Paert songs (and the Pärt COTW generally...)

[Serial_Apologist]

Listening to Progeramme 1 of this week's COTW, I am struck once more as to the submotivations of a composer choosing to self-limit his formal vocabulary after being exposed to the consciousness-enhancing possibilities afforded by modernism thanks to the legacy of not just composers such as Schoenberg or Boulez, as so well illustrated in the Prokofievian wit and liveliness of the Op 1 Sonatine just heard.

It is one thing to knuckle down to dictatorship, or lack of suppressed information on developments elsewhere, but the latter was obviously not a factor in the young Paert, who briefly stood up to aesthetic repression, and yet appears to have had misgivings for so doing long after the fall of that source of fear.

The asociation of retrenchment with religion seems to have been a recurrent feaature of composers who have allowed themselves to be used ideologically by the promulgators of the capitalist realist musics for impulse consumerism that have me and my friends more and more thinking, hmmm, haven't I heard this a zillion times before? Perhaps it betokes an ingrained fear of the creative possibilities of the freed mind that modernism in its trans-artistic equivalents of Surrealism and Expressionism in particular, as opposed maybe to the geometrical, mathematics-based abstractionisms favoured by some in the 1950s West, that sends artists back into the limiting certainties of religious origination?

[Honoured Guest]

The creative possibilities of an incredibly sensitive response to text, usually religious, are sublimely rich enough to open up worlds for me.

[Gabriel Jackson]

Who is Paert?

[french frank]

Who is Paert?

Arvo Pärt, Gäbriel?

[teamsaint]

Bit of a slow burn this thread.

Could S-A re set the question as multiple choice, perhaps?

[Gabriel Jackson]

Arvo Pärt, Gäbriel?

Then Pärt is not Paert.

[Bryn]

Then Pärt is not Paert.

"Paert" is a recognised transliteration into the English written form.

[Serial_Apologist]

Bit of a slow burn this thread.

Could S-A re set the question as multiple choice, perhaps?

The speed of the thread is suitably commensurate with much of the music now on this week's COTW, I would say.

[Gabriel Jackson]

"Paert" is a recognised transliteration into the English written form.

It isn't. It isn't a German 'a', and it isn't pronounced Paert.

[Bryn]

It isn't. It isn't a German 'a', and it isn't pronounced Paert.

And this from Schott.

[Gabriel Jackson]

And this from Schott.

On the same page Schott (a German publisher, transliterating it as if it were German...) actually spell it Paert, Pärt and Part. Say "Paert" to an Estonian and they won't know who you are talking about.

[Bryn]

On the same page Schott (a German publisher, transliterating it as if it were German...) actually spell it Paert, Pärt and Part. Say "Paert" to an Estonian and they won't know who you are talking about.

Very likely so, just as most English folk have no idea how to pronounce Pärt. As I wrote, Paert is an accepted transliteration into the written English form (emphasis added for clarification). This forum is not aimed principally at Estonian readers but English ones.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I think that if you have been exposed to the numbing idea of materialism as perpetrated by Stalinism, embracing religion can seem attractive as a form of rebellion against such regimes - and it certainly required courage for people to embrace religion under such regimes which I think deserves credit.

The most significant living religious composer at the time when Part was writing his first such works in the late '70s was Messiaen - and it is interesting that the characteristic Partean sound-world has its origins in the Louange à l'Immortalité de Jésus as I think a comparison of this piece with Speigel im Speigel illustrates. Nonetheless, I think it is still clear that this is an individual sound world, one which has distinct expressive potential (as its use as incidental music demonstrates), and one rich in possibilities for development - and I don't hear for myself the composer showing any interest in investigating such developments in the works that he has produced since his emigration from Estonia in the early '80s.

I experience from the Music he wrote in the late '70s reactions not dissimilar to those I get from Delius' Music - a beguiling, individual language that doesn't allow for extended Musical discourse.

[Gabriel Jackson]

Very likely so, just as most English folk have no idea how to pronounce Pärt. As I wrote, Paert is an accepted transliteration into the written English form (emphasis added for clarification). This forum is not aimed principally at Estonian readers but English ones.

Accepted by whom? I have never seen his name rendered thus. I genuinely didn't know who was being referred to.

[Gabriel Jackson]

Listening to Progeramme 1 of this week's COTW, I am struck once more as to the submotivations of a composer choosing to self-limit his formal vocabulary after being exposed to the consciousness-enhancing possibilities afforded by modernism thanks to the legacy of not just composers such as Schoenberg or Boulez, as so well illustrated in the Prokofievian wit and liveliness of the Op 1 Sonatine just heard.

It is one thing to knuckle down to dictatorship, or lack of suppressed information on developments elsewhere, but the latter was obviously not a factor in the young Paert, who briefly stood up to aesthetic repression, and yet appears to have had misgivings for so doing long after the fall of that source of fear.

The asociation of retrenchment with religion seems to have been a recurrent feaature of composers who have allowed themselves to be used ideologically by the promulgators of the capitalist realist musics for impulse consumerism that have me and my friends more and more thinking, hmmm, haven't I heard this a zillion times before? Perhaps it betokes an ingrained fear of the creative possibilities of the freed mind that modernism in its trans-artistic equivalents of Surrealism and Expressionism in particular, as opposed maybe to the geometrical, mathematics-based abstractionisms favoured by some in the 1950s West, that sends artists back into the limiting certainties of religious origination?

How much consciousness-enhancing modernism would the young Arvo Pärt have encountered? While the Baltic states were - or sometimes were - a little bit more liberal than Russia in aesthetic matters that isn't saying much.
And wasn't he always religious which, as has been stated elsewhere, wasn't so easy in the USSR?