This week’s theme is…Sublime Stillness! The mysterious art we call music refers merely to frequencies that fill the air around us, controlled in a specific way by its performers. Technically this may be true, but we sense feelings and motions of intense clarity. Sometimes the incredibly high density of musical events creates furious, busy textures. And at other times achingly long-breathed sustained notes create a sublime impression of meditative stillness that seems to suspend time itself. This week we look at some examples of this.
Sublime Stillness, Day 3 – BONUS DOUBLE POST Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten by Arvo Part and Symphony No. 3 by Henryk Gorecki
This may have been a fluke, but there is a particular memory that still stands out to me from a trip I took to Europe almost two decades ago. It was a school trip, and the official tour included Munich Germany, Salzburg Austria, and several major cities in Italy. In every city we experienced great music, amazing history, delicious food, and enjoyable camaraderie with our fellow travelers. After the official trip ended, a small group of us had chosen to continue our trip independently of the school organization. We spent a week in Paris, and from there I continued on for yet another week to see Prague. I was fairly homesick by this point, and that most certainly colored a good deal of my experiences there, but I also remember that there was just something a little different about Prague. It was a great city, but there was a dinginess to things that I just didn’t observe in the more westerly countries. The memory that stands out to me the most was actually the train that took me from Paris to Prague. It stood out to me as run down, just a little crummier than the trains which had taken us between the cities of Germany, Italy and France. Again, it may have been a fluke, but the difference was striking because I had not seen a train like it before that point in my trip. And it occurred to me at that point that the condition of this train may have been an artifact of traveling to a country that was once in the Eastern Bloc.
Of course no European nation had an easy time during the calamity that was the Twentieth Century. Even nations that emerged more or less in tact from the dramatic and destructive World Wars were not spared in any way from the heartbreak of devastated populations, shattered governments and loss of considerable amounts of treasured national heritage in the form of architecture and art. But my experience on the train (anecdotal evidence to be sure, but a meaningful experience) to the Czech Republic hit home to me that the nations of the Eastern Bloc experienced particular struggles that have probably not really ended, even now. After their populations were ravaged by the World Wars they dealt with the rise of Communism and its resulting economic devastation and cultural repression. The most poignant and visible story of this is that of the tortured Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich. You can read about that here and here. But no composer was free of it in the Eastern Bloc, and the resonances of Communist totalitarianism were experienced in countless ways which resonated according to the values of the different nations. The responding music that came out of many of these nations, particularly those on the periphery of the great Soviet Union, is interesting also, and probably would not have shaped as it was without Communism repressing so many elements of the culture in those places.
The music of two significant and near-contemporary Eastern Bloc composers serves as an illustration of this. Henryk Gorecki worked in Poland and Arvo Part in Estonia. The two different composers ended up travelling surprisingly similar paths in their respective homelands. Both of them began their compositional careers imitating the modernism that they had inherited from nationalists like Bartok and serialists like Webern, and both found the Soviet officials to be less than pleased by their creative efforts in these styles. In the 1970s, still well before the fall of Communism in the Eastern Bloc, both began writing in styles that have come to be classified together along with the work of other composers in even further away places under an umbrella called “sacred minimalism”. Both of them found themselves drawn to religions which boast rich levels of artistic beauty and contemplation in their traditions, Gorecki to his native Catholicism so strong in Poland (his affection for his fellow Pole John Paul II is evident from his musical catalog) and Part to Russian Orthodoxy, to which he converted from Lutheranism. Their devotion to these faiths would have increased the friction they experienced with the Communist authorities and also certainly informed the aesthetics of the music they became known for writing during the 1970s and beyond.
I would describe the tenets of “sacred minimalism” to be a sincere and deeply introspective atmosphere that plays out on a grand scale, and the tendency to use simple and repetitive (usually diatonic) materials which are somehow imbued with a deep gravity and significance as they unfold over the course of said grand scale. Of course that description hardly does justice to a magnificent style for which I have great respect, and both Part and Gorecki spoke in quite distinctive voices within this umbrella. Long story short, if you seek a transcendent experience of meditative stillness and joy, pick a quiet afternoon and let a significant work by either of them work its magic.
The technique with which Arvo Part creates his signature sound is called tintinnabuli, after the Latin word for “bell”. With this technique Part is able to spin out long, slow, and diatonically stepwise lines against one another, coalescing into a dense, rich, florid texture that is essentially unified and simple at its core, qualities that are important to him. In 1976 Part was devastated by the death of the English composer Benjamin Britten, perhaps the only contemporary composer of whom Part was aware that shared his outlook on life and art. It wasn’t until 1980, after a protracted struggle with Soviet officials, that Part was finally able to leave the Soviet Union, so he never had the chance to meet Britten. In tribute, Part poured out his grief into a justifiably famous and deceptively complex score, the Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten. Scored for string orchestra and chime, it is an ingenious prolation canon (for more about prolation canons, see this post) with different voices playing the same sighing, melodically drooping figures from the a minor scale at different speeds. The overall effect is one of profound grief, a few minutes of timeless despair. It is astounding that a musical work like this is possible, simultaneously active and still, simple and complex, naive and profound. But with Part’s language and sensibility, this is all possible.
Gorecki found a comparable voice with which to utter similarly beautiful statements, but he was always more academic, gravitating to a language of greater complexity and nuance than Part. What impresseses me the most about Gorecki’s artistry is his ability to use astoundingly simple musical materials to craft profound musical statements of profound joy and humanity, amplified by his impressive and impeccably sensitive control of large musical forms. The materials by themselves would be hopelessly simplistic, but in Gorecki’s hands they become the elements of magnificent landscapes summarizing the entire human experience, joys and sorrows, sometimes for as long as a half hour for a single movement. His most famous work is the gorgeous 3rd Symphony, subtitled the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, composed at about the same time as Part’s Cantus. The symphony is scored for symphony orchestra and solo soprano, singing texts related to different stories of parents separated from their children, perhaps the most sorrowful songs of all. The beloved second movement sets an inscription written by an 18 year old girl incarcerated by the Gestapo to her mother, imploring her not to cry and invoking the protection and comfort of the Virgin Mary. Gorecki was struck by the generosity of the girl in considering her mother’s torment before her own. It is little wonder that this piece has become Gorecki’s best-known and best-loved around the world, even though he was never interested in commercial success. The transparent, long-breathed phrases bathe the listener in sorrow and hope, reinforced by the simple and touching quality of the materials which unfold over the course of the movement:
Gorecki and Part found similar but different voices, motivated by similar but different forces, and attracted to similar but different sources of hope and inspiration. The two great creative figures of what has come to be called sacred minimalism expressed similar sentiments in similar manners, but with subtle and important differences. But each manages to speak directly and essentially to the souls of listeners today, communicating the complex joys and sorrows of the citizenry of the Eastern Bloc, who daily dealt with oppression and tragedy, little and big, as they all struggled through the latter half of the most extraordinary century in the history of the world.
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