Grace Notes

The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, who turned 70 last year, may well be the most widely known living representative of what still passes for the classical tradition. Yet his music is not often featured on concert or radio programs, nor is it much used in divine worship, even though he often sets religious texts very simply for straightforward forces (choir alone or with organ or strings).

Its place is, rather, on the home stereo system--which is to say that its place is nowhere, coming out of nowhere, performed by singers and instrumentalists unseen, not present in our everyday world, outside our time.

A quietly remarkable documentary film by Dorian Supin, 24 Preludes for a Fugue (released on DVD by Idéale Audience), includes sequences in which the composer sits at a dining-room table to talk about himself, revisits sites of autobiographical interest in Estonia, prepares musicians, instructs students--does almost everything except have us hear his music, other than in rehearsal or class. The music is not seen in performance--and when it is, in a couple of filmed concert occasions that accompany 24 Preludes on the DVD, it is diminished by the visual aspect. Pärt's music refuses the corporeal--a rejection possible only in the age of high-fidelity recording--and is not helped when the circumstances of its performance are brought into view; hence its suitability to ecclesiastical buildings, where, quite apart from any acoustic appropriateness, the eye will rest not so much on the musicians as on the architecture. Supin is therefore wise not to let us see performances in 24 Preludes, and wise again not to let us hear them, leaving his soundtrack to the natural sounds of the Estonian countryside, the reverberant atmospheres of small rooms and churches, and the soft sibilants of the composer's voice, speaking in varying mixtures of Estonian, Russian and German. What we encounter--surrounding the music, pointing toward the music--is this composer's most extraordinary quality of simplicity.

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