Arvo Pärt
Born in Estonia in 1935, Arvo Pärt made his mark among Eastern European composers by creating a body of important work in the 1960s, a period which culminated in his political censure and personal despair. It was after a seven-year period of musical transition — or crisis — that Pärt emerged as from a chrysalis into an entirely new mode of musical composition: new, yet palpably drawing on medieval tonalities and primal musical elements.
In this new phase of his work Pärt’s listeners heard something exquisitely pure, uncluttered. “It is a cleansing of all the noise that surrounds us,” observed renowned violinist Gidon Kremer. They heard something unmistakably “spiritual” in this music, whatever they may have meant by that word. His devoted fans continue to include famous rock stars, artists, and film makers who incorporate his pieces into their scores; his work somehow seizes people of all walks of life, of all faiths and of none. For several years running, Pärt has been the most-performed living composer in the world.
What people hear as “pure” and “beautiful” is not only the work of a gifted composer; it comes from a lifetime’s experience of exile, both political and interior. What people hear as “spiritual” is born out of something very specific: Pärt’s immersion in the Orthodox Christian Church. How does this unique spiritual foundation inform his music?
Pärt has often spoken of his work as the interweaving of two currents: one is suffering, the other consolation. One is sin, the other is forgiveness. One is human, the other is divine. These lines are always discernable, always intertwined in his music. This sounds like heady stuff, yet many people have sensed this intuitively and deeply.
Although deeper realities in Pärt’s music are potentially accessible to anyone, they may carry a certain resonance for those familiar with the texts, rites, liturgies, and saints of the Orthodox Christian Church that is Pärt’s spiritual home. The Arvo Pärt Project, founded in 2012 by Peter Bouteneff and Nicholas Reeves, explores the potential connections between these Eastern Christian sensibilities and Pärt’s sacred music. As an institution of higher learning in the Orthodox Christian world, St. Vladimir’s Seminary is uniquely positioned to explore these connections.
To date, the Arvo Pärt Project has presented Pärt’s music at significant concerts in New York and Washington, DC, bringing the composer to these cities for the first time in thirty years. The Project has been involved in multidisciplinary panel discussions at major New York venues, and publications about Pärt’s music, including Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence, published by SVS Press in 2015.
The Project
Concert/Lecture Events
In 2013-2014 the Pärt Project worked with Arvo Pärt and his trusted conductor Tõnu Kaljuste to compile a select repertoire of his compositions. These were performed by the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, two world-class enembles that have extensive experience with the performance and recording of Pärt’s oeuvre. Pärt’s 2012 ECM recording, Adam’s Lament, won the Grammy award for Best Choral Performance in 2014. These concert events brought Arvo Pärt in person to New York for the first time since 1984.
The Project’s flagship performance took place at Carnegie Hall on May 31, 2014, the same day that Arvo Pärt came in person to receive an honorary doctorate from St. Vladimir’s Seminary. The choir then performed Pärt’s Kanon Pokajanen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 2. These were preceded by concerts in Washington, DC, at the John F. Kennedy Center on May 27 and the Phillips Collection on May 29. See below for a more complete listing of events and concerts produced by the Arvo Pärt Project.
For past Events including Sounding the Sacred Conference see below.
2. Publications and Lectures
St. Vladimir’s Seminary has been seeking to distill and explicate the spiritual impetus behind his music and his compositional journey. That pursuit has been at the heart of publications, lectures, and panel discussions that seek to bring light into previously unexplored depths of Pärt’s work.
In addition to several major magazine and journal articles (e.g., in BBC Music, and Christianity Today), Peter Bouteneff has authored Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence (SVS Press, 2015).
From the back cover:
“A luminous engagement of music, philosophy, and belief.”
— LAURIE ANDERSON, Composer, musician, performance artist
“Many of us have written about Pärt, but one thing was missing, the view from within the Orthodox Christian tradition that has guided Pärt’s work since the 1970s. This has now been provided by Peter Bouteneff, writing with clarity, precision, and the graceful authority of one who knows what he is talking about.”
— PAUL HILLIER, Co-founder, the Hilliard Ensemble, author, Arvo Pärt (Oxford, 1997)
On November 30, 2019, Peter Bouteneff delivered a lecture entitled “Music as Translation: The Movement from Text to Reception in Arvo Pärt’s Music,” at the Arvo Pärt Centre.
3. Concordat
St. Vladimir’s Seminary’s relationship with the Arvo Pärt Centre, in Laulasmaa, Estonia, has led to a Concordat that both institutions signed together in June 2015. Read about it on the Seminary’s website here.
This fraternal relationship does not imply that the Seminary or the Project speaks on the composer’s behalf; our published opinions and analyses, and the dialogue partners we engage, reflect the Project alone. But we cherish this bond that has been being built since 2012.
Sounding the Sacred Conference
The music of Estonian composer and Orthodox Christian Arvo Pärt—considered “spiritually powerful” by a large and widely diverse audience—provided the basis for an exploration of the relationship between sound and the sacred at an international conference in the heart of NYC’s arts scene, May 1–4, 2017. Musicologists, art historians, performance artists, experts in architectural acoustics, and renowned scholars and theologians gathered for the event, titled, “Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred,” at McNally Amphitheater on Fordham University’s Lincoln Center Campus.
His Beatitude Metropolitan Tikhon, primate of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) and Chair of the Board of Trustees at St. Vladimir’s Seminary, opened the conference with a theological reflection titled, “The Sound of Silence: The Appeal of Arvo Pärt to the Human Heart.” Taking note of the music’s near-universal appeal, Metropolitan Tikhon preferred to characterize Pärt’s music as “supremely personal.” In an address that featured references both to popular culture and ancient desert ascetical writers, the Metropolitan said that Pärt’s diverse listeners “feel as though he were a friend, or as if they were within the music itself, as though they were part of this composition.” He suggested, “Perhaps this is because the meaningful silence that dwells in and through the notes introduces us into deep prayer and humility.” (Video recordings of the l pre- and post-conference lectures, by organizers and presenters, will all be made available here.)
Professor Peter C. Bouteneff, director of both the Sacred Arts Initiative and Arvo Pärt Project at St. Vladimir’s Seminary—which hosted the event in collaboration with the Orthodox Christian Studies Center of Fordham University—remarked upon ways in which the conference broke new ground in examining Pärt’s music.
”People have been analyzing Pärt for decades by looking into it, exploring its inner workings,” Bouteneff began. “Our interest here was with the phenomenon of the music itself, how it impresses itself onto its listeners. We were interested in how the music’s sacred content is embodied in sound, which led us all to explore, from different angles, what we mean by ‘sacred,’ and how Pärt’s music manages to give it such a tangible and resonant expression.”
Additionally, Dr. Bouteneff marveled at the uncanny but frequent phenomenon spawned by a performance of Pärt’s music: its ability to unite diverse persons through their common humanity. ”As is always the case when you bring ‘Pärt people’ together, one is struck by the breadth and scope of their interests and their different entry-points into his music,” he observed. “Far from everyone is interested in the ‘spiritual’ as such, or at least in talking a lot about it.
But everyone feels strongly about the music and is touched by it to their core. That engagement deeply enriches their reflections on the composer and his oeuvre—as scholars, performers, and deep listeners.”
As part of the four-day event, a public musical performance of Pärt’s music, with the “Goeyvaerts String Trio+,” organist and Pärt scholar Andrew Shenton, and percussionist Yousif Sheronick, was also held at Holy Trinity Church, 213 West 82nd Street. A review by Jake Romm, “For Arvo Pärt Music and Silence Are Divine” called this performance “perfect.”
This chamber performance of some of Pärt’s more austere works—some of which are only rarely performed—was carefully attuned to the conference’s focus on the sonic effect of Pärt’s work.
In a personal message to Bouteneff, Arvo and Nora Pärt congratulated the organizers and welcomed the potential of the conference’s papers to chart new directions in the understanding of the composer’s work. Michael Pärt, Chair of the Board of the Arvo Pärt Centre in Estonia, and Karin Kopra, Editor/Archive Specialist at the Centre, were in attendance at all sessions of the Conference, and compiled reports to share with the Centre.
A volume is being published by Fordham University Press — Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred, edited by Peter Bouteneff, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Robert Saler.
View full event photo gallery here.
Arvo Pärt Project Events
Follow us on Facebook at arvopartproject for event updates and news.
EVENTS 2019
November 23-December 1, Project Director Peter Bouteneff is scholar in residence at the Arvo Pärt Centre, culminating in a public lecture entitled “Music as Translation: The Movement from Text to Reception in Arvo Pärt’s Music.”
EVENTS 2018
November 12, New York, NY, Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, All-Arvo Pärt concert performed by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, co-presented by the Arvo Pärt Project and Sacred Music in a Sacred Space.
October 12-13, Seminary President Archpriest Chad Hatfield and Project Director Dr. Peter Bouteneff attend opening of the Arvo Pärt Centre in Laulasmaa, Estonia.
EVENTS 2017
February 1, New York, NY, Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, All-Arvo Pärt concert performed by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, co-presented by the Arvo Pärt Project and Sacred Music in a Sacred Space.
February 9-12, Portland, Oregon, Arvo Pärt Festival by Cappella Romana, concerts, lectures by Peter Bouteneff and Alexander Lingas.
March 26, Worcester, Massachusetts, Trinity Lutheran Church, “Introduction to Arvo Pärt’s Passio“, Peter Bouteneff, Jeffers Engelhardt and Andrew Shenton.
May 1-4, New York, NY: International Conference on Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred, presented by the Arvo Pärt Project and the Sacred Arts Initiative, in collaboration with the Fordham University Center for Orthodox Christian Studies
EVENTS 2016
January 4, Butler University, Indianapolis, IN, and St. George Orthodox Church, Fishers, IN: “Beauty in Dark Times: The Music of Arvo Pärt,” lectures by Peter Bouteneff
February 21, Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Peter Bouteneff and Jeffers Engelhardt deliver pre-concert lecture for performance of Passio by Yale Schola Cantorum
April 3, “Arvo Pärt Day,” Tishman Auditorium, The New School, Peter Bouteneff moderates panel with Nicholas Reeves, Jonathan Schaefer, Corinna da Fonseca Wollheim.
September 18, St. Francis Xavier Church, 46 W 16 St, New York: ECM Album Release Concert by Vox Clamantis, at 6:30PM
November 19, Kanon Pokajanen, in the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, performed by the Williamson Voices.
EVENTS 2015
January 12-23: Hybrid online/on-site course at St. Vladimir’s Seminary—The Music and Faith of Arvo Pärt
April 16: Live Ideas Festival of New York Live Arts, curated events for Arvo Pärt: Journeys in Silence.
Panel discussion with Laurie Anderson. (pre-event interview with Peter Bouteneff)
April 16: publication by Peter Bouteneff of Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence (SVS Press, 2015).
June 16-18: travel to Estonia with seminary delegation to sign Concordat between St. Vladimir’s Seminary and the Arvo Pärt Centre.
September issue – cover essay in BBC Music, “Arvo Pärt: A Portrait,” by Peter Bouteneff.
SVS Press becomes US distributor for In Principio: The Word in Arvo Pärt’s Music (Arvo Pärt Centre, 2015).
EVENTS 2014
May 27 John F. Kennedy Center (presented by the Estonian Embassy in Washington, DC)
“If anybody wishes to understand me, they must listen to my music; if anybody wishes to know my ‘philosophy’, then they can read any of the Church Fathers.”
— Arvo Pärt
May 28 Panel Discussion at George Washington University
Dr. Peter Bouteneff and Nicholas Reeves with GWU Music Faculty
3pm, School for Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University, Jack Morton Auditorium
May 29 Phillips Collection, Chamber Program
May 31 Arvo Pärt receives honorary doctorate from St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, delivers commencement address.
May 31 Carnegie Hall, All-Arvo Pärt Program
Reviews:
• The New York Times
• The New York Classical Review
June 2 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Temple of Dendur, Kanon Pokajanen
June 11 Panel Discussion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Dr. Peter Bouteneff, architect Steven Holl, neuroscientist Robert Zatorre
