Part: Symphony No. 2

Symphony No. 2 (1966)

Arvo Part (1935- )

In the last twenty years Arvo Part has become a widely recognised name in contemporary music, with a succession of works, many of them written for voices with Latin texts, which have won him a dedicated following. This was particular the case with music lovers who thirsted for new music without what was often felt to be a prevailing severe intellectualism and constricted emotional expression in much of the music composed since the 1950s. In America this desire for a simpler, more direct musical communication drew an entirely new audience to follow the work of such figures as Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, composers commonly labeled “minimalists,” whose work was marked by a sometimes deceptive simplicity, with great emphasis upon repetitive rhythmic patterns, the use of triadic sonorities quite divorced from traditional notions of “tonality,” and meditative, even spiritual connotations in creating moods, trance-like states of mind, with chanting, drumming and other evocations of non-western musical cultures.

Not long ago the work of Arvo Part would hardly figure in a discussion of 20^th century music---even as late as 1980 the article on Part in the New Grove Dictionary of Music consisted of a mere 25 lines. It was in 1982 that Arvo Part’s PASSIO brought wide attention to a newly evolving stage in his creative development, one which has become well known in a series of works with titles such as Litany, Miserere, Stabat Mater, Te Deum. While it is always enlightening to consider the earlier stages of a composer’s work, one might question the need to look back upon a composition dating from an early stage in his development (1966), moreover, one employing musical devices which have not remained part of his more mature style. And it is true that anyone familiar with the intensely quiet, “timeless” qualities of Part’s more recent work will be rather amazed by the Second Symphony of 1966. And yet the uniquely meditative and spiritual compositions written by Arvo Part in the last two decades might not have come into being without the composer having passed through the testing stages of his earlier, often deeply disturbing works such as the Second Symphony.

Arvo Part was born in Paide, a small town fifty miles from Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Long a part of thre Russian Empire, Estonia became an independent Republic in 1920, only to be absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1940, finally regaining its independence in 1994. As a child he trained as a pianist, also playing the oboe and playing percussion in a dance band. In his late teens he turned to composition, studying composition in Tallinn under Heino Eller, the leading composer of the day. By then the arts in Estonia were firmly in the grip of Soviet “socialist realism” orthodoxy, harshly rejecting western influences, particularly those of serialism and the post-Webernian work of composers such as Boulez, Nono and Stockhausen. But it was also a period during which young Polish composers (most memorably Krzysztof Penderecki) were asserting their artistic independence by their own quite individual `response to some of those very western influences found to be so pernicious by the authorities in Moscow. Although a Prokofiev-like neo-classicism can be found in some of Part’s very first compositions, as early as 1960 he began to toy with the serial technique in his first major work, the cantata NEKROLOG, which immediately was attacked in official circles for its “espousal of western formalism.” While western serial composers were officially “tolerated” after 1958, an unofficial ban remained in effect, and many younger, more adventurous composers were severely criticised for their “experimental tendencies.” As late as 1968 Part’s CREDO for piano, chorus and orchestra was savagely attacked, bringing about a crisis both artistic and spiritual on the composer’s part, plunging him into a long period of silence. In the 1970s Part’s life went through some profound changes, including a conversion to the Russian Orthodox faith, and in 1980 a decision to move to Vienna, and eventually to Berlin.

Part’s growth as a composer moved directly into an intense preoccupation with serial techniques in his earlier works of the 1960s, in many respects spurred on by the vivid example of his Polish contemporaries. An element of musical “collage” and musical quotation also enters his work, as well as a fascination with traditional contrapuntal techniques often employed in serial composition, such as canonic writing. Soon Part began to explore European music of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, including such composers as Perotin, Ockeghem and Josquin des Pres. And a highly individual response to a concept of bell-sounds referred to as “tintinnabuli music” is at the core of most of the later works, which set religious texts and focus upon spiritual concepts.

Thus it is fascinating to discover the basic elements which underlie the Second Symphony, a work of unusual expressive mystery and emotional power. Written for a full symphony orchestra, with a duration of about 15 minutes, the work carries no tempo markings, instead giving bald metronome markings for its three movements: quarter-note = 104-120 (fairly quick), half-note = 112 (quite lively), quarter-note = 48-60 (quite slowly). A somewhat bizarre novelty in terms of sound resources is the use of children’s toys to produce background noise---Mark Laycock recalls a performance in Boston in which three percussionists employed rubber duckies! There is a degree of “aleatoric” writing (in which precise rhythmic notation is abandoned to chance), as well as an underlying tonal structure which is serial in basic design, although of little direct concern to the listener.

Although often described as “non-narrative” in character, the opening movement of the symphony follows a clearly defined structure. It opens with an aleatoric (random) chattering of pizzicato notes in the strings, employing the twelve chromatic tones squeezed into the space of an octave, joined by background noise of children’s toys. The first of a series of sustained, lyrical lines (gradually taking on a nearly traditional “melodic” character) is heard in the solo horn, followed by random chattering now given to the flutes. The random element returns in pizzicato strings, now joined by the eerie rustle of cellophane being crushed, soon leading to another lyrical line, now in the clarinet, arching upward quite expressively, followed (as before) by the random chattering, now in the lower winds, creating a more agitated mood. Now bowed (and louder) the random strings figure returns, with background noise made by applying wood blocks to the piano strings. The next sustained line is heard in the bassoon, becoming more intense, now followed by random chattering in the brass. The next entry of the sustained line is given to the brass, circling from low to high registers, joined by ominous rolls on the tam-tam. Suddenly, with a dramatic glissando in the harp, we are swept into the higher reachs of winds and strings for a series of triads heaped one upon the other---“Pelion piled upon Ossa,” with distinct key centers of B, D, E, F, E-flat, etc. pressed into a sort of multi-tonal fortissimo wail, soon melting away into highly colored, dissonant clusters in the brass, joined by shrieking trills high in the winds. This rises in intensity, then settles back into a soft D Major chord, which then swells into a fullest fortissimo to end suddenly.

While Wilfred Mellers describes the second movement as “scherzoid,” Charles Ives would probably add that “this scherzo is not a joke!” Chugging into life with bouncy, rather carefree pairs of repeated notes (to be played with aleatoric rhythmic freedom), this three-minute interlude rapidly takes on a truly nightmarish character---what seemed “carefree” at first becomes mindless and brutal. The jabbering repeated notes, passed among brass and winds is punctuated by isolated sustained tones in the strings, each time swelling from soft to loud, moving from high to low registers. At midpoint the music flies into splinters, and faintly echoing Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” with shards of sound sailing in all directions, a jagged pointillism is underway, with long sustained tones in the lower brass against a background of smacks and thuds in percussion and piano (using the flat of the hands directly on the strings). The sustained pitches rise, becoming yet more threatening, moving into the higher brass, joined by the winds to form a screaming, sinister wall of sound, to conclude by suddenly breaking off.

Moving immediately into the final movement we are confronted by a massive fortissimo string chord built up of superimposed fourths, stretching from highest to lowest pitches against which a thundering timpani drumbeat is heard: a rhythmically precise E-flat octave which is hammered out with mechanical deadliness, first a phrase of twelve notes, then eleven, ten, nine – and so on down to a single note. Each phrase is punctuated by a rapid scurrying figure in the strings, at first in an imperceptible DIMINUENDO, then rising again in volume, while the string pattern becomes progressively more hectic. This suddenly gives way to a section with the dry rattle of COL LEGNO strings (rapping the strings with the wood of the bow) against a tapestry of murmuring winds and brass. Brass figures begin to stand out, the winds begin to create a frenzied jabber, the entire orchestra rising in a huge CRESCENDO, out of which steals a tonal melodic fragment in the clarinet. In a startling, almost cinematic shift of orchestral mood and color, we suddenly find ourselves transported into a cloudless C Major, with a naïve little tune heard with traditional harmony and orchestration of blushing modesty. The melody is a passage from Tchaikovsky’s “Sweet Day-Dream” from an 1878 collection of children’s piano pieces. Three last dissonant crashes are turned aside by the cool sounds of open-string fifths, the children’s music continues, and drifts into silence.

What can this possible MEAN, many of us would ask. But then, we raise the same question with many of the works of Beethoven, of Mahler, of Debussy – and we are forced to supply our own private, unverifiable responses. Can this be another of those “Unanswered Questions?” Can it be related to the composer’s own personal struggle for creative integrity working under Soviet repression? A vision of the artist seeking some sort of personal salvation in a nihilistic world? Arvo Part himself might not be able to answer our questions – he might choose not to, or perhaps might not know the answer himself.

In his fine little 1997 book on the composer, Arvo Part’s most devoted interpreter, Paul Hillier, has this to say about the Second Symphony: “[There is] the feeling of savage, bitter scorn unleashed, barely relieved even by the dulcet conclusion. At the outset we are knocked off balance by the unexpected sound of children’s squeaky toys, the alienating effect of which lingers in the memory and permeates the whole piece; indeed, the beginning and end of this work may be said to inhabit childhood, the purity of which is invoked as something that might eventually overcome all the evil in the world.”