journey. The underlying vision of The Transcendent Mystery of God’s Word very much reflects such a notion of the deeper concerns and reasons for uniting, in an updated way, Antioch and Alexandria.     

The Bibliography in The Transcendent Mystery of God’s Word is an inviting library in itself and many of the books listed point in directions for those interested that bring to the fore the fuller landscape of the Antioch-Alexandria merging. If understood aright, these approaches can be friends on the journey rather than opponents. John Martens and Paul Niskanen should be offered many a kudo for this 10 bell book that one and all should read and inwardly digest for a mature understanding of Antioch-Alexandria and the transcendent mystery of God’s Word.

Amor Vincit Omnia

Ron Dart