For this composer, creativity and purity walk hand in hand
Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to His Musical Language by Joonas Sildre, translated by Adam Cullen. Plough Books, 2024. $26.00
Most of my frustrations with Between Two Sounds, a biography in graphic novel format of Estonian contemporary composer Arvo Pärt (1935—), would have been dispelled had author/artist Joonas Sildre’s afterword been a foreword instead.
To be sure, Between Two Sounds is a striking and skillfully visualized book. Pärt’s life as a young music student growing up in postwar Soviet-occupied Estonia—slowly stifled by a system that strictly regulated what sort of creativity was permissible, and eventually exiled for his refusal to compromise either his music (“neither socialist in content nor nationalistic in style”) or his Christian faith, both of which are inextricably connected—is portrayed in simple achromatic panels, punctuated at key moments by bold, attention-grabbing splash pages in stark black and white. It’s an effective visual representation of Pärt’s musical style, most notably the minimalist tintinnabuli style that he pioneered and that is known to Western audiences through such pieces as Spiegel im Spiegel (1978).
I picked up on what Sildre was doing with the simple, sketchy artwork fairly quickly. But I’m too historian-brained to realize that he was doing much the same thing with the narrative itself—until I read his afterword. “This story is an interpretation of several people’s respective journeys,” he writes. “It is a subjective glance, one representation of many possible representations; idiosyncratic, but far from the sole possible one.”
This was the point at which I realized I had been reading the story all wrong. I had been frustrated until then with the way Sildre chose to gloss over, rush through, or omit entirely what should have been pivotal historical events. Sildre gives very little historical context for the Soviet occupation of Estonia in Pärt’s childhood—a development that would shape the course of his life and career. A first marriage and a child are briefly introduced into the narrative, then dropped and never picked up again. These are sketches of a life rather than a full picture. Sildre’s afterword makes it clear that this is intentional. He emphasizes or de-emphasizes details as needed to fit the particular story he’s interested in telling—in this case, the story of Pärt’s spiritual journey.
More than a biography of Pärt himself, Between Two Sounds is a biography of Pärt’s music and of the evolving creative impulses behind it, which Sildre links directly to Pärt’s faith. Pärt’s search for meaning (to “find that one note that holds life”) leads him to the sacred music of the past—in particular, Bach and Gregorian chant—then to the disappointing realization that “early music alone won’t be my salvation.” Pärt, baptized Lutheran, joins the Orthodox Church after a long creative dry spell and finds his new inspiration in the Desert Fathers, coming finally to the conclusion that “the fundamental task is not the music’s composition, but working on oneself. Cleansing. Penitence. Almost nothing in our creative work is made better if we ourselves do not become purer. My whole being must be in order. Every part of it.”
“What do you believe has changed in your creative process?” an interviewer asks Pärt in 1978. “I myself have changed,” Pärt replies.
This isn’t the book to pick up as a basic factual introduction to Arvo Pärt’s life or to Soviet Estonia. A reader without much background knowledge of what happened in Estonia between 1939 and 1991—and why—will put down this book without acquiring many more specifics. A single panel dated 1944 shows young Pärt briefly overhearing worried neighbors discussing the threat the German and Soviet occupations pose to Estonian independence. The narrative then jumps almost immediately to after the war, when the Soviet occupation is already well established; no further explanation is given. We do see, with slyly effective subtlety, some of the inanity of Soviet rule: When young Pärt’s modernist piece Nekrolog (1960) is dismissed by the Composers’ Union as dangerous Western decadence, he presents some of his pieces of children’s music instead. “Much better,” the committee members agree.
Between Two Sounds is much more interested—and effective—in getting the reader to consider the connection between art and faith. Art begins in the soul, with love for every created thing and for God, the ultimate Creator. Everything else is secondary; excess to be discarded. “To be like a beggar in terms of composing music,” Pärt prays. “What, how, and when—God will provide . . . [I] must take a leap of faith from the edge of the abyss and hope that at the very last moment, God will hold out his hand.”
Amanda McCrina writes historical fiction about Poland and Ukraine during World War II and the Cold War, inspired by her own family’s heritage. Her latest is I’ll Tell You No Lies (FSG, 2023). She lives outside Nashville, Tennessee.