First off, let me say this: I don't usually write, but I think this man is such an achievement to Estonia and the whole world, therefore I wanted people to know (more) about him.
So let's start, who is Arvo Pärt?
Arvo Pärt is a composer of religious and classical music. He was born in Estonia, 1935 and he's living there today. After his parents got divorced at an early age of his life, he moved to Rakvere with his mom and he began going to school there. When he was seven years old, he started to learn how to play the piano. Our music teacher told us a story, when Pärt was seven, he used to ride in circles around some kind of music player in the streets and he would just listen to every single song there was in the player. We even have a sculpture of him as a boy on a bike, where he did that.
He also listened to every single song in his school one by one and it really helped him to understand the music more.
By the time Pärt reached his early teenage years, he was writing his own compositions. After finishing high school in 1954, he went on to study at the Tallinn's Music School, but less than a year later he temporarily abandoned it because he had to go to the military, but soon after that he got released from it due to kidney problems. After the military Pärt went on to study in the Tallinn's Conservatory, where he studied composition with Heino Eller(his teacher), who said that the notes are just falling out of his sleeves. Eller was the most important teacher to him, as he managed to travel across Estonia and learn more about the music. He also found out about dodecaphony , which influenced him alot in his early creations. Alongside the Conservatory, he managed to get a job as a sound producer for the Estonian Radio, which helped him listen to more music from socialist countries, what weren't allowed to be listened to. He also established younger generation's composers contacts.
Pärt finished the Conservatory in 1963 and by the time he became a mature composer, whose work also featured film and theater music. Pärt fell into a deep creative crisis, that lasted for eight years, and what ended his early period of creation. In his crisis years, he mainly studied medieval and Renaissance music, leaving his own compositions behind. About the same time he converted from Lutheranism to Orthodox Christianity. Again in 1973 he started to come out to public with more compositions and by the time of that he had self-invented his own compositional technique called "tintinnabuli", and his new creation was very strongly inspired with personally perceived religious motives.
This video is a demonstration of his tintinnabuli style, he worked so long to achieve his own style, which had never been done before and he actually did it. He wanted the music to be.. neutral, neutral as in a bit sad and cheerful but never one or another.
His new music's popularity brought persecution by the Soviet Union and people recommended Pärt to voluntarily leave the country. Even tho it took a lot of paperwork and necessary connections, he managed to emigrate in 1980 with his wife and two sons to Austria. There he began to co-operate with a music publisher called Universal Edition, which even to this day is the publisher of his creations. This so called co-operation enabled Pärt and his family to get Austrian citizenships. In 2005 he came back to live in Estonia.
Kind of a heads up before listening to this upper video. It might be pretty loud, so I suggest you lower the volume before listening to it. This piece of art is called "Credo" which means "belief". Pärt is strongly religious and he always admired Bach. You can hear the random "scary" parts in the music, these are the distractions of his life, but as life goes on, he manages to conquer all the bad things and eventually find his belief. The song you actually hear is Bach's HTK prelude and fugue in C-minor.
Pärt is the most presented living composer in the world, he is also described as one of the best composers still alive. He is a deep thinker and every thought he makes is amazing. He believes in god and that everything is for a reason.
Thanks for reading, I hope you, Steemians learned something about this musical genius.
This is actually my first real post at Steemit, before I used to spam memes and all other stupidity, never knew what to do here, still don't to be honest.. but I'll try.
I'll maybe do more of these about people I truly admire, or life in general, but I strongly doubt I have any audience.
