In honor of the 90th celebration of the composer, I am posting my 2018 bachelor's thesis on the film scores of Arvo Pärt (1968-76). Fully revising the text and requesting permissions would be quite onerous, and after feedback from experts such as Immo Mihkelsen, I'm not sure if I stand by all of my original claims. It does however provide a helpful glimpse into lesser recognized period of the composer's work. I would like to thank Eva Näripea, Liina-Ly Ross, and Guntis Smidchens for their help.
1. Introduction
In the beginning of Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the two-part feature film Pärt scored in 1975/6 for director Grigori Kromanov, a journalist approaches the writer Nikandrov (Nikolai Volkov jr) in a bar, and begins to question him about Russian artists. Who are the best writers? Nikrandov lists off a few names, but the journalist continues asking. Nikandrov generalizes: there is much talent in Russia. But the journalist keeps asking: Who is the first Russian who is recognized as talented? Who is talented in this area?
"But where is talent easy?" Nikandrov asks finally. The camera cuts to a shot of Arvo Pärt playing in the background.
Figure 1. Arvo Pärt accompanying a singer in the bar.
Casting the composer in something more than a bit part, Kriminov nods here to the ignominy of the Soviet Union, in which a serious artist such as Pärt is delegated to barroom entertainment in a backwater dive. The system of censorship, cutting into the free talent of Pärt, has rendered him anonymous, dragging his music from high spiritual aspirations to accompanying banal scenes in the background.
More than this, however, the cameo can also be understood as a commentary itself on Pärt's work writing film music in the Soviet Union, in which, rather than express his maturing art to the fullest in a supporting, uncensored system, he must play for a relatively uninterested audience not even aware he toils in the background.
Recognized throughout the Soviet Union as a leading avant-garde composer, by the early 1970's Pärt had suffered twice the pain of official ideological scrutiny: first in 1960 as a young graduate of the conservatory with the premiere of his self-concocted twelve-tone work Nekrolog "Obituary," and second in 1968 with his openly-religious Credo, in which the harmonies of Bach and the spirit of Christ triumphed over modernist evil. Both confronted major Soviet taboos: the first exhibited the Western decadence of dodecaphonic music, and the second testified to the composer's Christianity. While Pärt found a completely individual approach to both, the official reaction against Credo- and the composer's refusal to back down in his support of the piece - led to the composition's erasure from official lists and records. Though Pärt could keep his place in the Estonian composer's union, his name was associated with rebellion, and he withdrew from public scrutiny.
Pärt had begun to undergo personal changes. His work at the Estonian National Radio, begun during his studies at the conservatory, ended in 1968. He separated from his first wife, marrying Nora Pärt. In 1974, he converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Against previous modernist and avant-garde tendencies, he became increasingly drawn to baroque and early music. This study occupied the composer between 1968 and 1977, during which he completed only two works, his Third Symphony and the vocal-symphonic piece Laulu armastatule (Song to a Loved One), which he later eliminated from his oeuvre altogether. Pärt's withdrawal from composition and intense spiritual self-scrutiny during this "period of silence" sowed the seeds of a breakthrough in his creation of a new musical style, Tintinabulli. This is the style that became the structural base for compositions that make him, today, the most performed living composer in the world.
Yet far from silent, Pärt was quite active during this period, making his living writing film scores, within which his search for a transcendent, unified style, can be heard. By 1968, Pärt had already scored thirteen films using modernist techniques like tape manipulation, the prepared piano, and styles such as rock, jazz, and serial composition. By February of 1976, when Pärt wrote what would be his first piece in the style of Tintinabulli, "For Alina," he had written for twenty one more films, at an average of about three films a year since 1968. After his breakthrough - resulting in the composition of Fratres, Tabula Rasa, and Spiegel im Spiegel in the productive year of 1976 - he turned his efforts back to concert music, scoring only two more films in 1978.[1]
The composer had been working, as his cameo suggests, hidden in plain sight. And though film music might not have commanded the same artistic authority as art music, it did allow the composer to test new musical ideas in concert with an pre-existing text. Pärt treated each commission thoughtfully, refining his approach to film music as he came better to understand the relationship between music and image, later stating that:
"Music is with film like it is with a theatrical work, as image and sound are like one coin with two sides. If a director says that music adds a lot to a film, then the composer can say that it's an entirely different thing to this music with a picture or without it. A picture gives an entirely different dimension to music. But very poor music doesn't work without a picture. This music's poverty is that richness which occurs in a synthesis with a picture. And so if, within a picture, there are so-called empty spaces which leave room for music, then this duet begins to breathe in a different manner." (Mihkelson, 2013)
It is during this period of composition that these "empty spaces," begin to show up in Pärt's work, notably in 1971 with the Third Symphony. The match of visual narrative to musical gesture formed one relationship with which Pärt began to think through Tintinabulli. A dramatic shift in the use of musical resources to make meaning, motivated by this relationship, began to occur, as the principles of music reformed in a surprising re-arrangement of basic elements of silence, sound, and harmony, mediated by images.
Thus, when Pärt returned to composition for the stage, the resulting concert music took advantage of the techniques inherent in effective film music. This occurrence may partly explain the prevalence of this period's output in soundtracks to feature films and documentaries: if many contemporary encounters with Pärt's music are "mediated through the practices of new media production," this may be due to the fact that the music itself was created through its practice with other mediums (Dolp, 2012, Volt, 2013, 2009).
But how did this mediated practice take place? To approach such a question requires as much a musicological as a cinematic investigation. Yet, as Render (2011) argues, musicology often fails to substantially address film music due to the fact that the analytical techniques of the former are created to study thematic development in Western Music, as exemplified by the works of composers such as Beethoven and Brahms. Because of its shorter form and reliance on images, film music resembles art song rather than the symphony, priveleging "thematic beauty and explicibility over thematic development." (2011) This generally applies to the musicological elements of Tintinabulli, with its focus on the interaction of melodies in counterpoint, creating a "static" form often characterized in opposition to classical thematic development (Hillier, 1997).
Pärt himself has explained his investigation, deconstruction, and assembly of style through the analogy of gesture, which like music, follows a system of meaning which is not easily explicable:
"...I can't explain what I'm feeling. I don't have the words to do so. Yet if I simply lift up my hands like this, then you understand because I've shown you with my hands, even though I can't find the words to say it. My body makes a movement and you can't say what it says in words - it's a different language. That is also how I want to write music, and at that time [studying early religious music] I couldn't express what I had to say in any other way." (McCarthy, 1996)
As Pärt has emphasized, the technical aspect of style does not explain the way in which it makes meaning; rather, it is the "spirit of the music," or the inner emotion of what makes a musical object meaningful. Pärt's intense study of existing musical genres as approaches rather than styles allowed the composer to exploit and even alter the pre-existing meanings of certain parameters of sound within his own music. If in his first major period of composition [1958-1968], Pärt began with modernist techniques, in his years of crisis [1968-1976] he transitioned to classical music first through collage, then to patient study and emulation. While re-learning the fundaments of the classical idiom through the study of ancient music, Pärt returned also to experimental music, coalescing his gains into a system built again from the bottom up. Thus, the composer's personal evolution can be read like a revisional history of Western music in reverse, with constant references to the classical era. By 1968, Pärt cites neither teachers nor contemporaries - such as Heino Eller, or Kuldar Sink to name a few - but the influences of Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Schubert, and Bach as his greatest influences (Randalu, 1968).
Aside from this anxiety of influence, scoring for film added another layer of difficulty to the production of meaningful concert music: facing the void of music that must persist without images. If a musical object might give meaning to a certain picture within a film's complex, what does that musical object mean on itself? What does the duet mean, when its second player is taken away?
As Schmelz (2001) describes, "Pärt's mimetic sense was always stronger than his constructivist bent." Just as the composer moves from a period of strong influences which culminates in collage, then begins to strip away these enriched methods to come to a personal stance in music, Pärt's sense of the mimetic reference of sound changes in his engagement with film. This is particularly noticeable from early stop motion and cell animations, in which sound directly matches the motion or gesture on screen, to later feature films and documentaries, in which music is linked with more subtle cues in the structure of the narrative. Yet by their close bond to narrative structure, these compositional methods require texts seperate from images to stand on their own as musical entities in concert works. In his mature work, Pärt often patterns these resemblances with religious texts. However, before these settings, formal aspects of Tintinabulli had taken on certain meanings for the composer. For example, Pärt has described the morality of the two musical voices in "For Alina," demonstrating the piece with another set of physical gestures:
"How can this kind of inequity be in the world? Watch: Here is one holy person, and here is a robber. War happens here, god watches over this, and lets his rain fall on both." (Siitan, 2013) The personification of the two voices, and the moral narrative of their counterpoint, shows that forms of personal philosophical meaning emerged within Tintinabulli in a narrative determined by musical structure itself. While Pärt's three symphonies capture the major musical stages of Pärt's stylistic development as Kotta (2015) has argued, Pärt's music scored for film shows us these changing relationships between overall philosophy and musical structure. The relationships that the composer later claims extant in the patterns of Tintinabulli are regularly evident in his films. Not only this, but due to the domination of film comissions in Pärt's ouevre during this "period of crisis," the resultant unification of these seperate principles actually occurs beginning in the music written for films on the eve of 1976. These major tenents of Tintinabulli can be loosely summarized as:
· The natural harmony of the triad
· The mimetic quality of sound (and its relation to silence)
· The creative personification of two harmonic voices
In the following, I analyze six representative films spanning from 1965 to 1972 and demonstrate how, first manifesting separately, then synthesizing into a whole, these principles formed the first works in Tintinabulli. The first two include Lydia Laius' feature film The Milkman of Mäeküla, and Heino Pars stop motion film, Cameraman Kõps in the Kingdom of Stones, in which Pärt repeats the inferences, apparent in his earlier film work, that the harmonic triad relates signifnicantly to the harmony of nature and the natural world, and similarly that one can mimic a structure which reflects light (a crystal) with a "reflective" sound, the bell. Following the crisis of Credo, Pärt plays with the symbolic relationship between two harmonic voices in the documentaries The White Land of Enderby, directed by Andres Sööt, and A Sound: Three Portraits, by Olav Neuland. In these as well as Rein Maran's experimental documentary Person to Person, Pärt begins to tranfer the mimetic quality of diagetic sound into the larger narrative structure. These breakthroughs "crystallize" with the percussive explorations in Virve Aruoja and Jaan Tooming's experimental feature film Colorful Dreams, in which Pärt applies the reflective metaphor of the bell to the interaction of two musical voices moving in triadic tandem with a visual narrative, reusing this practice in some of his last work for film.
This essay is part of a larger work on the film scores of Arvo Pärt, and while I will mention other notable films scored by the composer, I will not go into great detail on the remaining films aside from a chart included in attached index. Though much has been written on the application of Arvo Pärt's concert music to film, (See Volt, 2013, 2009, Czimic, 2011) relatively few have approached his music written for film, whether from the limited audience for some of his films, or the dismissal of the composer himself. Volt (2009) has devoted considerable attention to Pärt's score of Laius' feature film Ukuaru, but only in Estonian. Hillier (1997) devotes little more than a paragraph in mentioning his work for film, while Mihkelson's essay in the Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt (2012), abridged from the Estonian language original (2013), covers biographical details of the era but does not go into great detail about specific films or technical aspects of Pärt's film music.
Whether due to the "lower" artistic status of commissioned film music as opposed art music, or a certain stylistic agnosticism with which the serious composer wrote popular songs, surf-rock, smooth jazz, or even fiddle-swing, Pärt has indeed critically distanced himself from his film work. Yet he also recognized the formative role of this period in his creative work:
"Instrumentalists maybe had it easier, since every morning they already had to sing a new song, but a composer keeps working on film for many weeks - at the very least. Yes... this would have to leave its mark. And perhaps also it is somewhere, but one would have to go and find it." (Mihkelson, 2013).
In the following, I hope to prove that Pärt's scores for film indeed left their mark, but to an even greater degree, were intimately tied to the inception of a personal style. As Mihkelson remarked Pärt "became a composer in Estonia," and thus through a direct collaboration with his cultural contemporaries not only in Estonia, but in the greater Soviet Union as well.[2]
2. Arvo Pärt as a Film Composer in the Soviet Union
Born in September 11th, 1935 in Paide, Estonia, Arvo Pärt received a primarily musical education, transitioning to Tallinn where he entered the national conservatory in 1957 at the behest of his composition teacher, Heino Eller, the influential private teacher for a generation of composers (Mihkelson, 2013).[3] In 1958 Pärt began working as the sound director at the Estonian National Radio, continuing until 1967. Mihkelson (2013) emphasizes the formative influence this work had on Pärt, who began his work as a sound engineer during a time in which their independence and importance was highest in the recording process. Pärt himself placed microphones, ran sound mixes, and often cut and edited taped music, working as both producer and recording engineer. Through this work, Pärt not only learned the modern technical processes of musical production, but also personally worked with some of the top musicians in the country, and had access to recordings not easily found elsewhere. In this fashion, Pärt had the unique opportunity to record his own music, including film scores.[4]
Pärt also had the unique placement of geography. Estonia, like the other Baltic countries, occupied a point on the periphery within the Soviet Union, and was relatively more open to Western influence than other Soviet Socialist Republics (Egorova, 1997). However, while some eccentricities were tolerated, artists were still under strict censorship according to their membership in official unions, and had to find other, non-sanctioned means if they wanted to exhibit their work otherwise. Pärt's education with Eller, for example, took place in the latters' home, where their work and educational materials could not be closely monitered. The composers union, however, was a different story.
Founded in 1944, the league of composers functioned out of Moscow, where a central comittee comissioned and approved musical works after discussions on their ideleological appropriateness. Pärt joined the Estonian Socialist Rebulic League of Composers in his fourth year at the conservatory, 1961, and remained a member of the comittee through its first three directors, Eugen Kapp (1944-1966), Boris Kõrver (1966-1974), and Jaan Rääts (1974-1994) (Põldmäe, 2000). The difficulties that arose from compositions such as Nekrolog or Credo did not occur with his film music, for two primary reasons. First, film music was not considered under ther same intense scrutiny as programmatic concert music, since it was evaluated wholesale with the rest of the film.
Second, unlike the Composers Union, films produced by the primary production company in Estonia, Talinnfilm, were inspected by a the Tallinfilm Art Union (Tallinfilmi kunstinõukogu), which differed significantly from the composer's union. Founded later in 1957 according to a memorandum cultural ministry of the Estonian Soviet Republic, the Art Union consisted of 17 people, 9 of which were taken from a pool of 14 candiates who worked in some creative capacity in Tallinfilm, and 8 of which were drafted through agreement, and at points included actors, theater producters, journalists, composers, and set designers. The union, meeting in Tallinn, took care of Estonian film production: the comittee looked through script drafts, actor auditions, as well as rough edits, which they approved or disapproved for production, and watched films in their final form before sending them to the central government in Moscow (Uuet, 2012). Finished films were sent according to a system of ratings based on their perceived merit, bieng split into four groups. As the producer Jaan Ruus explains:
"The smaller the group, the more money you made - traditionally it was the second group, that meant a good film. The third group meant it was bad, and the fourth crap. The first group was hardly given because Moscow could always bring the price down." (Vainküla, 2014) As a comittee staffed mostly of filmmakers, meetings including everyone were very few, and while minutes were held for meetings beginning in 1961, these were later altered to quick notes and later simply the union's decisions. Documentaries, informational, and educational films were discussed and produced prior to feature films, for which a special panel (toimetuskoleegium) was assembled to treat completed scripts (Uuet, 2012).
While the union's decisions were nevertheless contingent on authority above them, their locality within Estonia and majority membership of filmmakers enabled to some degree artists to dictate their own art; members in the union's 30 year history included documentary filmmaker and later president Lennar Meri and the animator Rein Raamat. For his film scores, Pärt would receive the completed film and proceed writing the score, sometimes in collaboration with the director or other filmmakers, but determined in instrumentation by the budget of the film. Following this, Estonian Radio Orchestra would record this score in the Estonian Radio Studios, usually conducted by Eri Klas; in the first part of his career, Pärt himself recorded the music, which would then be edited into the mix by the filmmaker (Mihkelson, 2012).
3. Early Films - The Milkman of Mäeküla and Cameraman Kõps
The Milkman of Mäeküla (Mäeküla Piimamees) (1965)
The first part of Pärt's career also occupies a time [1959-1969] which Egorova describes as "transitional" within the history of Soviet film music (1997). During this time, composers were working to understand the relationship between sound and visual images in a new way, bringing attention towards stylistics and recording technology. Intense research in the latter thus brought natural noises to the fore in forms of film representation. From a political perspective, the Soviet cinema industry also served as a laboratory for experimental composers, who could test the latest trends in music, such as serialism, concrete and electronic music, which were forbidden (1997). These composers included Pärt and his contemporaries, including Schnittke, Gubaidulina, and Nikolai Karenikov.
Pärt's first comission, the short film From Night until Dawn (Õhtust hommikuni)came from the director Leida Laius, and marked the beginning of a fruitful, fourteen year working relationship within which Pärt composed half of his six feature film scores. Born to an Estonian family outside of Petrograd, Laius grew up an outsider in Estonia, studying acting at the Estonian National Theater Institute and working in the early fifties as an actor. Later she studied directing at the State University of Cinematography in Moscow, where her contemporaries included Andrei Tarkovsky and a new wave of Soviet Filmmakers (Sillart, 2002, Mihkelson, 2013). From Dusk till Morning), which tells the wartime story of a young woman who finds an escaped soldier from the red army, and must decide whether to risk giving him refuge in the house she stays in, owned by a young family. The black and white drama's presentation of personal and moral dilema presages the main themes of her mature work, such as the agency of women and the relationship between mothers and their children in relation to the society.
Already known as a serious composer with modernist tendencies, Pärt took the assignment seriously, collaborating with Laius at the Estonian National Radio building. While the director was pleased with the end result, a number of those they worked with weren't, including the cameraman Mihhail Dorovatovski, whom once complained during production to Laius "The whole film - full of two notes, without a pause!" without knowing that Pärt was standing wide eyed at the door (Ly, 1995). While admittedly showing the influence of the composer's avant-garde tendencies, Pärt's score followed a general patern in Soviet Cinema, which did not..."regard sound and music as passive or 'silent," but rather as sound which "would be endowed with an organizing or structural function." (Gillespie, 2003)
Pärt's ability with more serious and complex cinematic conceptions further grew with his second collaboration with Laius and his first full length feature film commission, an adaptation of the Estonian literary classic, The Milk Man of Mäeküla (Mäeküla piimamees) by Eduard Vilde. This 1965 black-and-white film followed a Soviet wide-trend classic national literature adapted to film, as well an interest in the depiction of psychological states through investigations of complex human characters, as opposed to the psuedo-romanticism of Stalinist cinema (Egorova, 1997). Vilde's 1916 work tells the tale of a serf, Tõnu Prillop (Jüri Järvet), who bargains away his deceased wife's sister, Mari (Elle Eha) to the local Baltic German Baron, Ulrich von Kremer (Ants Lauter), in order to buy the farm of the local milkman and pay off his debts. The novel captured the difficult relations which remained between typically wealthy Baltic Germans and indentured Estonians during the 19th and early 20th centuries, yet Laius concentrated more on the story of Mari, rendering the complexity and difficulty of her roles as a woman and as a mother.
The dramatic explication of these themes Pärt addresses by scoring more the inner emotional lives of characters. Just as Laius' depictions had grown from the somewhat theatrical roles of "From Dawn till Dusk," Pärt's musical techniques had moved further from the mimetic depiction of physical movement and thematic portrayal of narrative structure - audible in early stop motion films with Elbert Tuganov and Heino Pars - to a synthesis bringing out the film's moral dimensions. Due to this, his use of orchestration and character-based leitmotifs operates at a further distance from matching visual action to that of behavior, thoughts, and emotions.
The score, written for symphony orchestra, harp, and string instruments, is split into nine parts according to the major plot sections of the film, within which belong shorter scripts labeled according to action "Tõnu goes to the Market" (Section V.3) or pieces of dialogue, "There is no more, understand!" (Section VII.4). A large part of the music falls into transitional pieces, which thematically link the culmination of scenes with those that follow or simply fill transitions, while another part plays a part in the action conveyed by the scene, diagetic (as in the scene in which Tõnu prays in church to the sound of the organ) or non-diagetic.
Where Pärt might use certain instrumental textures to signify characters actions in the latter scenes, as when Kremer sees young Mari to a mischevious melody on the clarinet, the former scenes, by their association with transition, usually make use of entire orchestra. These sections, with their throbbing, held string parts and sudden fortehorns, have a high drama or suspense to them. This can be heard, for example, in the film's third act, when Tõnu returns home to find Mari is home, but the two begin to fight, Mari leaving. A minor-key cannon begins in the strings as Tõnu runs outside in the dark snow, calling out her name: as in the Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, a melody lowers through the orchestra in a desperate echo of defeat before silencing to a line on strings and horns as he falls to the ground.
While dramatic and emotional in nature, this scene is still largely mimetic: the cascade of strings aligns with Tõnu as he literally falls, and emotionally as he understands that he has lost Mari. Pärt breaks through to a more chilling musical metaphor in one of the most remarkable scenes of the film, when Tõnu, drunk and dissolute, has a vision of Mari in the last moments before his death. After leaving the deal with Kremer and hearing that Mari has taken a lover, the smith Juhan, Tõnu goes to the pub, and getting drunk, joins the rowdy crowd dancing. As he collapses, the crowd lifts him up, and the camera cuts with a cymbal crash to his falling face on his sled as he drunkenly races home.
Pärt accompanies the treacherous journey through snowy woods with frantic, hovering strings in the altissimo register, and as the sled careens off path, slows them down over a fading cymbal crash. As the only the double basses play to the echoing rings of the cymbal, an exhausted Tõnu looks over an icy wasteland. After silence, he sees the angelic figure of Mari arise from the snow to the sound of rising octaves in the upper strings. He whispers to the ghost, which leans down as the octave parts in the upper end to a major ninth, and fades to hovering strings in altissimo register as she begins to console him, telling him to go to sleep. As she does, a sweet violin melody plays, rising higher; he answers quietly, and the white shroud of the ghost fades into black, the violin soaring.
Figure 2. Mari's ghost consoles a dying Tõnu.
Here, Pärt matches the gentle, pure nature of the spirit, with the compounded octaves in the strings, but also draws a hallucinatory, almost heavenly, suspense in the soft, held notes, which break into compassion emotion when Mari whispers to him, matched by the entrance of the melody.
These, the last moments of Tõnu's life, resolve the primary conflict between the two characters, but in a pyhric way: Tõnu does not really receive Mari's consolation, only seeing a ghost, which fades away. If the instrumentation matches the gossamer white of the floating spirit, then the suspension of time in the octaves maintains the transcendence of his final experience, which resolves in the entrance of melody, and a whispering triad on the harp as he dies.
Though the composer scored this scene three years before Credo, the religious and musical correspondences in this scene are telling. From the perspective of narrative, Pärt has maintained that that the final note of a piece is most important (Siitan 2013), which parallels his own religious views on the matter, having said that "....The last moments before death are very precious - very important - for at that time things can happen which have not come about during a whole lifetime." (McCarthy, 1999) By translating the pure whiteness of Mari's ghost into a simple octave texture, the composer draws the ethereal emotion of the moments before death. But by ending the final moment in a triad, he draws a conclusion as to the place of harmony in life itself. The character's state of being spreads from the suspended struggle of life, to an elemental event which played, resolves, then fades away.
1968 - Cameraman Kõps in the Kingdom of Stones (
Pärt later cast the triad in a metaphysical role in his work with the pioneers of Estonian animation, Elbert Tuganov and Heino Pars, with whom the latter scored a four part series The Adventures of Camerman Kõps designed to teach children about the natural world. Born in Mulgimaa in 1925, Pars worked as an actor in Vanemuine theater and stage director at Tartu University before studying in the Russian Academy of Theater Arts in 1953, and working in Tallinn film initially as a cameraman. From 1957, Pars began collaborating with Tuganov, whose first film "Peetrikese unenägu," was released in 1958. By 1960, Pars and Tuganov's collaboration resulted in "Metsamuinasjutt" the first Estonian film to receive an international award (Robinson, 2013).
For Pars' directorial debut 1965's The Little Scooter (Väike motoroller) Pärt combined thematic elements with instrumental voices, to create a small play which accompanied the film's action, though in a flagrantly modernist fashion which focused on new timbres and sound combinations, extended by special recording techniques combined with a select use of instrumental famlies (woodwinds, strings) and instrumental effects (plucking, bowing). Near the end of the film, for example, when the scooter stops to rest in the forest, and animals, including a deer, a woodpecker, and a squirel, come out from the silence, their movements matched by single note, percussive figures, recorded with delay.
Off the success of this first film, Pars wrote 1964's Cameraman Kõps in the Kingdom of Mushrooms (Operaator kõps seeneriigis) as the first in his tetraology which pioneered the genre of children's natural educational film in the Soviet Union. Their main premise, that of an genial elderly scientist guiding the curious but sometimes naive Kõps through some segment of the natural world, about which the audience was shown documentary footage, invited more of Pärt's ingenious musical analogies and aural pupeteering, as well as programmatic music. Didactic by its nature, the film encouraged not only a general knowledge of mushrooms, but the love of nature, or as the scientist himself puts it: "Nature is a great artist, you only have to take a look at his handiwork!"
The score, written in seventeen parts for flute, piccolo, bass clarinet, vibraphone, marimba, drum, bongo, piano, guitar, string quartet, and Estonias first electronic instrument, the varioola,[1] further expressed the various features of the world which Kõps explored, setting up the major themes for the three sequels, such as the theme waltz on vibraphone, guitar and variola. In addition to this, however, it also set up major symbolic threads which later fed into Tintinabulli: the naturalness of the triad and the metaphor of ringing for transparent water, which culminate in the final cameraman Kõps film.
Pärt establishes a musical division between the natural and the technological world in the first film: the inner workings of the doctor's laboratory are sounded by ascending diminished chords on the varioola, an eerie, dissonant, white noise mimicking electric machinery that recurs throughout Pärt's scoring for depicted laboratories, such as the Aatomik films with Tuganov in the 1970's. Similar to the white noise of the laboratory, the scientist's various machines and their workings are likewise depicted through equally as machinated instrumental means. Whereas Pärt tends to depict the natural world through highly melodic passages on single instruments, such as when the camera cuts through images of mushrooms as the scientist explains their name to Kõps: Pärt translates their organic variation with widening intervals played on the flute.
In the second film, 1965's, Camerman Kõps in the Berry Forest (Operaator Kõps marjametsas), Pärt furthers this depiction of nature in the documentary footage of flowering plants and the berries, sometimes shown in high-frequency to show the process of blooming and seed production. These shots of growing blooms are accompanied by single musical notes on instruments such as the guitar or the marimba, or chords on the piano, sometimes echoed through intense delay. Unlike the busy instrumental texture of animated creatures or machines, plants exist and grow as single notes are played and left to sound.
Pärt demonstrates the triad's link to the spare sound-world of nature when the scientist takes Kõps aside for a lesson in his lab. In his lecture on the reproduction of flowers, he points to the essential parts of the plan on a simplified cross section of a flower. Each gesture sounds note-wise upwards in a resounding dominant seventh chord on the vibraphone. After the two leave the lab on their excursion, they find berries in their natural context, accompanied by a major chord played notewise upwards on the piano, which repeat as they look around at other plants. Unlike the demonstration of the flower in the lab, this chord fully resounds, suggesting an internal harmony unique to the natural world, represented by the triad.
In the third film, 1966's Cameraman Kõps on the Abandoned Island (Operaator Kõps üksikul saarel) Pärt plays some new tricks with the background music, as when scoring the Kõps and the scientists' "going wild" with a major key inversion from the finale of Mozart's Piano Sonata 11, or the Turkish March. But nature, here, is still the same. When a water spider lets Kõps swim with him underwater, ärt scores first person perspective shots moving through the plant-filled water in a wondrously sustained manner similar to Tõnu's death scene above, with an open fifth held in the varioola, over which a violin plays a sharply sweet, high melody, followed by a ringing of the triangle. The hovering, submerged atmosphere, repeated in similar scenes such as in 1973's Headstreams (Veealused), repeats the wondrous arpeggiation of the previous films with the additional mystic quality explored in The Milkman of Mäeküla, followed not by a triad, but by the sound of something ringing.
The harmonic echoes of the triangle reach towards an image which Pärt will continue to pair mimetically with the motion of light in transparancy, evident in the final episode of the series. For this, Pars decided to have Kõps venture out on his own. The short begins with the protagonist wandering on a beach where he meets a bird named Nipitiri: the young camerman finds a entrance to a cave, and along with the Nipitiri, ventures into a world of stones and crystals, ruled by a magical guardian Uli, who transforms herself into a crystal, before Kõps finds his way out.
Figure 3. Uli guides Kõps through the caves of crystal to the sound of echoing bells.
Following the music of this series, Pärt writes for a medium ensemble for the trumpet-based programmatic music at the beginning and ending of the film, and for more creative "exploratory" music, which conveys the atmosphere of the magical subterranean world. Most notably, Pärt illustrates the sparkling centers of light through bells and other echoing tones, such as the vibraphone, equating their inherent harmonics with the well-ordered, natural laws expressed by the geologically formed crystals.
In contrast with the previous films that take place on land, guided by a wise elder, the final installment has Kõps venture deep into the ground on his own, far from the surface of the earth and into the hands of mystical powers greater than himself. Like the journey underwater, scored in analogy to the ethereal state of Tõnu in his dying moments, this imaginary environment allowed Pärt to score another side of nature beyond the realm of human perception but part of a lawful universe.
The composer portrays this narrative by writing for an evocatively religious instrument, the organ, measuring its chords within noticable silences that suggest the size of the subterranean area and Kõps' movement within it. As the young camerman enters the cave, glancing at stalactites, Pärt draws the expanding space within through a descending chord on the organ, with an ascending, staccato melody in the upper register, creating a sense of deepening and opening space. Kõps meets the spirit of the cave through a flame, the organ erupting into a fire of dissonant chords, and the cameraman falls deeper within. Later, when the cameraman meets Uli, who shows him the beauty within the subterranean realm, the organ, carrying the mysterious depth of the atmosphere, begins a solemn melody, which follows the opening sequence.
Figure 4. The transubstantiated Uli-crystal.
The various halls of crystal and shining rock formations she guides him through, which Pärt scores with a variety of resonating vibraphone, xylophone, and bells, lead to a chamber in which Uli stands apart and becomes a crystal herself, the key to Kõps escape. This transformation links the spatial evocations of the organ with the material metaphor of percussive sounds. As she combusts into flame, the organ erupts with a cymbal flash, a smattering of notes burning into a dissonant tone clusters. Kõps and Nipitiri watch on. Once the flame is out, and a low note sounds on the organ, and Kõps comes over to see her, a small, red crystal: the ring of a small bell.
Though Pärt has already scored the various reflective and transparent surfaces of the caves with bells, here he isolates the sound to a single object and character, much the way he does so with the various plants and animals depicted in single-note formations throughout other episodes of the series. The crystal, along with the bell, is on the other hand different from mushrooms or berries: it occurs from much more mysterious and longer processes, as retold with Uli's heroic self-sacrifice, than other elements. Thus, its sound, too, when it occurs in natural isolation, possesses a natural harmonic series more audible than other instruments. In Pärt's mimetic leap of the imagination, the fundamental laws of reflection bound in a crystal are analogous to those in the sound of a bell.
Article continued in Part 2.
[1] Of these thirty seven total films, Pärt scored a total of nineteen cell- and stop-motion animated films, eleven documentary or popular science films, and seven feature films. With a running time of around ten minutes, the animated films were primarily produced for children, often featuring a recurring character with a signature song. The documentary films were produced almost entirely in black and white, with run times from ten to about forty minutes, and include travel documentaries, biographies, and nature documentaries, as well as popular science and two experimental art films. These genres make up the bulk of Pärt's work in film; five of his feature films are feature length dramas, as well as an experimental film (Colorful Dreams) and a science fiction film (Navigaator Pirx). With the exception of the latter, a co-production with Poland, all films were produced in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic.
[2] In a larger context, Pärt belonged to a generation of radical experimental composers within the Soviet Union, including Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Sofia Gubaidulina (some of whom were in fact friends of the composer) who exhausted their early passion for the taboo style of serialism and re-adapted serial techniques into individual musical languages that drew on existing historical models, aleatoric methods, and "banal" uses of tonality (Schmelz, 2009). In their quest for new sounds, these composers also pursued writing for film, as the process of censorship for film was generally more lenient than that off centrally comissioned art music, and would, simultaneous with their stylistic crises, share a general interest in religion (Medič, 2010).
Pärt also worked in the more local context of Estonia, a Socialist Republic on the Western edge of the Soviet Union. Thus, while studying the conservatory the composer had access to books on twelve-tone music by Eimert and Krenek, as well as some illegal sources, Pärt relied both on his and his contemporaries own inventiveness in creating and understanding new music (McCarthy, 1995, Restagno, 1996). This network included friends and musicians with similar approaches to Pärt, such as the flutist and composer Kuldar Sink, or Andres Mustonen and his ensemble Hortis Musicus, but also those working in different mediums, such as the animators Elbert Tuganov and Heino Pars, directors Laida Laius and Andres Sööt, the dancer Ülo Vilimaa, to name just a few. By interacting personally and artistically with these substantial creators in their own right, Pärt worked out his ideas within a community characterized by great productivity and experimentation.
[3] As Pärt's general biography is summarized elsewhere (see, for example, Mihkelson 2013, Hillier 1997), I do not go into great detail on the composer's early years and elementary schooling.
[4] Pärt's early work with recorded music is another factor which must be noted in understanding the degree to which his style is mediated through different practices of production. As the composer describes, certain aspects of his style were created to directly answer the problems set by recorded sound: "I heard this music only through speakers. And if I didn't like something in the ochestration or the timbre, I could make it more accesssible to me with the use of a mixer or filter. So when I sometimes went by chance into the studio and hearn how the music actually sounded, I was extremely dissapointed. One or two things would have to be tweaked in the score. This weird fluke would take upalmost all of my time working in the studio. There lacked an adequacy between the real sound in the studio and that on tape. Afterwards I had to learn quite a lot, and for this reason research the orchestra - orchestration." (Mihkelson, 2013)
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