A New Arvo Pärt Recording from ECM New Series

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

The coming Friday, ECM New Series will release Tractus, its latest album of music by Arvo Pärt. The release was planned to anticipate next year’s 40th anniversary for the release of Tabula Rasa, the first of the Pärt albums produced by ECM. For those who cannot wait, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

Many of us that first encountered Pärt’s music through the Tabula Rasa album can probably recall the impact of its jolt. By 1984 listeners were getting tired of the opacity of atonality, particularly when it involved the abstract approaches to permutation, whose origins dated back to the innovative (at the time) techniques of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. Those were the days when it seemed as if one could not be recognized as a legitimately innovative composer without the background a of doctoral degree in abstract mathematics.

In retrospect it is easy to say that pushback was inevitable. For those of us spending much of our time in New York, that pushback burst on the scene in 1970, when the auditorium of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum hosted a full-evening program of compositions by Philip Glass. This was a time when Pärt had come to recognize the futility of pursuing atonality, leading to a dry spell that lasted into the late Seventies. Whether or not he was aware of what was happening in New York is open to question; but he began to approach composition with a “clean slate” in 1976.

Some of his earliest results were the first version of “Fratres” and the “Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten,” both of which found their way to his “debut album” for ECM. By the time his music was headed for the recording studio, he had the support of major musicians including violinist Gidon Kremer, pianist Keith Jarrett, and conductor Dennis Russell Davies. Not long thereafter, it seemed as if all of the “cool kids” could not get enough of ECM and Pärt.

Tractus provides a useful perspective of just how things have changed since that first ECM release. While, with one exception, the Tabula Rasa album confined itself to the chamber music genre, Tractus is an album of large ensembles, both the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra. The conductor for Tractus is Tõnu Kaljuste.

Personally, I enjoy the shift into the choral genre; but, in spite of the change in sonorous qualities, the underlying rhetoric is not that great a departure from most of the earlier recordings. As a result, it is hard for me to avoid the old joke about the monorail which I picked up during my student days. The joke was that, after a rather brief flurry of excitement, the idea of building a monorail system became “an idea of the future whose time had passed.” Time may have passed on the surface structure of Pärt’s compositions; but the “deep structure” (with apologies to Noam Chomsky) has not changed very much over the last 40 years.