One of the most popular composers of our time, Arvo Pärt’s personal story of artistic perseverance is nearly as powerful as his beautifully understated music.

Born at the height of Stalin’s “Great Terror”, Arvo Pärt expressed an interest in music at an early age, playing both oboe and side drum in a local army band. Pärt enrolled at the Tallinn Music Middle School in 1954 and continued his musical education at the Tallinn Conservatory in 1957. During his stay there, he studied composition under Heino Eller while simultaneously working as a recording engineer for Estonian radio and writing a variety of film and theatre music. He won the All-Union Young Composer’s Competition in 1962 for his children’s cantata Our Garden and graduated from the conservatory in the following year.

Much of his early work, such as Nekrolog, shows the influence of serialism, a compositional technique the Soviet government frowned on. Even so, Pärt continued on this path throughout the 1960s, studying all the serialist scores he could find and writing such works as Perpetuum Mobile (1963) and his First Symphony (1963-4). As the decade wore on, however, Pärt showed an increased interest in the music of Baroque masters, especially that of J. S. Bach, and began using collage technique in his works, a style in which he took older ideas and juxtaposed them with more modern compositional practices. Evidence of this lies in his 1968 work Credo in which Pärt uses Bach’s C major prelude from the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier and distorts it through serial practices. A scandal erupted surrounding the work, not for its modernist writing, however, but for its overt use of Christian themes.

Following Credo, Pärt withdrew from composition and focused on simple counterpoint and the study of early music. In 1976, he unveiled his new overtly consonant compositional style, described as “tintinnabuli” after its bell like sound. The first in this vein was the short piano piece Fur Alina, with other works such as Cantus in Memoriam Bejamin Britten, Fratres, and Tabula Rasa following soon after. Even though these new works proved more acceptable to the authorities, Pärt’s continued use of religious subject matter irritated the government. The result was his emigration from the Soviet Union in 1980, first to Vienna and then to Berlin, where he still lives.

Throughout the past twenty years, Pärt has continued to write in his “tintinnabuli” style. Focusing for the most part on religious themes and choral pieces, he has written large-scale choral works, such as St. John Passion (1982), smaller chamber style pieces, like the Stabat mater (1985), and a cappella works such as Kanon Pokajanen (1997). With the support of both ECM Records and individuals such as Paul Hilliard of the Hilliard Ensemble, Pärt has proven himself to be one of the most successful and popular classical composers alive today.