The music of Arvo Part (the ar is pronounced like "heir," so it's "Peirt") bids us enter an unhurried world. More precisely, it takes us into the realm where "deep calls forth unto deep," and time is a faculty of life in the Spirit. His De Profundis, a setting of Psalm 130 (129 in the Vulgate), is a musical metaphor of the composer's challenge to the uncontrolled clamor of our age. This psalm is one of the psalms most frequently set to music by Western composers. In Part's version the texture is elemental, consisting of open chords and punctuated only by the most subtle changes. Like a Japanese vase, it has a simple consistency that yet draws its admirer slowly into its rich grain. Scored for a choir of male voices, organ, and chimes, it moves slowly, very slowly, from the haunting plea, "Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord," to the climactic confidence of "Let Israel hope in the Lord: for with the Lord there is mercy," and finally it returns to the quiet confidence that "He shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities." Besides articulating the psalmist's experience with the power of sparse language, it is a quintessential countercultural statement.

We live in an overarticulated world, full of signs, symbols, sounds, images: an environment where noise pollution is so pervasive that we are largely unconscious of it. Some artists, it is true, celebrate the noise. Stuart Davis declared that art should not fight for contemplation, but should reflect a Public View of Satisfaction of Impulse, incorporating taxicabs, electric signs, and fast travel as its main images. But many others invite us to leave modernity, at least in its more secular temper, for another world, a simpler, more profound sphere. The way to get there is by the austere language of minimalism.

It would be unjust to label Part a minimalist without a word of explanation. The minimalist movement is arguably one of the most compelling trends in the arts in recent times, though it has not been well studied. As the word suggests, the smallest units are featured, the most reduced lines and harmonies employed. Though one can find antecedents in almost every age, the term minimalism was born in the 1960s to describe a school in the visual arts that opposed the complexity of modernism with greatly reduced shapes and forms. Some of it was an "in-your-face" rebellion against the beautiful, and other Western ideals; so one might encounter a single rock in a large museum room, otherwise empty. At best, it was an approach that drew attention to basics, to primary colors and shapes, inviting the viewer to participate in the purity of the objects. It was a call to reform, to the discipline of the artistic process at the most fundamental level.

In music, minimalism meant a re turn to tonality and pure sounds with little attention to dramatic development and contrast. Like a mobile, the sounds were examined from different perspectives, inviting the listener to enjoy the most elementary pitches and rhythms. American minimalist composers are a significant family, including figures well known to the public as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and LaMonte Young.

Paul Hillier, in his marvelous study of Arvo Part, rightly warns that the label "minimalist" is somewhat misleading as a description of the Estonian composer's music, because he was not particularly involved in its American 1960s phase. In fact, though, there is a broader sense of a minimalism that should properly include composers as different as Henryk Gorecki (often associated with Part), Brian Eno (who popularized "ambient music"), and even Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson. In essence, it refers to a generic approach that eschews perspective and linear progress. It is not that nothing "happens" in the music, but that most of the development is achieved by the listener, who discovers the different shapes and contrasts in the texture. Think of Gregorian chant. Though chant is laid out in time and, indeed, delineates a biblical text, one is hard put to identify its different chapters or its milestones. Rather than offering a story with beginning, middle, and end it creates an ambiance, a mood.

Arvo Part is a minimalist, but with a difference. At the heart of his music is ritual. Instead of calendar time or clock time, it suggests prayer, being in tune with eternity. Hillier points out that the music represents a hesychast answer to our noisy environment. The term was first used in the fourth century to designate that inner peace, that tranquility of soul needed for the proper contemplation of Christ. While it is associated particularly with the monks of Mount Athos, and has been preserved and developed in its strongest form in the Eastern Orthodox Church, it is a tradition that dates back to biblical times. The hesychast avenue is neither passive nor in active. The condition it commends is listening to God, actively, using the faculties. But it cultivates sobriety, watchfulness, chasing away distractions. By "keeping the heart with all vigilance," we discover the springs of life filled up to God (Prov. 4:23).

Part did not come to this place over night. Born in Estonia in 1935, he was still a boy when his country was absorbed by the Soviet Union, and he re members times of privation and scarce resources. He had a voracious appetite for music of all sorts and was composing by the age of 15. He trained at the Conservatory in Tallin, and came under the influence of the leading musical figure in Estonia, Heino Eller (1887–1970). Part composed in a number of styles, and even scored music for films (as many as 50 list him in the credits). His early works reveal an impressive command of musical technique, and at the same time display a certain sternness of mood. One hears Shostakovich and Prokofiev in these pieces, but one especially detects the shadow of Bartok.

In the early 1960s, Part committed himself to the ultimate modern method, the serial technique. The term refers to composition that eschews melody and harmony in the traditional sense, and instead uses a series, or a sequence of 12 tones (the number of different notes in our chromatic scale). The relationship of the notes in the series becomes the foundation for the whole composition. Because it has no key, and lacks the familiar sounds of functional harmony, such music is sometimes called atonal.

In Part's case this is not an altogether accurate label, because he often mixed elements of tonality and even collage techniques with his stricter 12-tone writing. Part's first serial composition met with considerable controversy. Called Nekrolog (1960–61), it was ostensibly a protest against the suffering of victims of fascist oppression. The Soviet cultural powers correctly detected a critique of their own regime; in 1962, the All-Union Congress of Composers condemned the piece. The significance of Nekrolog is not in its ideology, however. It is in its lack of hope. Hillier notes that indeed the piece is unremittingly bleak, and that it represents a time in the composer's pilgrimage where suffering could only be tragic, with no hint of its ca thartic value.

Throughout the decade, Part struggled to use advanced technique that never fully expressed what his heart longed for. It all came to a head in 1968 with the composition of Credo, a setting of Matthew 5:38–39 ("You have heard it said: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you: do not resist evil") for piano, chorus, and orchestra. The audience loved it. The authorities, who by now could accept serialism, believed it was an act of defiance because of its title. The piece was banned in the Soviet Union for over a decade. The composition does have a message embedded in its musical development: nonviolence is ultimately more forceful than violence. Hillier thoroughly analyzes Credo. He is well qualified to do this, being not only a specialist in early music (he is director of the Early Music Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington) but also the conductor of the Theatre of Voices, a group that has recorded more of Arvo Part's work than any other.

Hillier's argument is that Credo brought the composer to a sort of impasse, a crisis that deeply affected his creative process. Part uses tonality in this piece with a constant reference to Bach's Prelude in C from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. But the piece is also strongly serial, with the use of chance elements as well. The piece uses the conflict of tonality and serialism to symbolize two forces, the conflict of two basic styles, neither of which can pave the way for the future of music. This may sound naive, but be cause of Part's skill, the allegory works musically, and so it is more than just an aesthetic statement in sound. On one level, the angry sounds of atonality are challenged, and eventually transformed by the more serene Bachian harmonies. But at the same time, tonality is broken down, de constructed into its fundamental elements, and so yields to serialism. As Hillier puts it, "in Credo the two elements of order and disorder, good and evil, are presented not as separate blocks of energy, but as linked forces, each containing the seeds of their opposite, with a continuum of gradual disintegration (and reconstitution) lying between them."

Perhaps tonality is regained, but then comes the question: How does the composer move forward, writing contemporary music, without simply being nostalgic about the past? After Credo, Part wrote virtually nothing for seven years. He had searched for truth and found it in Bach, who wrote in the eighteenth century. So how could there be progress, the great idol of modern music? Many composers and artists have wrestled with this dilemma. Some have simply returned to the past, be coming neoclassical and traditionalist. Others have proclaimed postmodern ism as a way out, allowing them to throw together all kinds of contradictory styles. Part went on a quest for a "third way." He questioned the propriety of progress in art, and affirmed the "modernity" of all great music, be it Bach's or that of any other master. In a remarkable interview right around the time of Credo, he suggested that "the secret to [better music's] contemporaneity resides in the question: How thoroughly has the author-composer perceived, not his own present, but the totality of life, its joys, worries and mysteries?" And so he went on a quest for authenticity, one that led him, finally, to shed the pretenses both of an angry spirituality and of modern music. (Olivier Messiaen went through a similar process, though with very different results.)

Spiritually, Part rediscovered the Christian faith of his upbringing. He joined the Russian Orthodox Church. There he found a way to remain honest about the surrounding evil while ultimately resting in the love of a sovereign God. Hope was restored. Musically, he began to explore the riches of ancient music. He studied the Notre Dame school, and Guillaume de Machaut. He developed a great affection for the Netherlands school, with Ockeghem, Obrecht, and especially Josquin des Pres. The masses and motets of Dufay were seminal for him. What he found in this tradition was much more than compositional techniques. He found a unique spirit, one of simplicity and depth, and of doing all for the sake of Christ, the Logos. Rooted in plainchant, so much of this music was fixed on that Word that it made it real to the congregation. Part had been looking for an alternative to postmodernism on the one hand and mere antiquarianism on the other. He found it in the spirit of this tradition. The key that unlocked the door was—bells!

Part arrived at a style of composition that bespoke the complex of sounds, changing yet the same, rich in harmonics yet simple in tone. Because his musical substance would now be so resolute, allowing us to hear music long after the notes have been sounded, Part has called his style "tintinnabuli." Literally, the "tintinnabulum" is a small tinkling bell. It can be struck on the outside or chimed from within, giving out a rich timbre of a single note with harmonics and overtones. It has a ritual function for the church, calling the faithful to worship, announcing the canonical hours, or marking various parts of the service.

We can indeed hear the sounds of the bell in a number of Part's compositions, including De Profundis, mentioned above. Interestingly, in 1610 Pope Paul V required ringing the De Profundis bell on All Saints Day at one o'clock in the morning as a way to re member the departed. And we hear a bell-like punctuation throughout the choral meditation that bears the name. But more often it is the shape of a phrase, the growth of a sonority, the overall form of the piece that rings like a bell. Tintinnabulism has many implications for this music, inspired as it is by the atmosphere and teachings of the Orthodox Church. In the Russian Orthodox tradition, bell ringing bids believers enter into the realm of God's presence, and thereafter to order their lives according to a divine tempo. Though not evangelistic in any direct sense, the Russian bells invite the seeker to listen further, to look within, to leave the outside world for a time and consider the things of the Spirit. In the noisy West, do we not hear the sounds of the bells and long to enter into the heavenly places?

And so Part moved out of the impasse, and in 1976 he resumed his production at the most vigorous pace imaginable. His output includes numerous choral works on liturgical or biblical themes, but also a generous amount of instrumental compositions. Liberated as an artist, his life was nevertheless one of hardship and strife. In the 1970s he agonized over whether to stay in Estonia and endure opposition from the Soviet authorities or leave. His wife, Nora, is Jewish. Their friends urged them to take advantage of the policy allowing Jews to emigrate to Israel. In spite of numerous conflicts, they had no desire to leave their homeland. Eventually, though, in 1979, they applied for exit visas from the Soviet Union, which were granted the following year. With their two sons, the Parts left for Israel, but then, along with many others, never got to their official destination. Instead, they were hospitably greeted by a music publisher in Vienna and decided to stay for a while. They became Austrian citizens. Finally they moved to Berlin, which remains their main home today.

Writing minimally hardly means the pieces are short. The Passio (1982) is undoubtedly Part's ultimate tintinnabulist composition. Stemming from the glorious tradition of Passion music, this extended musical narrative retells the story of Christ's suffering based on the Gospel of John. Like the proverbial sermon, the piece has a beginning, middle, and end. The opening chorus (Exordium) announces, "The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ ac cording to Saint John." The story then lengthily unfolds from the Garden of Gethsemane to Jesus' expiration on the cross. The Evangelist narrates the story with a double quartet of four singers and of four instruments. Pilate and Jesus are given solos, but the feeling of the work is of one, slow-moving, enveloping whole.

There is much human drama in the juxtaposition of the different personalities. Each interlocutor asks, in a different way, Who is this man? The answer is resolutely the "I Am," the God-man who is savior and Lord. Finally (Conclusio) the chorus soberly chants, "You who have suffered for us, have mercy upon us. Amen." Musically, Conclusio reverses the movement of the Exordium, closing on the "nobis" of the cry for mercy on us in D major, a sort of resolution of all previous tension. We are not so much listeners as participants through prayer.

Not every reader of BOOKS & CULTURE will be comfortable with Part's particular solution to the artistic quandary of our times. Has he truly rediscovered the spirit of traditional music with his veneration of medieval principles? Is his minimalism compatible with the historical dimension of the gospel? Historical consciousness likely has led artistically to greater linear development, perspective, and organic relationships. Many Christians believe these to be singular gains over the last five hundred years, ones which Part's music at least questions, if not denies.

But whether these issues are satisfactorily resolved by this extraordinary composer, his example of courage in the face of opposition certainly remains his greatest inspiration. He found a way to face evil while yet resting in the everlasting arms. We can look with deep admiration to his compositional creed and hope to emulate it if only in a small way:

A composition comes as a single gesture which is already, in essence, music . …If this gesture, like a seed, takes root, it must be cultivated with extreme care so that it may grow; meanwhile you are oscillating between heaven and earth. The compositional task is to find the appropriate system for the gesture. It is one's capacity for suffering that gives the energy to create.

William Edgar is professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary.

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