Interview, Graham Ross on Arvo Pärt

After the conclusion of their cycle of albums celebrating music for the various festivals of the church year - from Christmas and Easter down to Trinity Sunday and Corpus Christi - I had been wondering what Graham Ross and his Clare College choir would turn their hands to next.

The answer turned out to be an exploration of Arvo Pärt's choral music - embodying his unique "tintinnabulation" style, developed by Pärt in the 1960s and 70s and now popular and instantly recognisable worldwide. Interspersed with works by Pärt are a wordless piece by Pēteris Vasks, and James MacMillan's moving Miserere. I spoke to Graham about the music on this album, and its relationship with the chapel-centred nature of his choir.

You refer to Pärt’s iconic “tintinnabuli” technique arising out of a period of self-imposed withdrawal from musical life. What do you think prompted this withdrawal, and with it seemingly a complete reassessment of how Pärt approached music itself?

Pärt endured some turbulent early years, receiving both praise and criticism for early works. 12-tone works were rejected in his native Estonia (but which later went on to win competitions). After a creative crisis he renounced earlier techniques, and works with a new religious focus led to his music disappearing from concert halls. His self-imposed withdrawal from musical life for eight years or so led him to a study of medieval music and to the creation of his new (now unmistakeable) musical language.

Works written using this “tintinnabuli” approach have an instantly recognisable sonority, but often appear to lack recognisable melodies or harmonic direction. Do you find this sense of stasis creates challenges in performing such works?

There are certainly some practicalities to overcome, yes – primarily, concentration (especially during repeated patterns/long sustained passages etc), vocal staggering of breath (though this is always achievable in a group), choosing tempi that work for the music/forces/building etc, and a need to keep very still and quiet in recording sessions! But as performing musicians we are used to quickly adapting as befits the repertoire. I think perhaps the most important thing is to really understand the structure of each work, so that things are paced perfectly for the end result. If you study Pärt’s Stabat Mater, for example, you find that the whole work is immaculately structured as an almost perfectly palindromic arc, with each section very closely following the syllabic metre of the Latin poem that it sets. Working this all out in advance is part of our role as conductors, and doing so makes the process of pacing these 25 minutes of music – which hardly ever move away from the key of A minor – much more achievable. As a result, in recording sessions I usually favour performing longer stretches where possible so as not to disturb the composer’s (and, hopefully, the conductor’s) carefully-crafted musical arguments.

The wordless Vasks piece Plainscapes seems to adopt elements of Pärt’s signature technique, but in general few composers seem to have emulated him, even indirectly; there isn’t really a “school” of disciple composers using tintinnabulation, as has historically been the case with other compositional innovations. Why do you think this hasn’t happened?

It’s too early to say, I think. I have a feeling that there may well be disciple composers in the future, and there are certainly others who have heavily borrowed elements from Pärt’s style. But it’s true that this soundworld is unmistakenly Pärt, and that the ‘school’ will perhaps end with him. We can draw parallels with a composer like Olivier Messiaen, I think, whose musical language is unquestionably his, and his only.

How well do you think the austere and often desolate compositions on this album lend themselves to liturgical, rather than concert, use? Do you incorporate Pärt’s music into the worship at Clare, yourself?

The liturgy offers many moments of silence and reflection, and whilst the Vasks Plainscapes is wordless and I think therefore more of a concert piece, it could still serve as a moment of reflection in a service (though its duration probably prohibits this). All the other works I have programmed on this album, however, are settings of sacred texts, which of course belong as much in the church as they do in the concert hall. It’s probably fair to say that with its string accompaniment and a duration of over 25 minutes, Pärt’s Stabat Mater is conceived more as a concert piece, but even so it could easily form part of a Good Friday liturgy, for example. I’ve certainly liturgically programmed other works with string accompaniments before (MacMillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross works superbly, for example). At Clare College, I regularly programme all the other Pärt works on this album both in Chapel services and in concert, and they work beautifully. I introduced my Choir to MacMillan’s Miserere some years back and every year that I programme it it makes a huge impression on singers, congregations and audiences alike.

Among all the other works with sacred texts, Vasks’s Plainscapes stands out as different. What led you to include this work on this recording, and how do you think it fits into the overall conception of the album?

I love this work and wanted to put Pärt’s compositions in context with two of his contemporaries. Vasks was born only eleven years after Pärt in 1946, and his relatively recent works have included minimalist techniques that to me share something of Pärt’s unmistakeable soundworld. In Plainscapes, the long, drawn-out ‘horizon-stretching’ vocal lines are accompanied by a violin and cello duo, whose musical material – comprising predominantly slow-moving cello scales and triadic figurations in the violin – can arguably be said to owe much to Pärt’s tintinnabuli style. It seemed to me a perfect fit alongside the five works of Pärt that I programmed in this album. With no words in the vocal lines, the music is left to speak for itself as slow-woven threads in a tapestry of abstract sound, leading to a thrilling vision of nature awaking.