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.

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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: