Arvo Pärt

Tintinnabuli

Arvo Pärt was born on September 11, 1935 in Paide, Järva County, Estonia, and raised in Rakvere, where he studied piano, oboe, flute and percussion at the children's music school, graduating in 1953. From 1957 he studied composition with Heino Eller at the Tallinn Conservatory, graduating in 1963, and from 1957 to 1967 he worked as a sound producer at Estonian Radio, scoring over fifty films. His Nekrolog (1960) was the first twelve-tone music written in Estonia; in 1962 Tikhon Khrennikov criticized him for serialism, and the same year he won first prize in a competition of 1,200 works. His Credo (1968) was unofficially censured, after which he was largely silent until 1976, studying medieval and Renaissance music.

In 1976 he arrived at the style he calls tintinnabuli, named for bells, built on simple triads and rhythmic simplicity, with Für Alina first performed in March. In 1977 came Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, Fratres, Summa and Tabula rasa. In 1979 he gave an ironic speech in a long wig at the Composers' Union congress and was excluded in November; in December he was detained at Moscow airport on the way to a London premiere and advised to leave the country. In January 1980 his family emigrated and Estonian media called him a traitor and banned his works; he settled in Vienna, took Austrian citizenship in 1981 and moved to Berlin, where he lived for almost thirty years.

Passio was premiered in Munich in 1982 by the Bavarian Radio Chorus, and in 1984 Tabula rasa launched ECM New Series with the producer Manfred Eicher, who has worked with him since. Stabat Mater and Te Deum came in 1985, Arbos with the Hilliard Ensemble in 1987, and Miserere in Rouen in 1989, the year of his first visit to Estonia after emigrating. Kanon pokajanen followed in 1997. He won a Grammy in 2007 for Da pacem and another in 2014 for Adam's Lament, and received the Praemium Imperiale in 2014, the Ratzinger Prize in 2017, the Polar Music Prize in 2023 and the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal in 2024. He returned to live in Estonia in 2010, and the Arvo Pärt Centre in Laulasmaa opened its new building on October 17, 2018. Wikipedia names him the most performed living composer in the world in 2011 to 2018, 2022 and 2025.

He has said that he could compare his music to white light, which contains all colors.