arvo

Today i think i listened to "Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten" at least 15 times. It's a piece composed by the Astonian composer Arvo Part (with the two little dots over the 'a'). It's on the CD 'Tabula Rasa' for those of you who want to listen. If you do, do it somewhere where you can just give yourself over to the music. No distractions or interruptions. Hear every nuance. Feel every chord. Every bell. Feel how it pulls you in and stretches you and spins you around like you are nothing but an ephemeral gas and then lays you to rest at the end.

I think it is one of the most beautiful pieces of music I have ever heard. I want it played at my funeral.

I found this on the internet today which deconstructs the piece in a way that I never could, nor would want to. But I found it really enriched the experience for me ...

I don't know what it was about today and this piece, but it struck me. Perhaps it was the 3 hours of sleep, perhaps it was the intensity of emotion in my heart, perhaps it was just feeling cracked wide open and that's how you need to be to really get some music. Or maybe something else. I don't know. And it doesn't matter. Just my mind trying to make sense of things again ...

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About Cantus (by Michael Attwood):

Cantus begins with three beats of silence. A significant fact which I will return to shortly. Then very very softly (pianississimo), and very slowly a bell is struck. Three times it rings out and dies away, and it continues to be rung almost all the way throughout the piece, mostly in groups of three, gradually getting louder. The other instruments, 1st and 2nd violins, viola, cello, and double bass enter one at a time. They are each playing the same melody - a simple descending A minor scale - but each is playing it progressively slower in the ratio 1:2:4:8:16, so that the double basses are playing at 1/16 of the speed of the 1st violins. This is an old form called a mensuration canon, which was popular in Renaissance music. The first violins start at the upper limit of their range, playing the first note, then repeatedly descending through the A minor scale, adding a note each time. The melody seems, at first tentatively, and them more confidently to probe downwards into the lower registers. Each instrument begins softly, but by stages increases until at the end they are all playing very very loud (fortississimo!). Each voice except the violas is split into two (and at times four) parts with one playing the A minor scale, and the other providing a sort of anchor by playing only notes from an A minor chord. This produces a sort of spiralling effect, with pulses of tension and release.

Each voice, then, is questing downwards, but it is not a blind search. Each is seeking a particular note which forms part of an A minor chord. The violins, having started first, are the first to reach their note, and having got there they simply play that note continuously until the end. As the other instruments find their pitch the effect is like the finishing of a jigsaw puzzle. At about the same time as the violas find their note, the bell lapses into silence. There is a definite, strong sense of completion when the double basses find the low A that completes the final chord, resolving the last dissonance. And so we reach a point where each of 6 voices (the cellos are still paired) playing at full volume, an A minor chord at a very low pitch, which continues for 30 beats. Then suddenly on the first beat of the last bar beat the bell is struck very softly, too low to be heard above the roar of the strings. [5] Simultaneously the strings stop, so that we hear the bell softly ringing and dying away into silence once more.

Cantus, as I said, begins and ends with silence. You might say that all music does this, but in Cantus it is in the score, it is programmed into the music and is integral to the structure of it. [6] I suggest that this silence, is like the blue sky at the beginning of a Buddhist visualisation practice. It is the pregnant void of shunyata. Three beats of silence also begin the 1st violin part. This becomes 6 beats for the 2nd violins, 12 for the violas, 24 for the cellos, and 48 for the double basses. In other words although we hear the instruments joining in progressively, they actually begin at the same moment! Silence in music is a great source of creative tension. For the performer it is a koan - how does one 'perform' silence?

The whole piece is built around the A natural minor scale, also known as the Aeolian Mode. Both the scale and the fundamental chord built from its notes have a characteristic melancholy to them. Music written in a minor key is almost inevitably sombre, sad, or even dark. If anything in music symbolises the bitter-sweetness of human existence, it is the minor chord. There is in it a sense of longing and of existential dissatisfaction. But this is not just any minor key, it is "A" minor which is the model for all minor scales and has ancient associations going back to the ancient Greeks, to Pythagoras and his music of the spheres. By choosing A minor Pärt is declaring his connection with archetypal musical modes which form the foundations of modern harmony.

As I mentioned each voice, each instrumental part, is twofold. This separation into two voices, one which sticks to the notes from the A minor triad, and the other which is free to wander over other pitches, has a definite intended symbolism. The latter "always signifies the subjective world, the daily egoistic life of sin and suffering, [the former] meanwhile, is the objective realm of forgiveness". [7] Pärt goes further:

"This can be likened to the eternal dualisms of body and spirit, earth and heaven; but the two voices are in reality one voice, a twofold single entity. This can be neatly and enigmatically represented by the following equation:

1 + 1 = 1 [8]

There are resonances here with Buddhist doctrines about the duality between samsara and nirvana, existence and non-existence, the conditioned and unconditioned, which are also not two.

Pärt's biographer suggests that "how we live depends on our relationship with death: how we make music depends on our relationship to silence". [9] It is death that sparks this piece. The characteristic Buddhist response to death is to search for the deathless. In the story of the four sights the Buddha-to-be goes forth into homelessness, into the unknown, in order to solve the problems of old age, sickness and death. In listening to Cantus, especially for the first time, we go into the unknown. The bell heralds death, it is the funeral bell and the initial response is instability. The first few bars seem to teeter on the edge of chaos, and we may be asking ourselves: "is this going to be one of those discordant, morbid, 'modern' works?". But soon things settle into a more recognisable pattern, and the entry of the lower voiced, slower moving instruments provides much needed stability. The quest has begun, each voice begins searching downwards, repeatedly pushing lower and lower, seeking something. The result is a sonorous tapestry, swirling with colour and unexpected conjunctions of tension and relaxation, which result not from the whim of the composer, but come from the structure of the canon itself.

And then one by one each voice finds the pitch it has been seeking, sustains it until the end, which is more than 250 beats in the case of the 1st violins. The spiritual life is like this. We search around looking for answers to the big questions. Then when we find the Dharma, we don't get answers, but we get practices which can take us to a place where the questions are transcended. Once we have the practices it's just a matter of sawing away until we reach the goal. We do this on an ever deeper level until at last the light of Bodhi dawns, and we are transformed in the deepest level of our being. As the double basses finally hit their note there is a palpable sense of relief, of relaxation combined with energy.

And then suddenly the music stops - or almost. In this moment there is a sense of spiritual death. As Bodhi dawns we die to our old self, our old self-centeredness. But with spiritual death there is spiritual renewal, and even though we don't hear the striking of the bell, it is struck, and rings on after the reverberations of the strings have died away. This last bell is the opening of the door to the deathless, or perhaps more prosaically it is the opening of the imagination to the possibility of the deathless. At this point there is little more to be said, since Nirvana is ineffable. And so we return to silence, once again written into the score. But this is not the silence of the absence of sound. It is the silence that is sound, and the sound is silence.

Pärt's music is recognisably religious since so many of his works are settings of religious texts. In the case of Cantus it is not just religious, it is spiritual. Cantus bares similarities to Buddhist visualisation practices, and since it is a re-enactment of the spiritual path it could also said to be puja. Cantus is not only profoundly beautiful, it is beautifully profound. It uses very simple elements to create a rich and complex whole, and seems to entirely fulfil Sangharakshita's criteria that art should communicate a sense of values that can transform our lives. [10]