Born in Paide in central Estonia in 1935, Arvo Pärt is among the most famous living composers – in 2023 he was the second most performed classical composer worldwide, having held the top spot the previous year, and for the entire period from 2011 to 2018. He left the Soviet Union in 1980, initially for Vienna, and later West Berlin, following a breakdown in relations with officialdom. These relations had often been rocky, perhaps most famously in the years following 1968 when his explicitly religious work Credo was performed and met with censure (Pärt had converted from Lutheranism to Orthodox Christianity in 1972). During this period, when he mostly focused on film scores, he developed a minimalist style known as tintinnabuli, often set to sacred texts – a style and presentation which the Western European public which was now his main audience had little conception of.
A recent book, Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground, by Kevin Karnes, Professor of Music and Associate Dean for the Arts at Emory University in Atlanta, observes that the background to his appearance in Western musical spaces is still little appreciated: “the landscape of experimental music in the USSR remains terra incognita for the most part, and Pärt himself is still widely regarded as an isolated, solitary figure who appeared out of nowhere in 1980s Berlin, his crystalline musical language already fully formed”. Karnes strives to put this emergence in a broader context, stressing the intellectual and cultural currents in Estonia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union.
The complicated way in which projects that departed from permissible subjects could still be pursued by those with a deep understanding of the system and its blind spots becomes a persistent theme, as does the relative freedom and creative ferment of the Soviet-occupied Baltic countries, which drew musicians from Russia and other parts of the USSR. Especially significant for Pärt was the scene that developed in the capital of the republic directly to the south of Estonia, Riga. There the Latvian architecture student Hardijs Lediņš was putting on what were known as “stationary” discos, featuring not only a head-spinning variety of music of all eras and styles, but also lectures. It was in Riga in 1976 that Pärt’s first tintinnabuli work, Sarah Was Ninety Years Old, received its inaugural (though unofficial), performance; a year later at another Lediņš-curated event, a fresh and openly religious work by Pärt, Missa syllabica, revealed the tintinnabuli project to be, in Karnes’ words, “the devotional one it had been from the start”. Will Mawhood spoke to Karnes about the book and this fascinating period in general.
You’ve written, in a 2019 article for Res Musica: “While not denying the singularity of Pärt’s achievement with his new compositional language, I aim to chip away at the persistent image of Pärt as a solitary, isolated figure at the time of his greatest creative breakthrough”. Firstly, why has this image developed, in your opinion, and why do you think it’s important to challenge this?
I think this image of Pärt as a solitary figure emerged, perhaps inevitably, in relation to the way in which his music first became known in Western European spaces. The first series of events that really brought his music to Western audiences was a tour in 1977 by Gidon Kremer and Tatiana Grindenko, Alfred Schnittke and the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra under Saulius Sondeckis that played concerts throughout West Germany and Austria. This is in the earlier book on Pärt, the one that I published on Tabula Rasa in 2017.
It was on this tour that they performed Tabula Rasa, which was commissioned as a companion piece to Schnittke’s First Concerto Grosso, both of those works being written for chamber orchestra and two violins, among some other works – I think they played Bach and Mozart and maybe Schubert or something, some of the standard canonical repertoire. And the reception of that concert published in the German-language press in Austria and in West Berlin more often than not did not know what to make of this music at all. Critics had never heard of Pärt, maybe they’d heard of Schnittke – he had a bit more of a presence, although still not a tremendous presence in Western European spaces. Most had never heard of Estonia or certainly didn’t know where it was, didn’t think of it as separate from Russia really; Russia was really mapping in the imagination of many onto the Soviet Union as a whole.
Playing this slowly progressive, meditative music – some really interesting parallels were drawn as critics and listeners were just trying to make sense of what they were hearing. There were some pieces that were published likening it to Indian classical music; there was a piece that was published comparing it to Pink Floyd’s concert at Pompeii. It was really all across the map, because there were really no points of reference. His music did sound very different from what was circulating among Western classical music listeners at that time.
And of course, as I said, his name looked exotic, the place where he was from many had never heard of, and it did really seem like it was something completely outside of experience. And as his music began to be circulated through the ECM recordings – one of them being the 1977 recording of Tabula Rasa made in Bonn, West Germany, which is on the first ECM disc with Pärt’s music on it, which I think came in ‘84 or so. That recording was received in the press likewise, as something which contained some kind of spiritual essence or this meditative aspect. At that point, Pärt had been living in first Vienna and then in West Berlin, beginning in 1980, and the physical image of the figure – a lot of these early articles talking about his music would have pictures of Pärt with what was then a big black beard, and would talk about his Orthodox spirituality, and this became associated in the British press particularly with what was seen at the time as a broader spiritual reawakening. This of course was at a time when [Polish composer Henryk] Górecki’s music was first becoming circulated through the Nonesuch label, and John Tavener in the UK was receiving quite a lot of press, and this led to Pärt being combined in with this group of so-called “holy minimalists”.
It was the time and the way that his music first became heard in the West, his first presence in the West, and the way that intersected with other discourse that was happening around music and around spirituality at the time.
Because you show in your book how much he came out of an Estonian context, Baltic context – also influences from musicians from other Soviet republics. How much were people conscious of that even a little bit? Was there any awareness, for example, of the Estonian context, or was he just seen as a Soviet musician?
No, no. At that time, in the late 1970s, the early 1980s, there was really no broad awareness whatsoever in Western European spaces or North American spaces of this underground avant-garde in the Soviet Union. It was only in ‘85, ‘86 – that period – where people even became aware, broadly speaking, of Soviet rock. There was that “red wave” record that came out in ‘87 [Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the USSR] and Artemy Troitsky’s book Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia. And these things were just completely eye-opening for many. Up until the later years of perestroika, what made its way out of the Soviet Union in musical domains was almost entirely music which was selected for export by centralised Soviet cultural authorities – so you got the pre-war works, the Shostakovich, some of the later Shostakovich music. The contemporary composers whose works were sent abroad were typically high-ranking figures in the Composers Union, and there was this very carefully controlled pathway for music to make its way to Western spaces.
These underground figures – Hardijs Lediņš in Latvia, Vladimir Martynov in Moscow – there was no profile, there was no access to their music in the Western European world. There was no sense of a disco culture in the Soviet Union. There was no sense that there were Soviet artists who were following Western developments in music and responding to them in their own work as soon as they were appearing, on Western markets as well. This goes back to the prog-rock work that Lediņš was interested in, and there are resonances of that in Pärt’s early music.
There’s a great graduate student who gave a paper at this conference [Karnes had just returned from a conference in Riga] – Andrievs Alksnis, who gave a paper on Uģis Prauliņš and his band Vecās Mājas that was performing Soviet prog-rock in Riga, going back to the late 1970s.
All of this was the scene in which Pärt’s music was taking shape, these were the sounds that were helping to lend his music its shape, and these were the audiences for his early music. None of that was in any kind of public awareness in the ‘70s and ‘80s [in the West]. And still today, it’s not widely appreciated, and that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book.
Really the reason I wrote the book is that I’m a historian and I’m interested in where things come from. And as I was discovering more about the scene, I was just like “this is amazing”. It’s amazing that it was happening, and so much of the music that was coming out of here is incredible, and so the project began as a regular historical project of looking for antecedents and where ideas come from, and it’s taken on more of an advocacy space. Because I also want to be sharing this music with audiences wherever I can.
So I guess that answers the second part of your question: why do I think it’s important? I think it’s not so important to change our perception of Pärt per se, as that studying the history of his music has really opened up a whole new world of music-making and of broader artistic conversation and thinking about art, that I didn’t know about as a historian. And that experience has changed my life as a historian, and as a listener and as a musician. And I feel that for me, three or four years since the book was published, looking back on the project – that’s become the most important piece of it that sticks with me, and is keeping me going forward.
Because something very striking from a Western European perspective – and I’m sure it would be the same for most North American readers – thinking about our own experience of this period is how eclectic the scene you describe in the Baltics is. A lot of people seem to be interested simultaneously in art rock – everyone seems to be obsessed with King Crimson in particular. But also new wave: a lot of Lediņš’s music is kind of new wave, the same with [Latvian band] Dzeltenie Pastnieki, who I think were a bit later. But also early music and modern classical, it’s all mixed in together. You give examples of choral music being played at a disco, which is very hard to imagine in the US or UK in the ‘70s or ‘80s.
Why do you think that difference existed between the two contexts?
A number of people have reflected back on this, and one has really stuck with me, although there are many different versions of this. There’s an Estonian musicologist, Toomas Siitan, who’s probably in his 60s. He did his training in Tallinn and grew up there, and he’s now a professor at the Academy of Music and Dance [in Tallinn], and he talks about this similar sort of discotheque phenomenon in Tallinn in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And I asked him this directly: “what for you was this connection?”
I mean, growing up in the States, I listened to everything, but it’s a stretch to imagine one individual committing themselves night after night… If someone was saying: “do you want to come to this series where I’m going to play you records of Gregorian chant one night, and renaissance madrigals and King Crimson and Devo, and this is all going to be mixed together?” It might be kind of cool, but it would strike me as deeply idiosyncratic, right?
And I asked Toomas about this, and he put it basically this way: that growing up in the ‘70s and the ‘80s in the Soviet Union as a musician, you learned what you learned in the conservatory, and you heard what you heard in the concert hall, and you listened to what they programmed on the radio. In all of these spaces, repertoires were tightly aligned and tightly controlled in relation to ideology as it waxes and wanes, and there was just this incredible appetite among at least some – particularly younger musicians, but not all – for things that were outside of that frame, for all of these musics that were not taught at the conservatory, that were not programmed on the radio, that were not going to be performed in the official concerts which were programmed by the philharmonics which controlled much of concert life. As he put it to me, “for us, all of this was exciting and new”. If it was medieval music that was not programmed, if it was King Crimson, if it was Devo. It was just all this stuff which was – not illicit per se, but just beyond.
Another person, Boriss Avramecs, a Latvian musician and professor – he writes about the Soviet musical space as being kind of a game preserve, as like a zoo or something like this – in which certain animals dwell, certain musics lived. You know, classical music and the Western tradition from Bach to Beethoven, maybe a little bit of Mahler, you had the Soviet classics Prokofiev and Shostakovich, you had Glinka, you had your works by Khrennikov and others who were the celebrated composers of the Soviet Union, then you had the estrada music that was being recorded by Melodiya [the main state-owned record company of the USSR], the system of the vocal/instrumental ensembles that would become registered through the Ministry of Culture – and they were authorised to perform at the clubs and so on. And that was all great, but there was this sense that some had – that was maybe all well and good, but that was like [only] this much of the musical world, and they really were hungering to experience what was beyond the boundaries and what was outside the fence.
This is an interesting phenomenon in this late Soviet time. Figures like Alexei Lubimov, who was one of the leading concert pianists in the Soviet Union – performed his Bach and his Mozart; he also conducted an early music ensemble in Moscow. And he performed in a rock band that had formed in one of the film studios in Moscow. Just working across all of these spaces. Avramecs has this amazing story of going to hear the Soviet rock band called Boomerang – which is not the more famous of the Soviet rock bands Boomerang, but a less famous one, also called Boomerang – and he was saying that one night he was there at rehearsal, and one of their members had brought in an arrangement of a [Renaissance English composer] William Byrd mass that they had arranged for this band to play. So they’re playing a William Byrd mass with their singer and their electric guitars and their synthesisers.
This sense of searching for what was outside the gates and the boundaries – but also responding to it and recreating it in one’s own space. This was just incredibly exciting for many, and really what fuelled a lot of this experimental work in the Soviet space.
Because that’s very striking in the period and in the book – there’s this fascination with transcendence. And you’ve got it even in the title of the book: Sounds Beyond. So that seems to be expressed in music, but also in a lot of religious or philosophical interests that many people had at the same time. Why do you think that was so characteristic of this place and this time?
I think you’re right, you point to something important. This phenomenon in a musical space of trying to get beyond the game preserve of the conservatory and the radio and the philharmonic. There were so many spheres of life where this was in play – particularly with young people. A sense that every aspect of Soviet education was circumscribed – and again prior to perestroika, you sort of had to look for an alternative, or you had to fall into it in some way, fall in with a circle of friends who were dedicated to this, make some connections somewhere. You’d have a relative who would send you things from abroad, information, or seek it out – go to Lediņš’s discotheques in the late 1970s.
And of course in the late 1980s, suddenly this starts showing up everywhere. The journal Avots [“Source”] – I’m a huge fan and collector of Avots because the art is just amazing in there, and you can still find issues for like three euros, that’s where you start getting Latvian translations of texts that had long been in circulation elsewhere: George Orwell and things, or essays on new Western art. Padomju Jaunatne [“Soviet Youth”] was another one – the journal of the Soviet Komsomol, the youth wing in Riga – that was publishing a lot of really interesting work. That’s where this really starts to enter into the popular consciousness in a way – prior to that you really have to seek it out, or fall into certain circles. And like everywhere, there are people who are searching for some experiences to which they didn’t have access growing up. I think those were a lot of the individuals who were fuelling a lot of this work, in the earlier, pre-perestroika years.
One other difference with the West is the degree to which these concerts were also educational experiences, which perhaps is linked to this sense of everything being new and to a degree context-less. Lediņš worked out astonishingly complicated programmes of lectures before having a disco. Could you talk a bit more about the importance of his role and what his goals were?
Lediņš always wanted his discotheques to be educational. He’d have the first half of the evening, which he called “stationary”, where he’d focus on teaching his audience about some new or unfamiliar music. The audience would typically sit in the hall, and he’d play records or tapes and also lecture about what he was playing. Often he played music from the West that was hard to find in other contexts – King Crimson, Gentle Giant, Robert Wyatt in the 1970s. But sometimes he also played classical music, like Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, or even disco music from East Germany. The second half of the evening, people would get up and dance. Even after he graduated from the Riga Polytechnic, he tried to maintain this basic formula. The Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art has discotheque programmes from his time at the Cosmos Discotheque in the early 1980s, where he’d alternate Western pop (Blondie, Depeche Mode, Eurythmics and so on) with lecture presentations about contemporary architecture, things like that.
My sense is that these kinds of educational discotheques were always kind of unusual, and that they had mostly disappeared in Soviet spaces by the mid-1980s. And that was also around the time when Lediņš largely gave up his DJ work, focusing more on recording new music and making video and performance art.
Because most of the period you’re writing about is the Brezhnev period, isn’t it, which is generally presented as an era of stagnation. You know, there were these hopes that there was some reform possible in the ‘60s, and those were kind of extinguished. Do you think that had something to do with this desire for transcendence – and how true is it [this presentation], because you’re also saying it was a period where some ideas could get into the press, at least related to music, that were a bit unusual? That’s kind of two questions in one, so feel free to take them one at a time.
There are a couple of things – one is in the Brezhnev years, or at least when you get into the later ‘70s, the late Brezhnev years: certainly the economic situation was bad. In many respects there was some pretty extreme isolation on the international stage, in relation to the war in Afghanistan and so forth. The economic situation was not good. All kinds of indicators of quality of life – life expectancy and GDP and everything – were not headed in positive directions.
And yet my sense is that there was a certain kind of – I’m going to use a metaphor I really don’t like – this sclerotic aspect of the bureaucracy that had kind of set in. Things were done how they were done, there were not a lot of efforts to modernise systems and processes and so forth. And things had been done how they were done for quite a long time. And there were a number of rather savvy individuals: Lediņš being one of them and Lubimov being another one, who kind of had a sense, in some cases because of the environment in which they grew up, the people they associated with in their lives, maybe certain opportunities that they had because of personal connections, had this intuitive sense of how to move projects through the system.
A couple of metaphors spring to mind from a couple of people in the book I discuss – one was the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov, but also Boriss Avramecs, they talk about the gaps between the gears in the system or the holes in the system, and if you knew where the gaps were, you could kind of thread your way through these gaps.
I think it was in September I gave a talk at Bolderāja, the bar in Avoti [in Riga], and Boriss was there, and he told this really amazing story. And Boriss is amazing, because he’s the one Latvian figure who was involved in putting together these festivals in a central way who is still alive. He collaborated with Lubimov and with Lediņš and with their friends to organise them. And he told this story about how his recollections, his experience of this time was that there were all these organisations that were ostensibly in charge of different things – there would be the Komsomol, which dealt with student issues and life on campuses, and then there were the philharmonics, which were in charge of official concert programming and had a great deal of say over what philharmonic musicians could or couldn’t do, and then there was the radio symphony orchestra, which other musicians worked for, but that actually had a different line to the Ministry of Culture than the philharmonics. So there were all these different threads of things going up the power vertical. But the communication across them was often murky or just non-existent, and the lines of sight across them were murky or non-existent.
The way he talked about it was that each of these organisations seemed to be working in – his metaphor was like a sphere of darkness, that they couldn’t see beyond their own space. And there was this phenomenon that he spoke about where at some point, if you managed to thread your way through the holes in the system or the gaps between the gears, and your project advanced far enough, then when people heard about it, they just assumed that someone down below had approved it or that someone maybe above had approved it, but they didn’t know about what that approval might have been – and therefore, the further you could sneak your way between these gaps in the gears, at some point your project actually could happen. You reach this critical turning point where it’s like “holy crap, we’re going to do this”, and then you just go, right? And there are all these stories about how the festivals themselves were organised. Just involving all these individuals who were inclined to help these students do something which seemed like a cool project that the students were doing. And the students involved were excellent, outstanding students – Lediņš among them.
Someone had recalled how co-ordinating with musicians in Moscow you needed to have a long-distance phone line, and you didn’t have these in your houses – they were not accessible to most. But then someone knew someone who had a friend who worked for what was then called the Poligrāfijas Institūts, which was where you would go to get things photocopied, because you also didn’t have photocopiers in your office. And this office had a direct phoneline to Moscow, so their friend just arranged that they could come in at night when there was no one around and use the phoneline. All these kinds of little work-arounds.
Someone else recalled how for a festival, they had to arrange accommodation, but to arrange accommodation for visiting artists they had to go through the Ministry of Culture or one of these organisations so they just basically crowd-sourced it around to a bunch of other students at the Riga Polytechnical Institute. And you had people staying in student flats and just overnighting, and this sort of thing.
A lot of this we still don’t know and we may never know, because so much of the on-the-ground details of organising events seem to have just been person-to-person communications. So for instance, there’s a figure, Immo Mihkelson: he’s in my book, I interviewed him and he was a radio engineer in Estonia in the ‘70s and into the ‘80s, but since he’s retired from that work he’s been spending time looking at the archives of the Estonian philharmonic, which are widely scattered apparently. And I asked him if there was any record of how it was arranged that Hortus Musicus could travel to Riga in 1977 to perform at this festival – and he looked into it, and as far as he could tell, there was nothing, there was nothing in the record to this effect. So either that material’s been lost, or somehow or other Hortus Musicus travelled to Riga in October of 1977 – and Hortus was a philharmonic organisation – but without the philharmonic’s awareness or authorisation at least on paper that they were able to do that. So just examples of these gaps and holes in the system.
And I wonder how much the reason there was this relatively rich scene in the context of the Soviet Union, how much that had to do with the fact that the Baltic states tend to have stronger connections to other parts of Europe than Russia does, for example, and how much that was simply what you’re saying: that these were small republics where they had – very circumscribed – autonomy. There was the concert wasn’t there, by Pärt, Sarah Was Ninety Years Old: where they performed it in Riga and there was a big fuss about it, and then the next year they performed in Tallinn and no one cared or it was praised.
Yeah, so Sarah Was Ninety Years Old was performed [in Riga] in ‘76 – but it was the ‘77 concert in Riga where a bunch of Pärt’s other music and some of Martynov’s spiritual music was performed, and that’s where they got in trouble.
But no one in Estonia seemed aware about that, right?
No, no – and I asked a couple of people in Estonia about that as well. And I think it was Immo Mihkelson again who put it to me most vividly: for that to have happened in Riga – I shared this thing with Boriss, right, where these different organisations are working in these spheres of darkness and no one knows what the others have approved or anything – for something like that to blow up in the public space in Riga, which was clearly out of bounds by any measure. Everybody’s thinking that someone must have approved it somewhere along the line. Eventually you get to the top of the line, the Ministry of Culture –and it’s like: a) “how the fuck did this happen?” and b) “oh shit, this happened on our watch. Weren’t you supposed to be checking?” This kind of thing.
So my Estonian colleague, the way he shared it to me was that the natural human response anyway probably, but particularly in the Soviet space, would be to just take care of it as quickly and quietly as you can. Solve the problem, don’t allow any more of these festivals to happen, tell Lediņš he’s got to get out of the business if he wants to get his degree, which he did. But the last thing that you’re going to do would be to share this around to your counterparts in other republics, because then everyone would know that you had screwed up so badly that something like this had happened.
And it was remarkable, they took this thing to Tallinn and they performed a bunch more sacred music. This is the other part of the response that I’d give: in Tallinn the festival in ‘78 was a philharmonic-sponsored event. Particularly in Estonia – more so than in Latvia, but in Latvia more so than in Soviet Russia, or at least in Moscow – there was a sense among some significant portions of the local party leadership and state bureaucracy, republic bureaucracy of exerting autonomy where one could, and of resisting and really resenting what were the expected lines of communication – the expected lines of seeking authorisation from Moscow. And you know, Estonian music history in the 20th century is full of these different kinds of things that happened: Pärt’s Credo in 1968, this was a piece that he composed, a choral work, and the opening line is – in the Latin – “I believe in Jesus Christ”, and this was broadcast live on Estonian radio in 1968. To a big scandal, it was one of the events that Pärt talks about as leading to his withdrawal from the concert space and moving to primarily writing movie scores for a number of years. But to this day, no one quite knows how that happened.
One thing that I’ve also found in my more recent research looking at the 1980s is a sense that the role of individuals within bureaucracies, within state organisations, could actually be quite profound. We tend to think of things like a Ministry of Culture as this monolithic thing that’s nameless and faceless, or we tend to think of things like the KGB as this monolithic, faceless, soulless thing – and in both of those cases, like with any organisation anywhere in the world, it’s a collectivity of individuals, a community of individuals and there are certain ways that we live and work within our different communities. But at the end of the day it’s a community of individuals, who sometimes can and have exerted quite a lot of autonomy in terms of their individual work. This could be anything from advancing certain projects to simply not denying certain projects.
That’s one of the great stories of 20th-century Estonian music history: how did that concert happen? Not just played but broadcast live on the radio, but what we know is that it did happen. The other thing that know for sure is that it was with a full orchestra and a choir, on Estonian radio. It wasn’t like someone just messed up one day.
Lots and lots of people involved.
It was someone’s project. And it was probably Pärt’s project only to the extent that he supplied the score and was probably thrilled that it happened, but certainly he wasn’t in a position to advance something to that point. So there are lots of these stories that are just remarkable and are still waiting to be told.
There are a number of Russian musicians active at that time – Tatiana Grindenko, the violinist from Moscow – but also Artemy Troitsky, who have written about the sense that many had in Moscow that quite a lot more was possible in Tallinn, and probably also in Riga, than was possible in Moscow. Probably for all kinds of reasons, but surely including the sense of autonomy that many were claiming in official capacities in the Baltic republics.
Speaking about Credo and the religious theme, you write about the increasing importance of the Orthodox Church to Pärt – he becomes interested in this concept of hesychasm, giving up of ego, and even trying I guess to remove the role of the composer, with these mathematical equivalences to Bible passages, which is again a kind of transcendental thing, in the sense of just removing the self. How much was that specific to him, and how much was that something that was just in the water at that time?
That particular manifestation I think is specific to him. But in the book I also look at the work of Vladimir Martynov from the same time. He’s a little bit younger, maybe ten years younger than Pärt. And somewhat later than Pärt, maybe six or seven years later, had his own awakening to the Orthodox faith – took it further in some ways, went to a monastery, renounced creativity for a little while at least, a few months or a year or something like this. But in the late ‘70s, around the time that Pärt had come back with his tintinnabuli style of composing – which as you say very quickly became a vehicle for experimenting with ways of removing aspects of your autonomy as a composer over the product of the work you’d composed, and substituting the composerly voice for what he conceived of as a mapping of sacred texts into musical space – Martynov started composing a different kind of music, but it was also a music that seemed very expressly to look back to earlier periods, to earlier times and earlier styles.
Martynov in particular started writing works which were composed in a pseudo-Baroque fashion, including things like using the harpsichord, and he’s talked about this, he’s written about this in more recent years, composing with what he calls “simulacra”: not copying the works of, say, Scarlatti or Bach, but composing your work from snippets of music which were modelled on their style, with things like harpsichords or Baroque string instruments. And the music that he composed during this time in the late ‘70s, it’s really a trip. One is a piece called Passionslieder but it was originally called an “Easter Passion”. It’s maybe a 40-minute vocal work, with an orchestra, with a harpsichord, and it has maybe five or six movements – all are based on the same melodic line, the melodic line being put together from these little fragments of Baroque-like figurations. And he has different vocal lines running on top of the whole thing.
This idea, in his mind, was that he was trying to separate himself; he was trying to write music that was a simulacra, intentionally like a cheap copy of what had been done before, by composers two centuries before – in order to effectuate the same kind of idea, to remove himself, he might not think it’s good, he’s making no claims, he might not like it. The most he can say is that he doesn’t want to copy them directly, but he’s going to come as close as he can, subjugating himself to something outside of himself, and creating music which is deliberately in a disciplined manner – not music that just, you know, came to him a dream or he might have otherwise chosen to create. He was also setting sacred texts. So it was less of a rigorous system.
That work Passionslieder was programmed in the same Riga festival concert in 1977 that featured Arvo Pärt’s Missa Syllabica, which was a full setting of the Latin mass in the tintinnabuli style, and a couple of other sacred tintinnabuli works – and it was, by several accounts, actually the concert of the Passionslieder that got them in trouble. The text of the Passionslieder is in German: “Der am Kreuz ist meine Liebe, meine Liebe ist Jesus Christ” (“The one on the cross is the one that I love, the one that I love is Jesus Christ“). And apparently one of the concert organisers had gone to see their friend at the Polygraphic Office and printed it out on these strips of paper and was dropping them from the balcony of the church into the audience as the piece was being played. Then there’s a written record – “you’re distributing religious propaganda”. And that was ultimately what brought the whole thing to an end in Riga.
But the piece itself is worth listening to. It’s a very different-sounding realisation, piece of music that comes from the same basic impulse – an Orthodox-inspired search for a way to create your work in a way that your work is not your own in a sort of ego-centred way.
You’ve written about the centre-periphery question, and how you hope that’s being challenged. It does seem to me in the Soviet Union – not just about this subject but in many subjects – characterising the Baltic states as a periphery is really misleading, even though geographically they are, but certainly with culture it’s misleading. And you find that in your book: you have mostly Estonians and Latvians, but also Russians, Ukrainians coming to Estonia and Riga especially.
What do you think the Baltics represented for these people at that time?
In that time, it was a borderland space. It had a much less deep history of Soviet presence and rule than most of the rest of the union – not annexed until 1944, in a lasting way. And it was a borderland to Europe, you could get radio broadcasts from Helsinki in Tallinn in a language that was largely mutually intelligible.
These were spaces that seemed deeply different and deeply European, from the Soviet imagination for many. And exotic in that way. Also in the ‘70s and ‘80s combined with the fact that this was where some of the first rock festivals were happening – this was where this discotheque scene really took root before spreading to the rest of the empire.
Troitsky writes about first going to a rock festival in Tallinn in ‘84, ‘85 something like this, and just how radically foreign everything seemed: the German architecture, the Roman script everywhere, this seemed to be another world. This was what they imagined Europe to be.
Header image: Frames from the 1976 RPI festival in Riga (right frame with Arvo Pärt) (Image: Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, photograph by Kirils Šmeļkovs)
Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground is available now from The University of Chicago Press
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