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Arvo Pärt and Spirituality

This study of spirituality focuses on the way in which traditional notions of spirituality and aesthetic understandings of modernity are re-configured in the music and aesthetics of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. It frames the consensual understanding the composer and spirituality first within the composer’s musical techniques (tintinnabulation) and in relation to Adornian modernism (narratives of death and mourning). From there it moves to understand Pärt’s music as a contingent re-enchantment (waiting for the utopian Christian promise of redemption). Finally, it discusses the embodied effect of the music not merely as mimetic (Cox, 2011) or as a ‘dance of sympathy’ (Scruton, 1997) but how Pärt’s music inspires and promotes awareness as a spiritual value. The article acts as a cornerstone of Part scholarship (part of the first major collaborative scholarship on this composer), and a reference point for future discussions of music and spirituality. It has been highly praised in Music and Letters (doi:10.1093/ml/gct027, p. 186).