Arvo Pärt is 90 years old

Yesterday, Sept. 11, was Arvo Pärt's 90th birthday and the New York Times has a fine article on him, except for the headline.

THERE IS ALWAYS an element of mystery to fame, but Pärt seems to have tapped into a kind of ur-expression in music that has a profound effect on people regardless of how much they know about it. (The effect of that has been double-edged; his works have been embraced by a New Age audience, then criticized by some cynical specialists as New Age or “holy Minimalist.”) Its spirituality is broad, recalling elements of multiple religions. Its harmonic language would be as at home in the 15th century as the 21st. This is a sound, Michael Pärt said, “without boundaries.”

The music isn’t cloyingly populist, either. If anything it is personal, devotional, a product of composing, what he called his way of “breathing in and out.” He has also been guided by the belief that “art should concern itself with the eternal and not just the current,” perhaps another source of his mass appeal.

For all its accessibility, though, Pärt’s music is difficult to perform. He has said that “it is enough when a single note is beautifully played,” but in works so stripped down and fragile, that can be a challenge to sustain, whether over a few minutes or an hour.

Interpreters have described it requiring a kind of selflessness. His works, in their clean construction and economy, resist over-expression. “We don’t want to hear the performer perform,” Hillier said. “Just doing the music is enough.”

Describing someone like Arvo Pärt as having a kind of pop star status is a typical aberration of our current culture. No, he has nothing like pop star status though a few well-known popular musicians love his music. Taylor Swift sells millions of tickets and makes billions of dollars. Arvo Pärt has a centre in Estonia devoted to him and there is a focus on his music at Carnegie Hall this season. See the difference?

One of his finest and most characteristic pieces is Spiegel im Spiegel