The Strange and the Beautiful

Glorious sunshine this morning, and a happy Friday to you! 

This week's MindLetter was occasioned by the Radio 3 Breakfast show yesterday; enjoy. 

The Strange and the Beautiful

One December, after my first term at university, Aqualung’s ‘Strange and Beautiful’ dominated the airwaves. Its sombre strangeness haunted me as I walked the streets emptied of students and tourists. Looking back now it seems like another world, a time when there were eras of quiet in between flurries of goods and bodies in a city centre. In those December weeks bustle was interrupted; the song itself, a slow peal of piano chords like bells wavering between minor and major, refuses to be rushed. I have listened to ‘Strange and Beautiful’, and found it to be both these things, for years.

How strange to be reminded of it yesterday, while listening to the radio, by quite a different piece. Arvo Pärt is an Estonian classical composer who vies only with John Williams to be the most-played living composer. Over breakfast I became aware of strings dancing upon a quiet, consistent bass like fairies dancing on ice; strange fairies, a little wild, not the perfect ones in a Victorian picture book. Every time the music threatened to become heavy a violin would climb back up the scale like a forest creature ascending to the summit of a great grey pine, or there would be a warm sweep of sound from the strings in the bass. This was Fratres, composed in 1977 for strings and percussion, in a style Pärt called tintinnabuli – the ringing of bells.

Yesterday was Arvo Pärt’s 90th birthday. He has composed all his life, but the pieces that I've been listening to emerged in his fifties. Earlier in his career he experimented with Schoenberg-style serialist music, but this was banned by Soviet censors, and Pärt descended into a deep and depressive silence. Pärt’s biographer, Paul Hillier, describes how “he had reached a position of complete despair in which the composition of music appeared to be the most futile of gestures, and he lacked the musical faith and willpower to write even a single note."

Anyone who has ever felt their creative light extinguished by forces outside their control will resonate with this existential malaise. But Pärt filled the void with something new: during this time without musical faith, he turned to his Christian one, studying fourteenth to sixteenth century liturgical music. He began composing again, drawing on plainsong, polyphony and Gregorian chant. 

Thus, the pealing bells of his new tintinnabula music call to worship; we know not what or where, but we recognise it immediately. It's not just the peal of string triads and the sense of those forest creatures dancing in snow and ice, it is also the silences. Pärt, we can hear, is a man who has known silence intimately, both in despair and in meditation. He is not afraid to intersperse it in his music, and it is part of the music, part of what makes it both strange and lovely, even sacred.

I listen to Fratres a few times while I am writing this MindLetter, bewitched by its sacred forest tonalities. Then, quite suddenly, I find that I have had enough; I don’t want to listen to it all day. Isn’t it often this way, with the strange and the beautiful? We immerse ourselves in it for a short time, in whatever form of worship it requires, and then we need something else: silence on our own terms, or something just as beautiful but with a chirpier hue (wait for the bridge). 

Indeed, Pärt’s percussion, which draws attention and punctuates, thereby always alluding to what surrounds it, plays on this. The sacred derives its force from what is not; part of the magic of the forest is that we must inevitably leave it. Just so, the strange and the beautiful are part of the varied texture of life. Let them catch your breath, open your eyes and ears, and then release you out into the sunshine.  

Happy birthday, Arvo, and warm wishes to you all.

Kitty

Fratres was written in various versions between 1977 and 1992: for string quartet; for cello and piano; and others. The version I heard was for violin, strings and percussion.