Arvo Pärt

Pärt was born in Paide, Estonia, in 1935 and studied composition at the Tallinn Conservatory, graduating in 1963. He worked as a sound producer for Estonian radio from 1957 to 1967. Under Soviet rule he moved from neoclassical writing to serialist and twelve-tone music, which drew official criticism, and his Credo (1968) was banned. He then spent about eight years studying medieval and Renaissance music, and he joined the Orthodox Church in 1972. In 1980 he left the Soviet Union and lived first in Vienna and then, from 1981, in Berlin.

In 1976 he returned to composing with tintinnabuli, a technique named for bell-like ringing. It uses very simple harmony, often single notes or triads, with simple rhythm at a steady tempo. His models are Gregorian chant, plainsong and early Renaissance polyphony. Für Alina (1976) is an early example, and Fratres (1977) came a year later.

Fratres has no fixed instrumentation. It exists in many scorings. The version for violin and piano dates from 1980, was commissioned by the Salzburg Festival and was first played there that year. The piece is a set of variations on a six-bar theme made of nine chord sequences, each separated by a recurring percussion-like motif that is imitated in settings without percussion. The outer voices move up or down the D harmonic minor scale together, while the middle voice uses only the A minor triad (A, C, E). Drones on A and E accompany the piece. Because both C-sharp and C appear in the chords, the music sits between major and minor.