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Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground
Sounds Beyond charts the origins of Arvo Pärt’s most famous music, which was created in dialogue with underground creative circles in the USSR.
In Sounds Beyond, Kevin C. Karnes studies the interconnected alternative music and art scenes in the USSR during the second half of the 1970s, revealing the audacious origins of some of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s most famous music. Karnes shows how Pärt’s work was created within a vital yet forgotten culture of collective experimentation, the Soviet underground.
Mining archives and oral history from across the former USSR, Sounds Beyond carefully situates modes of creative experimentation within their late socialist contexts. In documenting Pärt’s work, Karnes reveals the rich creative culture that thrived covertly in the USSR and the network of figures that made underground performances students, audio engineers, sympathetic administrators, star performers, and aspiring DJs. Sounds Beyond advances a new understanding of Pärt’s music as an expression of the aesthetic and religious commitments shared, nurtured, and celebrated by many in Soviet underground circles. At the same time, this story attests to the lasting power of Pärt’s music. Dislodging the mythology of the solitary creative genius, Karnes shows that Pärt’s work would be impossible without community.
In Sounds Beyond, Kevin C. Karnes studies the interconnected alternative music and art scenes in the USSR during the second half of the 1970s, revealing the audacious origins of some of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s most famous music. Karnes shows how Pärt’s work was created within a vital yet forgotten culture of collective experimentation, the Soviet underground.
Mining archives and oral history from across the former USSR, Sounds Beyond carefully situates modes of creative experimentation within their late socialist contexts. In documenting Pärt’s work, Karnes reveals the rich creative culture that thrived covertly in the USSR and the network of figures that made underground performances students, audio engineers, sympathetic administrators, star performers, and aspiring DJs. Sounds Beyond advances a new understanding of Pärt’s music as an expression of the aesthetic and religious commitments shared, nurtured, and celebrated by many in Soviet underground circles. At the same time, this story attests to the lasting power of Pärt’s music. Dislodging the mythology of the solitary creative genius, Karnes shows that Pärt’s work would be impossible without community.
- GenresMusic
205 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 24, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 12, 2021
Tintinnabuli Begins
Review of the University of Chicago Press hardcover edition (December 2021)
Close followers of the music of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt will likely know of the October 27, 1976 concert in Tallinn, Estonia which is considered the official premiere of his earliest tintinnabuli (Latin: little bells) compositions. The music journalist Immo Mihkelson has written about it in the article The Cradle of Tintinnabuli - 40 Years since a Historic Concert (2016) five years ago. The Estonian version of the article includes photo scans of the concert booklet which are not seen in the English language version.
What is less known is that one of these same works (Sarah was Ninety Years Old aka Modus) was actually premiered earlier in April, 1976 in the neighbouring Baltic country of Latvia, which, like Estonia, was then still under Soviet Russian occupation. Further premieres (Missa Syllabica, Arbos, Cantate Domino, Summa, Fratres) occurred again in Latvia in October 1977 at a Festival of Contemporary Music. Both of these occasions were organized by then architecture student/part-time disc jockey Hardijs Lediņš (1955-2004) through his discotheques and lectures at the Student Club at the Riga Polytechnic Institute.
Lediņš organising his first discotheques in Latvia in the 1970s. Image sourced from Appreciated at last, Latvia's Visionary Artist Hardijs Lediņš at Deep Baltic.
Musicologist Kevin C. Karnes has researched these early concerts through interviews and expeditions to examine both Latvian and Estonian music archives in order to reconstruct this history as best as possible. This includes hearing the documentation from the private recordings of Hardijs Lediņš (now with his family in Latvia) and of Arvo Pärt (now at the Arvo Pärt Centre in Estonia). Along the way we learn how Lediņš organized his discotheques to present a 1st half which provided a lecture on contemporary music (ranging from avant-garde classical to progressive rock, music mostly inaccessible in the Soviet Union) with a 2nd half devoted to dancing.
Arvo Pärt's early tintinnabuli music is discussed in detail, providing much needed information on the composition and public premiere dates of these works. It is particularly interesting to read about how the early more simple tintinnabuli style evolved into Pärt's syllabic style where the text of a work could be used as the basis for an algorithm to create music from it. Much of this sort of cryptography was required in order to disguise the religious inspiration behind these works in the officially atheistic Soviet state. Texts would then often be sung on solfeggio syllables rather than in their Latin or other original languages.
This is a major publication that adds much early history to Arvo Pärt's creative shift from exploring avant-garde stylings such as dodecaphony, collage and aleatoric music to his tintinnabuli and syllabic music from the 1970s onwards.
Kevin C. Karnes is also the author of the excellent monograph Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa (Oxford University Press, 2017) about the composer's breakthrough work which first made him widely known beyond the Soviet Union and became the cornerstone of the composer's first ECM Records album Tabula Rasa (orig. 1984/enhanced hardcover book edition 2010).
Trivia and Links
Kevin C. Karnes earliest version of Chapter 4 "Ritual Moments" in Sounds Beyond appeared in the journal Res Musica as Arvo Pärt, Hardijs Lediņš and the Ritual Moment in Riga October, 1977 (2019).
A further interim version of Chapter 4 appeared in Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred (Fordham University Press, 2020) as the conference paper Arvo Pärt’s Tintinnabuli and the Soviet Underground.
Review of the University of Chicago Press hardcover edition (December 2021)
Close followers of the music of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt will likely know of the October 27, 1976 concert in Tallinn, Estonia which is considered the official premiere of his earliest tintinnabuli (Latin: little bells) compositions. The music journalist Immo Mihkelson has written about it in the article The Cradle of Tintinnabuli - 40 Years since a Historic Concert (2016) five years ago. The Estonian version of the article includes photo scans of the concert booklet which are not seen in the English language version.
What is less known is that one of these same works (Sarah was Ninety Years Old aka Modus) was actually premiered earlier in April, 1976 in the neighbouring Baltic country of Latvia, which, like Estonia, was then still under Soviet Russian occupation. Further premieres (Missa Syllabica, Arbos, Cantate Domino, Summa, Fratres) occurred again in Latvia in October 1977 at a Festival of Contemporary Music. Both of these occasions were organized by then architecture student/part-time disc jockey Hardijs Lediņš (1955-2004) through his discotheques and lectures at the Student Club at the Riga Polytechnic Institute.
Lediņš organising his first discotheques in Latvia in the 1970s. Image sourced from Appreciated at last, Latvia's Visionary Artist Hardijs Lediņš at Deep Baltic.
Musicologist Kevin C. Karnes has researched these early concerts through interviews and expeditions to examine both Latvian and Estonian music archives in order to reconstruct this history as best as possible. This includes hearing the documentation from the private recordings of Hardijs Lediņš (now with his family in Latvia) and of Arvo Pärt (now at the Arvo Pärt Centre in Estonia). Along the way we learn how Lediņš organized his discotheques to present a 1st half which provided a lecture on contemporary music (ranging from avant-garde classical to progressive rock, music mostly inaccessible in the Soviet Union) with a 2nd half devoted to dancing.
Arvo Pärt's early tintinnabuli music is discussed in detail, providing much needed information on the composition and public premiere dates of these works. It is particularly interesting to read about how the early more simple tintinnabuli style evolved into Pärt's syllabic style where the text of a work could be used as the basis for an algorithm to create music from it. Much of this sort of cryptography was required in order to disguise the religious inspiration behind these works in the officially atheistic Soviet state. Texts would then often be sung on solfeggio syllables rather than in their Latin or other original languages.
This is a major publication that adds much early history to Arvo Pärt's creative shift from exploring avant-garde stylings such as dodecaphony, collage and aleatoric music to his tintinnabuli and syllabic music from the 1970s onwards.
Kevin C. Karnes is also the author of the excellent monograph Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa (Oxford University Press, 2017) about the composer's breakthrough work which first made him widely known beyond the Soviet Union and became the cornerstone of the composer's first ECM Records album Tabula Rasa (orig. 1984/enhanced hardcover book edition 2010).
Trivia and Links
Kevin C. Karnes earliest version of Chapter 4 "Ritual Moments" in Sounds Beyond appeared in the journal Res Musica as Arvo Pärt, Hardijs Lediņš and the Ritual Moment in Riga October, 1977 (2019).
A further interim version of Chapter 4 appeared in Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred (Fordham University Press, 2020) as the conference paper Arvo Pärt’s Tintinnabuli and the Soviet Underground.
May 26, 2024
This book, based on an impressive trawl through archives and interviews with some surviving participants, reconstructs an interesting underground scene in Riga and Tallinn during the 1970s, when both Western modernist classical music, rock, jazz and local musicians’ own fresh new works were presented to audiences in spite of Soviet censorship. This sheds greater light on the development of Arvo Pärt, a composer often assumed to have largely retreated from public life after 1968, developed his celebrated tintinnabuli style in solitude and silence, and was eventually discovered in Germany in the 1980s. In fact, as Kevin C. Karnes shows, Pärt’s first tintinnabuli works were premiered in these underground concerts, he was very much part of a local musical community, and his reputation was well established both locally and internationally before his emigration.
The hero of this book is Latvian DJ Hardijs Ledins, a young architect student who began arranging discotheque evenings in Riga in the mid 1970s. These were representative of the early Soviet discotheque scene, which aimed to educate audiences about musical developments instead of just providing dancing, and they began with a first half that was a seated lecture. It is through Ledins that Pärt turns out to have had strange bedfellows in the development of his musical style centered around Orthodox Christian spirituality: Ledins’ mother worked for the Latvian SSR Communist apparatus and thereby her son had the access to rare foreign recordings that enabled these discotheques, and the festival where Pärt’s first overtly religious works premiered was staged behind of fig leaf of “Celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution”. Also amusing is how influential King Crimson was for some of the organizers of these scene; I wouldn’t have predicted such a close degree of separation between Robert Fripp and Red and Pärt’s music.
This book is essentially an extended essay and can be read in nearly a single sitting. There is some obvious padding to make it book-length, which can get tiresome. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the glimpse into this time and place, and there are some never-before-seen photographs. Note that Karnes has also produced, for the Oxford Keynotes series, a monograph on Pärt’s piece Tabula Rasa that complements this book well, as it also discusses the Riga and Tallinn scene but also Pärt’s wider impact in these years.
The hero of this book is Latvian DJ Hardijs Ledins, a young architect student who began arranging discotheque evenings in Riga in the mid 1970s. These were representative of the early Soviet discotheque scene, which aimed to educate audiences about musical developments instead of just providing dancing, and they began with a first half that was a seated lecture. It is through Ledins that Pärt turns out to have had strange bedfellows in the development of his musical style centered around Orthodox Christian spirituality: Ledins’ mother worked for the Latvian SSR Communist apparatus and thereby her son had the access to rare foreign recordings that enabled these discotheques, and the festival where Pärt’s first overtly religious works premiered was staged behind of fig leaf of “Celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution”. Also amusing is how influential King Crimson was for some of the organizers of these scene; I wouldn’t have predicted such a close degree of separation between Robert Fripp and Red and Pärt’s music.
This book is essentially an extended essay and can be read in nearly a single sitting. There is some obvious padding to make it book-length, which can get tiresome. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the glimpse into this time and place, and there are some never-before-seen photographs. Note that Karnes has also produced, for the Oxford Keynotes series, a monograph on Pärt’s piece Tabula Rasa that complements this book well, as it also discusses the Riga and Tallinn scene but also Pärt’s wider impact in these years.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews