![]() ![]() Part's works make connections.įrom Lil Nas X to Mozart to Esperanza Spalding here is what we loved listening to this year. Part's works are contained on three disks released over the last five years by ECM, a jazz label that has staked out some territory in contemporary and Renaissance music, two extremes with which Mr. We read, for instance, of works from the 1960's in which ''each instrument enters with a new unit from an arithmetical series of durations and with a new pitch class, holding to these throughout.'' The entry about his music in the New Grove Dictionary, published in 1980, offers an unrecognizable picture, based on Soviet works that have not traveled to the West. Born in Estonia in 1935, he immigrated to the West (first Vienna, then West Berlin) in 1980, after having established, abandoned and re-established a career in Soviet avant-garde circles. Much of his music is bound up with sacred texts, and has a shimmeringly mystical, devotional quality, underscored by the use of Renaissance harmonizations, medieval melodic techniques and even Gregorian chant. Part's recent music has emerged, it has become clearer that, although his language uses Minimalist elements, Minimalism is not really his idiom. Works like ''Tabula Rasa'' and ''Fratres,'' the first of his scores to gain any currency in this country, were solidly, unequivocally tonal, and they used repetition as a central structural element.īut as more of Mr. ![]() When Arvo Part's music was first performed in New York, less than a decade ago, the temptation was to think of the Estonian emigre composer as a Minimalist. ![]()
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