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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.
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