1972 - Person to Person
Person to Person marks the full-length directorial debut of cameraman Rein Maran after his 1971 student film, Okaslinnus. Maran later went on to apply his attentive, if somewhat unpredictiable style to nature documentaries, though only after applying these and similar techniques to very different effect in Colorful Dreams (Jüssi, 1980). Like the latter, his first outing as a director is an art film made perhaps at the height of an experimental era in visual arts in Estonia, even somewhat psychedelic in its mix of moving patterns and sound combinations. Person to Person presents a combination, perhaps unique in the history of film, of decorative arts and ballet, mixing scenes of dancers Ülo Vilimaa and Alla Udovenko with shots expressively highlighting the handwork of the Estonin SSR union of decorative artists, including ceramic, glass, and knitted objects. Maran presents the dancers through colorful effects and transitions, associating their expressive movements with the many intricate surfaces, designs, and patterns.
This abstract visuality, largely void of a dramatic narrative, give leeway for Pärt to freely explore connections between music and the logic of moving images. Not required to convey the moral, emotional, or spiritual levels in films like The Milkman of Mäeküla, or A Sound, the composer returns to the elemental fascinations of his scores for stop motion films, yet touching less on an imagined vision of the natural world and its opposite than back on the constructed assemblages of art itself. This in turn brings the composer ever closer to the form, pulling like opposing magnets the poles of Tintinabulli: structural mimesis, which has already aligned in relation to silence and the two voices, and the final element, the metaphoric sound of the bell. For Maran's film, this motif returns, but seperate from the other elements, as the composer really makes the creative link fully unifying them in his score for Colorful Dreams.
For Person to Person, Pärt wrote two major types of scores, one standard and the other for jazz ensemble. The standard music varies greatly in range, but follows closely in the themes and ideas of the images. The opening and closing music theatrically bookends the film's content similar to a feature film, with Pärt contrasting an orchestral flourish with the bare, altissimo line over the piano in the opening credits.
Other segments follow the spare orchestral writing for the sections on the sea captain Tõnissoo in A Sound. As the camera later addresses the frozen products of artist's creative maniuplation of raw materials into forms and shapes, Pärt's score states, then slighty modifes kyes, timbres, and patterns of orechestraion, such as during a section highlighting boxes, which Pärt varies pizzicato sequences in high reverb and lush but quick brushes of chords over images of elaborately desinged boxes, with a solo violin, followed by spare interruptions on the strings, over others. A creative highlight on glass objects - beginning with a Vilimaa's dance in a turning, reflected environment, followed by a shot of the glass sculpture where the shape was taken from - gives Pärt a chance to score the reflection of light in transparent objects with echoing, bell-like percussion.
Figure 8: Vilimaa dances in the reflective space, which becomes a glass sculpture.
From the shots of Vilimaa, which Pärt scores with a bellowing bass clarinet, wide, scattered epxlosions on the keyboard, and plodding notes on the vibraphone, the camera cuts to the multishaped landscape, and the music cuts to the echo of a percussive object in reverb. Cutting again to the glass sculpture, we hear a sequence of bright chords on the piano, then a percussive sound, before the camera cuts to a rotating glass bowl, and a series of percussive notes run through a long delay to shots of glass objects.
Similar to the deconstruction of sound Pärt enacts in his score for Reportage According to the Telephone Book, Pärt takes the metaphor of the bell and in the transition from the imagined interior to the physical product binds the seperate sound back into music, taking the first logical step towards the incorporation of the bell into Tintinabulli. Notably, the suspended and scattered "subjectivity" within the glass structure tells a story like that of Toomas Enke's artful lamps and thier relation to the artist, except in this case Maran presents art objects without their creator. The inwardness of the sculpture relates more towards fundamental laws, observable in the natural world. Here, Pärt is indeed not far from the concept of the triad. Yet like the transformation of Uli into the crystal in Camerman Kõps, the subjectivity within the crystaline harmonics of the bell points to some connection to the self's unification with the objective world.
The other major form - jazz - consists of ensemble improvisations, with guitar, double bass, drums, piano, and a combination of trumpet and flute, based around simple harmonic figures and vamps. The structure of improvisation here is similar to that of the music used in the jazz segments of The White Land of Enderby, in which, rather than feature soloists, the ensemble moves fluidly through shared melodies and harmonies, some instruments refraining, then joining. Though in other sections, notably the transition to experimental visual art, the band seems to be mimicking the attitude of western era ensembles, such as John Coltrane's classic quartet with McCoy Tyner and Jimmy Garrison.
Figure 9: Foreground and background during the jazz episode of Person to Person. In this part of the sequence, the piano plays solo chord sequences spaced in together with this effect.
Pärt uses this group in the most dynamic way in a sparse ballad, of which certain motifs are scattered throughout the film, as within the echo-suite of the glass section. This ballad, with a tender, sublimative chord progression no doubt influenced by the music of the renaissance and baroque eras, begins with the piano as the camera pans, one after another, over a group of pots on the floor. The chords resolve, and pause as the camera moves to another group, starting again when the camera approaches the next group. After another, the electric bass gradually comes in, and the trumpet starts a solemn melody, the camera cuts to the side of rotating vases decorated with picutres of birds and fishes.
The sequence continues over similar pictures, with the flute taking the melody, but finishes when the camera cuts to an ancient style figure before a wall, the wide focus deepening to show it covered in similar, carved, medeival-looking figures. The spaced piano figure plays the chord sequence soft and trilled on the upper register of the piano before the camera cuts to other figures and the song repeats with the flute. Though it only plays over still objects, the dynamics of the music along with its carefully spaced silences working in tandem with the panning, cutting and focusing of the camera, imbues the these object's fine visual intricacy with beauty.
Pärt was deeply preoccupied by the question of beauty during this period, in which his personal searching intensifies in his music. The composer's deep engagement with the syntax of visual images gave a clue as to an effective rhythmic logic for capturing this, but it remained still attached to the images that imparted it. The other essential elements of Tintinabulli which circle separately in Person to Person remain close to each other but somewhat apart compared to the synthesis achieved in personal narratives such as Tõnu's final moments in The Milkman of Mäeküla. As his technical grasp improved, his writing drew further from the self-sustaining purpose that he had come across in early forms of Tintinabulli. Pärt understood the metaphors he had discovered in relation to the laws of sound he had learned, but did not yet have the right schema within which to fully relate them to one another.
One solution lay in the music of the classical era, which Pärt recognized not only as great music, but the key to the great philosophies of the past, claiming in 1968 that "Our century's intellectual values simply don't reach to those of Schubert's or Bach's era." (Randalu, 1968). Beginning in 1973, Pärt scores all of his films for some form of classical ensemble. For animated films Sisters, Such Stories, and The Colored Pencils, which he wrote that year, Pärt largely eschewed his avant-garde techniques of tape manipulation and atonalism in favor of small concerto-forms for piano and orchestra built around clear themes and variations. In The Headstreams, which followed the underwater segments of Cameraman Kõps on the Abandoned Island, Pärt scores the miraculous transfer of letters onto the body of a flatfish with a string quartet, and shots of floating jellyfish with a minor key, Schubertian piano solo. In both scenes, rather than merely narrate what occurs on screen, Pärt imparts a part of the directors message, inherent in the perspective of the camera (the fictitious window of the submarine): a recognition of beauty. Over the shot of the jellyfish, the protagonists are heard whispering, "Look, how beautiful!" In both cases, Pärt finds in classical music a beauty analogous to that of nature.
Yet if classical music presented beauty, it did not hold the answer. The intellectual values inherent in the music of the great composers of the past still belonged to the past. Pärt had to work the answers of the present out to himself. This meant, partly, finding an honest message with which to convey the material Pärt already had at present. And it meant looking closer at himself, as to what his own subjectivity meant in the silence of the world.
As it turned out, this search took Pärt back to the view of the world as a child. The animated films he scored had already touched this idea, but some, such as Just So!, and Mouse Hunt, took a somewhat adult, tongue-in-cheek, satirical stance. Sisters, on the other hand, directly presents the innocent play of a young girl as the fantasies about her two young dolls come to life. In the 1974 cell-animated film The Little Star (Täheke) a young boy, falling asleep, dreams he is a brave hero rescuing his sweetheart, inevitably awarded a red star for his efforts, while in reality all the children have stars, and he's merely the girl's friend.
Interestingly, the film does not directly depict a star outright - the little star refers to the protagonist. Yet Pärt's instrumentation partly reflected an imagined star, scored in the main theme during the opening credits initially in a duet between the ethereal strings of the traditional Estonian kannel and the chiming orchestral bells, suggesting a small, twinkling star. The star cannot be heard in the main two themes of the film, played in the brawny tuba, reflecting the imagined generals, firefighters, and other official figures, which the reward the hero, and the shrill and small piccolo, on the other hand, for the vulnerable young boy, creating a
comic discrepancy between the dreaming young boy and his heroic dream-counterpart.
These instruments reunite in the film's end, when the boy awakes to the diagetic sound of a trumpet call, all of his heroic dreams disappearing. Nearby, all the children are rewarded stars, and he walks behind carrying their shovels, starless. Pärt's sparkling music in the opening title then, represented not a star off-screen, but the aspirations of the young boy himself, and the emotional power behind his dreams. Like the young boy, Pärt dreamed furiously in pursuit of something precious. Adopting the viewpoint of a child, the composer enabled himself once again to experiment where classical structures had bound his ideas, touching on ideas of the self, religion, and even of Estonian national character in Colorful Dreams, finally touching upon a scheme in which all could exist as one.
5. 1974 - Colorful Dreams (Värvilised Unenäod)
Colorful Dreams' production and release was an exceptional event in Estonia, being one of the only experimental films released by Tallinnfilm. Jaan Tooming and Virve Aruoja's script caught the eyes of Tallinnfilm during a script competition, but the comissioned filmmakers used only two main episodes from the film, improvising the rest, not only in terms of post-production in editing, but in pre-production, through filming and acting as well. Afterwards, the film was nearly censored by the Tallinn Film Art Union, entering release only after discussion in which Girgori Skulski, that "Tallinfilm could experiment for one time in ten years." (Märten, 2012)
The resulting film pushes the limits between documentary and fiction, fantasy and reality, sign and symbol, captured through the perspective of a young girl, the film's protagonist, Kati. Loosely, the plot recounts Kati's trip to the country with her mother, where she finds a black cat. Returning to the city, Kati brings the cat home, only to worry her mother by getting lost looking for it. Far more than this, the hallucinatory editing of Aruoja and Tooming, along with the work camerman Rain Maran, layer a story of childhood through a prism of light and sound, using a variety of camera techniques, montage effects, non-linear timelines, overdubbing, and other techniques to immerse the viewer in the sensory state of childhood, full of intense emotions, living myths, and the spellbinding mystery of nature.
The Estonian critic Raimo Jõerand has noted the correspondance of these techniques and their corresponding philosophical consequences with Pärt's period of musical searching, noting similarities between the composer and Tooming. Both were engaging in a search through "mythical and unconscious archetypes," in order to arrive at "a human being's elemental source." (Jõerand, 2014) These investigations had a profound effect on Pärt's artistic conception, the composer later stating:
"I would like to sum it all up with a very simple metaphor. I believe that the thoughts of an innocent child can sometimes be stronger than the superficial complexity of the whole world: a glance from this innocent being can convey a higher truth than anything we can reach with all our ailing endeavors."(Restagno, 1999)
With the surrendering of judgement that came in the open experimental atmosphere of Colorful Dreams, Pärt could freely explore relations of sound and meaning glimpsed only in parts in previous film scores. After combining and re-combining sounds, he had begun to reassemble their formal elements into new musical forms. Pärt brought the existing elements of Tintinabulli into a system correspondent to the forms of classical music in which he experienced fundamental religious beauty, but one which answered to his personal values, and those of his time and place.
For the film's production, Arvo and Nora Pärt spent the summer of 1974 in Hiiumaa with the film crew, staying longer than they expected. Somewhat unusual for this time, Aruoja and Tooming prepared the resulting music spontaneously according to their editing process, during which they assembled their improvised footage into its web of sounds and symbols (Mihkel, 2013) A portion of the music heard in the film was recorded, in the experimental spirit of the project, as a group, such as spontaneous group drumming on a beach at Hiiumaa, recorded by sound engineer Enne Säde after Pärt fell in love with the sound of the hollow trees there, or a call and response choral section, sung by the filmmakers themselves to translations of Native American poetry by the poet Jaan Kaplinski (2013).
Pärt also composed a number of pieces for large array of sometimes exotic instruments, including soloists, men's choir, flute, recorder, percussion (3 timpanies, vibraphone, xylphone, tamburine, bongos, triangle, stamp block, Koryjak trum, gongs, cymbals, rattle, Hiiu drums, rattle, bass drum, tom-tom), harpsichord, celesta, piano, and two guitars. Many of these percussive sounds Pärt had explored before, such as in a scene during Cameraman Kõps when a group of ancient animals awoke from their slumber in deep bedrock. Yet with the score for Colorful Dreams, Pärt drove even deeper into a spectrum of percussive sounds, including those of traditional and ethnic instruments, capable of summoning their own magic.
The plot of "Colorful Dreams" can be read allegorically, beginning and ending with a shot of a blooming cherry tree in black over which Kati's voice sings the incantatory song,
"Päike, päike/tule välja" (Sun, Sun/ Come out) entailing the creation of the world. (In the final shot, her voice is accompanied by a ringing bell, which continues into the end credits). Her experience of the beach-set woods near her mother's summer home over the course of the film points to the individual perception of the world, her parents (her mother played by Rain Loo, and, in a notable symbolic gesture, her father by Tooming himself) acting as the symbolic links to distant ancestors and the "huge giants" (suur tõll) of legend.
Like the Estonian kannel in Little Star, these ethnic instruments belonged to the mythic, folk, and in some respects nationalistic thinking of the film. According to Tooming, the director's vision for the film's music focused on that of minorities, such as the music of Native Americans, Polynesian drumming, Jewish devotional music, and others (Märten, 2012). In one example, Pärt writes for a percussion ensemble somewhat like gamelan music, chanting circles, and drum groups. This experimentation drew from not only the mythic quality of Kati's perspective as a child, but also to the filmmakers' own oblique approach to the concept of Estonian identity in relation to these groups of people. As a character, Kati engages in this thinking when she is shown watching a Russian language television program about Native Central Americans. Tooming and Aruoja show Kati sitting on the couch, playing her own toy flute in imitation of the flute player in the program; after playing "war" with another program, Kati is shown riding on the foot of her father, her voice hear whispering in the background about the "huge giant" (suur tõll) referring perhaps in part to Estonian myths about giants, used later in the national epic Kalevipoeg.
Figure 10. The Estonian Lullaby: Kati picks up a cat, and the tree of life.
In this segment, Tooming and Aruoja demonstrate the way in which, even though Kati is not initiated into a fully-grown political identity, there are certain ways in which she learns and interacts with political reality in the small world which she inhabits. As the filmmakers suggest in her fascinated reaction to the television program, followed by her own memory of her father's place in remembered fairy tales, her conclusions approach aspects of myth that are not only universal, but located in the language and culture surrounding her. This aspect of Estonian identity thus does not take place in any overt symbolism of home and country, but rather in the constituent elements of myth and language that could fundamentally make up Kati's sense of belonging.
Pärt in fact conveys this connection in setting an Estonian lullaby to a two-voice piece on the celesta near the beginning of the film. The scene follows images of cats, which Kati and her friend have been watching, over which Kati's mother's voice can be heard mentioning her interest in getting a cat: "Would you like to have that cat for yourself?" We then see Kati picking up a cat in a small enclosure she has been playing in, a woman singing the rhythmic words of an Estonian lullaby can be heard:
Tule, uni, ukse'esta, Come, sleep, from the door,
astu sisse akkenasta, Step in from the window,
riugu-raugu reppänestä, Slip-drift from the smoke-hole,
käi lapse kätki piale, Come over this child's cradle,
kuku lapse kulma pääle, Fall upon her eyelash,
lange silmälaua pääle! Settle onto her eyelids!
Author's translation (Tampere et al, 2016).
This folk song Une Sulased (Servants of a Dream) comes from a recording made of the Harjumaa singer Miina Lambot, who sang traditional Estonian songs and regilaul for the Estonian Broadcast Corporation in 1938 (Tampere et al, 2016). As the scene, scored with an occasional light drum, continues, Pärt's accompaniment to the melody of the song can be heard in the form of two voices playing on the celesta. The classical counterpoint of their interaction, resounds in gentle, bell-like tones, while the camera cuts between this shot of Kati holding the cat, then to that of a bug, then of a duck, then a cow. Kati is seen waving to something off screen, and the voice of the song fades, the camera cutting to the illuminated tree seen at the beginning and end of the film, the two voices on the keyboard continuing to play, cutting away to the actual forest around Kati, then to the girl under a blanket, sleeping.
Figure 11. The melody of "Une Sulased." (Tampere et al, 2013). The recording of the song can also be heard online at: https://www.folklore.ee/pubte/eraamat/rahvamuusika/ee/030-Une-sulased
Though Tooming and Aruoja set this music to the scene, Pärt later watched the film, and it is worth nothing the correspondences that occur here which later repeat themselves in his music. Of course, the scene presents one aspect of Kati's relationship to nature, through her adoption of the cat, and the shots of the animals, which might be interpreted as her own memories. The dream-evoking mood of the lullaby is paired with this relationship, moving from waking into dream again, into the timeless space of the mysterious tree, then to the space of the trees around Kati in Hiiumaa, where she awakes. The incantatory melody of the lullaby, like that sung by Kati in the beginning of the film, in effect "summons" this world of dream from sleep. Yet even as Kati wakes, the two voices on the Celesta continue to play. Like those of the violin in A Sound, they encode two aspects of Kati as an individual, though in the context of Colorful Dreamsit is still difficult to differentiate between the Kati as a subject, and the objective world of animals and nature around her. This can be heard in the setting of the voice, belonging not directly to Kati, but to something else, likely reaching to another source separate from the beauty in the classical melodies of the celesta - the folklore of Estonia.
This small part of the score perfectly embodies a key moment in Pärt's musical thinking of this time: with the bell-like timbre of the celesta, he writes two cautiously moving voices in classical counterpoint, carrying the spiritual values of the classical era in the modern rhythmic science of the bell, but lets these speak with the mystical summoning in the simple, minor key melody of the Estonian lullaby. In scoring this brief experience, Pärt's music opens up a critical space for Kati as a subject to exist by arranging her sensations in concert with nature. Critically, Tintinabulli begins to bloom when the composer sets established musical elements with principles of Estonian folk music, allowing Pärt to find a music which emotionally answers to the values of his time and place, as they were being thought out in the art of that era.
Figure 11. Kati crying, the Two Voices on Harpsichord
Another example of this thought-provoking combination of the two-voices interacting through the bell-like timbre of a percussive keyboard instrument occurs after Kati's mother refuses to take the cat with her into their summer house. Kati begins to cry, and runs away from her mother, the camera following her as she wanders into the forest. Over shots of the beach, her cries combine with other, unknown voices, and when we see the haunted, human-like figures on the beach, the harpsichord fades in. Pausing, then starting, the high and low voices exchange intervals in a manner that could only be Pärt's. Suddenly, Kati's voice can be heard whispering, intoning a rhyming song:
Üks rohutirts läks kõndima; One grasshopper went a'walking,
ei saanud aga kõndida: but a'walking he could not,
kaks jalga liiga pikad tal he had two feet that were too long,
ja teised lühikesed all. and on the others short.
Author's Translation (Enno, 2012)
Like the above example, Pärt's music is paired with the spoken word, the text being the Estonian poet Ernst Enno's childrens' rhyme "One Grasshopper Went A'Walking." Though the music initially captures the emotional turmoil of Kati's anguish, paired with the stark images of the beach, it becomes another engagement with the Estonian language, and importantly, with the view of nature through the eyes of the child. As the music plays, the mood shifts, and we see images of the forest. No longer the inhuman objects on the beach, where Kati sits along crying, the view becomes one of Kati's renewed outward facing perspective. With the space taken by the personality of Kati read from the poem, the two voices of Tintinabulli proceed in the relation of place and person, leading her once again to an equilibrium with herself and her environment. In this scene, too, the character of Kati becomes the space which Pärt and his own thoughts later occupy in relation to a music that relates his primary musical fascinations of the triad, the two voices, and the bell, in a single schema, Tintinabulli.
As mentioned above, Pärt had already established the mimetic analogy between the harmonics of the bell, and that of natural physical laws manifested in a crystal or glass. The sound of water, glass, and other reflecting objects also takes a symbolic role in the Colorful Dreams, with Kati and other young children playing with glass orbs and a fishing net in the beginning of the film, and Kati playing with marbles in her apartment, which features elaborate glass and crystalline decorations. The refraction of light in these round, transparent objects suggest a wild array of associations, including the optical effect of filmic images themselves, reinforced all the more by Maran's repeated use of the fisheye lens. Perhaps more importantly, the visual element of the glass orbs display an analogy to the subject of the film, Kati herself, whose internal experiences form a constantly echoing dialogue with that of the outside world, reflecting in herself the world around her, and vice versa.
This is precisely the unification of self and world which suggests itself in earlier scores, and which Pärt had searched for as another unifying principle in the philosophical style of his music. In the sound of the bell, which brings together these parts of Kati's existence, Pärt could perform again the transformation of person into object, visible in Uli's turning into a crystal in Camerman Kõps and in the final shots of Enke's lamp in A Sound, only this time in reverse, bringing the subjective experience of music out of objective sound. It is important to note, that this ringing came to Pärt through his existing conception of the triad's role. By producing the triad stepwise in its primary form through the harmonic series, the bell's sound sets its own musical schema in a single note, the triad suggested in the increasing but fading harmonic series once the bell is struck. Pärt had circled this key intuition as to the lawful nature of the bell, and returned to the instruments associated with its timbre on the vibraphone and glockenspiel.
However, the harmonic series, by following a single melodic line upwards, only suggests harmony: it does not form any horizontal chord. Pärt's final breakthrough came in the form of two bells, ringing with one another. This is heard often the gamelan-like percussive pieces in Colorful Dreams, when multiple bell instruments resonate at different rhythms to one another. Setting these different bells in sequence causes a complex interaction between their harmonic series, in which the rising arpeggiated scales of the harmonic series form passing chords with one another. Pärt made a creative leap in understanding that this interaction could itself form another kind of counterpoint. His first experiments, in effect, "focused the microscope," on the most simple version possible of this interaction between bells: two voices moving in the silence between these essential harmonic echoes.
The music for Colorful Dreams can thus be seen as Pärt's restless investigation of the many combinations and versions of these bell-like melodies. But only by isolating back to the metaphoric dualism of the two voices did Pärt understand how the regular laws of the natural world bind the self and the world within the vocabulary of music. Tintinabulli can thus be heard in the film's keyboard pieces on harpsichord and celesta, which stretch out the geometric lines of baroque music with the lasting, echoing qualities of the instrument.
These short pieces are the remarkable precursors to what is often described as the first Tintinabulli composition, the piano composition "For Alina," written three years later in 1976. If the bell demonstrates the crystal of a human spirit, then the sound of two bells ringing together as the counterpoint of Tintinabulli emerge when these spirits meet. Indeed, as Pärt explains in one scene of Dorian Supin's documentary 24 Preludes to a Fugue, the two voices of "Alina" interact like two people, crossing one another. Within the harmonic universe with which Pärt reimagined the principles of counterpoint, this meeting in its simplicity comes to reflect the human and the divine, subjective and objective, good and evil, uniting them into an all-encompassing "unity," of which Pärt spoke of in 1968.
6. Conclusions
In 1978, two years since Pärt had begun to elaborate his new musical style in fully-fledged concert works, the composer was once again interviewed by Ivo Randalu. Between their radio interview in which Pärt had claimed his faith and belief in unity, ten years had passed. Clearly, the composer had learned something critical, but when Randalu asks him to explain Tintinabulli, the Pärt is at a loss.
"I would like to say it this way..." he says, taking on an amazed expression and gesturing with his hands. In the background, Nora Pärt laughs and asks him if he isn't doing a dance. Words will not do to describe the inner emotion. The composer's wife playfully asks for a sound, then for a color.
"Blue," the composer answers, "light blue." Pärt explains the color like the sun coming from the edge of the sky, just as you cannot see it, framing the scene with his hands. This, he explains, is less a color than a metaphysical state, "our soul's longing for his, this color, for this light. It wants to fly after it," he says, lifting his hands (Sööt, 1979).
Switching from gesture, to an image, then describing a scene, Pärt wrestles with the very difficulty of communicating. After finally acting out the internal sense of Tintinabulli in his small scene, the composer is able to give it a metaphysical sense, a moral, which generalizes these elements into a poetics comprehensible again in words. Pärt at this time is not merely immersed in musical thought too severed from language to communicate it; the very way in which he understands the internal meaning of music emerges from a filmic sense of its being. This cinematic intelligence combines gesture with image into a scene that synthesizes a mood. As the narrative of a film manifests from a sequence of images, so too does the significance of music evoked from a set of gestures.
I would like to emphasize this cinematic intelligence as part of the process by which Tintinabulli revealed itself to Pärt. Of course, the creation of this style was a complex alchemy of religious and imaginative principles that were effected by the composer's work as a sound designer and his writing for the theater, to name a few of the ways beside film in which Pärt applied his music through other mediums. Overall, however, the role of his film scores should not be underestimated, as during this critical period between 1968 and 1975, these constituted Pärt's only public works aside from the Third Symphony. And, I have noted, the main principles of Tintinabulli can be traced in these films, in contrast with his concert music, in which other organizing principles still dominate. Film scores gave Pärt an opportunity not only to express ideas, but to make imaginative associations and to learn principles of orchestration and compositional structure far different than those present in classical, or even modern music for that matter.
On these fronts Pärt was, indeed, breaking new ground: through the triad has a role in classical systems of harmony, the composer realized after practice that in the music he wrote for film this meaning changed. And while the sound of something simple like a single struck bell may not have made sense in the setting of a concert work, it did when paired with a meaningful image. Thus, the act of writing scores drove Pärt to rethink these simple elements of music. This accorded too with his personal-analytic approach to modernist methods such as twelve-tone writing, leading the composer to think not only in context of the location of the bell's meaning in a single film, but as a fact of sound that could become a principle itself for constructing music. That this sound, as well as the personalized writing for two voices, can be heard throughout these years, informs us that Pärt had considered, written, reacted, and repeated these inferences in practice for Tintinabulli.
In this rearrangement of the familiar, Pärt comes to resemble less his American contemporaries, the so-called "minimalists" such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, but early modern figures, especially the composer and ethnologist Béla Bártok. Like Pärt, the latter repositioned laws of music according to principles discovered in another form of work - the ethnographic study of folk music - realizing a new system which translated the idea of tonality into a completely new, non-tonal setting. Bártok achieved this by his method of "reducing expression to simple and primary symbols," partly by reassessing his personal inspiration from previous traditions (the music of Strauss, Debussy, and Wagner), in light of scientific research, leading to the "elemental rebirth of music through the reconstruction of its means." (Lendvai, 1971).
Like the latter, Pärt followed a similar path in the deconstruction of the music of the past, but integrating the principles of sound he had toyed with in film. Interestingly, though Bártok did not not necessarily focus on the metaphysical meanings of this process, he did come to a parallel understanding about the dualistic relation between sound and music in which music is defined by a subjective experience of the objective laws of sound. More specifically, these include "inner" hearing, based on the physiological structure of the ear, and "external" hearing, controled by the physical laws of consonance, creating a game between the sensuous colors and textures found in nature and the expressive and emotional reaction found in human experience. Together, these priniciples justify universal concept of music in which one could "trace back all the folk music on the face of the globe to a few parent-forms, archetypes, ancient styles," the unity which Bártok sought in his own kind of Tintintabulli (Lendvai, 1971).
The similarities between the two composers bring up another surprising connection, that of their relation to folk music. Pärt has denied a link between his own music and Estonian themes and traditional music, and indeed he has set few if any Estonian texts to music, in contrast to his contemporary Veljo Tormis (Restagno et al, 2012, Hillier, 1997). Though Pärt did not conduct extensive fieldwork as did Bártok, nor did he utilize folk themes to his music, his setting of reglilaul-like texts in Colorful Dreams, including the traditional Estonian lullaby, suggest a connection that might lie deeper within his music. Pärt is likely to have heard other field recordings in Estonia, especially having access to the archives during his work as a sound designer for the Estonian Broadcasting Corporation, and it is possible that certain aspects of traditional Estonian music, such as a certain language-influenced approach to melody and harmony as in the lullaby, became part of Tintinabulli's unification. The possibilities here are many, but I will only not another similarity between Pärt's unique voice leading and the movement of parallel keys between voices in the Setu singing tradition (Pärtlas, 2012).
Another unexpected connection between the two composers can be found in the political aspects of their work. Just as the combating systems of modernity and folk-melody in Bártok's music became a "battle ground for the struggle between reaction and progress....[as] the conflict between revolution and counter-revolution...was making itself felt in every sphere" within Hungary in the early 20th century, so too did Pärt's music take part in an ideological struggle occurring in Soviet Occupied Estonia in the late 20th century (180, Ujfalussy, 1971). This clash most clearly can be heard in concert works like Credo, written against the prevailing political climate, advocating for the personal expression of religion against the soulless wastes of modernity. In his works for film, however, Pärt more minutely touches on these questions of personal liberty and belief, with clear political consequences. In Colorful Dreams, for example, the childish imagination of Kati does not follow the official ideology of the Soviet person, or "Homo Sovieticus," but of someone the filmmakers show to be constituted by the people, traditions, language, and dreams surrounding her. So, if Pärt finds a method whereby he can combine together the principles of his music, he does so in a place where the Aruoja and Tooming make an argument for the self-determination of the Estonian people.
One concrete way in which Pärt's music might touch politic themes is its silence. To some extent, silence, with its manifold metaphysical meanings, became the image to which the acoustic processes of music could once again take place. However, the incorporation of silence as a gesture into a system of meaning was not unheard of in Estonian art, such as in the plays of Mikk Mikiver during the 1980's. Anneli Saro (2011) views the use of silence in productions such as Pilvide värvid (The colors of clouds) as "empty signifiers, which were filled by audiences according [to] their personal or collective shared experience. Because of this highly personal apect, these empty signifiers became more significant than signs with fixed, or limited meanings."
From such an event, in which performer and listener are bound together by shared silence, a political force also develops. Pärt's search for stylistic freedom, parallel to his contemporaries, brought a new form of compositional control that allowed room for the listener into the creative event begun by the composer. Within Estonia, this silent practice "becomes a form of self-expression for a people and a nation whose language and right to speak of it have almost been taken away from them" (2011). If Jaan Kaplinski concluded that most Estonians under the soviet regime pinned their hopes on either "The West, God, or luck," rather than live a "life in truth," the choice of religiously motivated silence could also evoke hope, and offer a renewal of meaning in a politically restrictive world (112, Salumets, 2014).
Appendix: Films Scored by Pärt
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The Author would like to thank Eva Näripea, Kaire Maimets Volts, and Immo Mihkelson for their assistance.
