Program Notes

Pärt: Te Deum

It is a long way from the kaleidoscopic sparkle of the neoclassical Shostakovich to the austere surface of Arvo Pärt's music. In his book-length study of Pärt, Paul Hillier acknowledges the Estonian composer's kinship with the minimalist school of American composers, while also stressing the differences between Pärt's methods and those of a Philip Glass or a Steve Reich. What they share is an ideal that can be traced back to Cage and before him to Satie, an impulse to explore the inner workings of music by embracing a discipline of exaggerated simplicity. Pärt does not measure off a time span of silence and present it as a composition, but he does say that his role is "to draw . . . music gently out of silence and emptiness."

The core of Pärt's style from the late '70s onward is his fascination with the tonic triad, the same workhorse of Western harmony that Shostakovich could intentionally overemphasize for comic effect. In contrast, there is no mistaking the solemn tone of Pärt's works in this style, many of them incorporating religious texts. One such is the Te Deum, written in 1984-85 on a text that is tradtionally linked with a far more celebratory mood. Here Pärt works with textures in which at least half of the independent voices are restricted to the pitches of the triad, the first, third, and fifth notes of the scale. The remaining voices tend to move in small steps, so that the relationship between voices shifts between consonance and dissonance. He also writes chantlike sections sung in unison, and here the notes of the triad may be used for ornamentation instead of harmony, as in the opening line for unison male voices. Each verse of the text is chanted in unison or in two-part harmony and then is either repeated in a more elaborate setting or answered by an interlude for the strings, based on the melody presented in the chant.

The work is divided into three main sections, each one building to a climax and then tapering off, with the high points at "Pleni sunt coeli," "Judex crederis, " and "Fiat misericordia." The tonality fluctuates between D minor and D major; all three sections begin in minor and end in major. The sense of D as an anchoring pitch is further driven home by a low D heard toward the beginning and end of the piece, played on a synthesizer or sampled from a wind harp.