Scholarly writing on the music of Arvo Pärt is situated primarily in the fields of musicology, cultural and media studies, and, more recently, in terms of theology/spirituality. Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred focuses on the representational dimensions of Pärt’s music (including the trope of silence), writing and listening past the fact that its storied effects and affects are carried first and foremost as vibrations through air, impressing themselves on the human body. In response, this ambitiously interdisciplinary volume asks: What of sound and materiality as embodiments of the sacred, as historically specific artifacts, and as elements of creation deeply linked to the human sensorium in Pärt studies? In taking up these questions, the book “de-Platonizes” Pärt studies by demystifying the notion of a single “Pärt sound.” It offers innovative, critical analyses of the historical contexts of Pärt’s experimentation, medievalism, and diverse creative work; it re-sounds the acoustic, theological, and representational grounds of silence in Pärt’s music; it listens with critical openness to the intersections of theology, sacred texts, and spirituality in Pärt’s music; and it positions sensing, performing bodies at the center of musical experience. Building on the conventional score-, biography-, and media-based approaches, this volume reframes Pärt studies around the materiality of sound, its sacredness, and its embodied resonances within secular spaces.
- Cover
- ARVO PÄRT Sounding the Sacred
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- I. INTRODUCTION
- 1. Arvo Pärt and the Art of Embodiment
- 2. The Sound—and Hearing—of Arvo Pärt
- II. HISTORY AND CONTEXT
- 3. Sounding Structure, Structured Sound
- 4. Colorful Dreams: Exploring Pärt’s Soviet Film Music
- 5. Arvo Pärt’s Tintinnabuli and the 1970s Soviet Underground
- III. PERFORMANCE
- 6. The Pärt Sound
- 7. The Rest Is Silence
- IV. MATERIALITY AND PHENOMENOLOGY
- 8. Vibrating, and Silent: Listening to the Material Acoustics of Tintinnabulation
- 9. Medieval Pärt
- 10. The Piano and the Performing Body in the Music of Arvo Pärt: Phenomenological Perspectives
- V. THEOLOGY
- 11. Presence, Absence, and the Ambiguities of Ambiance: Theological Discourse and the Move to Sound in Pärt Studies
- 12. The Materiality of Sound and the Theology of the Incarnation in the Music of Arvo Pärt
- 13. Christian Liturgical Chant and the Musical Reorientation of Arvo Pärt
- 14. In the Beginning There Was Sound: Hearing, Tintinnabuli, and Musical Meaning in Sufism
- LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
- INDEX OF TERMS
- INDEX OF PERSONS
- WORKS BY OTHER COMPOSERS
- WORKS BY ARVO PÄRT
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