Each generation of composers seems to have a single master who writes a piece that stands out above all the rest, and this piece often comes to summarize the totality of that musical era. A Bach fugue, for instance, illustrates the Baroque period; a Mozart symphony the entirety of the Classical; and a Chopin mazurka or Schubert lied the Romantic. However, the twentieth century, so fragmented between styles and philosophies, seems devoid of a truly unifying work able to pull together all these disparate pieces. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring demonstrates the beginning of dissonance as the preeminent tool of composition, but doesn’t give a single nod to eclecticism, which dominated much of the later part of the 1950s and 1960s. Schoenberg, Cage, Stockhausen-all have important contributions to the study of music, but their pieces only capture a small segment of the breadth of twentieth century composition.
However, in 1968, the largely unrecognized Estonian composer Arvo Pärt composed Credo, a work for solo piano, chorus, and orchestra, and the twentieth century found its representative voice. The twentieth century was a period of turmoil and chaos, both musically and culturally, and Pärt-himself experiencing a spiritual and musical crisis-captured this sense of transition and change better than any of his contemporaries. Credo is more than just a curious blend of eclecticism, tonality, and twelve-tone serialism, however: it is a violent conflict between those musical theories. Simultaneously, Credo contains the battles between serialism and tonality, the sacred and the secular, and most profoundly, the two great schools of post-World War II musical philosophy: order and chaos. While this piece is one of the key works for an understanding of Pärt’s oeuvre as a whole[i], it demonstrates more importantly the battle of ideas that raged in music and culture throughout the twentieth century.
First, discussing the key components of the Credo provides a framework to appreciate the nuances of Pärt’s skillful blending of different styles. Then I will examine the various conflicts of the twentieth century-theism and secularism, tonality and atonality, order and chaos-and look at their musical application and discussion within the piece itself. In so doing, we can discover Pärt’s view of musical philosophy.
The Credo begins with-and indeed, is entirely based upon-a quotation from J.S. Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C Major, from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, BWV 846. Pärt scores it as blocked chords for both the choir and orchestra, dignified in tone. The choir sings the first line of the second paragraph of the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in Jesus Christ,” adding to this sense of an exalted introduction. With the direct citation of Bach and the fervent proclamation of belief, Pärt seems to be drawing the listener back to an earlier era, setting up his piece with the introduction focused on what “used to be.” The orchestra and choir depart, but the melody is sustained by a direct quote of the Bach prelude on piano, and a roll of timpani brings us back to an orchestral segment, but this time, the choir sings part of the Sermon on the Mount, found in the fifth chapter of the book of Matthew: “Ye have heard that it has been said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:’ But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil.”[ii] After the statement “dentem pro dente,” the first sign of modernity, a muted horn trilling violently, breaks through the largely romanticized flair of the Bach prelude. The strings begin a segment of parallel fifths, which become more and more dissonant as time progresses. In a very real sense, the piece begins to disintegrate, moving from the reserved and solemn tonality of the Bach to total, pervasive chaos. The volume increases, and repeated attempts by the choir to repeat the phrases from earlier are drowned out by the broiling noise of screaming horns and woodwinds. The prelude also returns, the pianist playing no longer at a staid, serene pace, but flailing on the keys, almost as if he is trying to drive back the atonality that flows around him.
By the middle of the piece[iii], there no longer remains any semblance of the Bach prelude, and any consistent rhythm has been replaced by barking calls and trills on the trumpets, furious poundings on the piano, and eerie wails and almost inhuman cries by the choir. Suddenly, the cacophony ceases, the only sound the cellos playing a low C, and then just as abruptly the dissonance returns. This pattern continues, with the moments between the cacophony growing in intensity, until finally the choir returns, dramatically repeating the phrase “But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil.” A final shriek of instruments, and then the whole group dies away, leaving nothing but the piano, resuming the prelude several registers higher than previously written, angelically elevated above the clutter of the atonality below. Here the fight between the eras-the antiquated and the modern-becomes most apparent: the score alternates between the piano playing the prelude, and the orchestra trying to drown it out with dissonance. Slowly, though, the dissonant passages begin to lessen, and the piano gains strength as the choir joins in, softly repeating the same phrase: “That ye resist not evil.” Each repetition of the dissonance loses several instruments, which begin to join the prelude in harmony, matched by the choir, with the piano continuing in its direct quotation.
Tonality triumphant, the prelude continues to grow, choir doubling the harmonies of the strings, with no trace of the previous atonality remaining. The horns rejoin the piano, and the full orchestra, chorus, and solo piano rejoice in an almost anthem-like passage, timpani providing dramatic emphasis to the chord progression. The choir repeats the phrase “Credo” several times with the orchestra behind, and then a long silence is broken by ‘C’s played in octaves on the piano, supported by the cellos on a low C. The piece ends with this last, soft, statement of the tonic-what Peter Quinn eloquently refers to as “undamaged associations of the C major triad”[iv]-which provides a final and obvious dismissal of atonality.
On a purely musical level, Credo serves as a battleground between the proponents of tonality and atonality. The piece develops into a fully-fledged war between two opposing camps: the first camp quoting the Bach prelude and supporting it with tonal harmonies, with the second attempting to depose this sound and crown the discordant atonality victorious. In the first camp, the use of a quotation from tonal music is significant, but the choice of Bach points particularly to the innate symbolism in the piece. In all of musical history, J.S. Bach was perhaps one of the most tonal composers: his inventions, sinfonias, and fugues all use a mathematically precise system of counterpoint, and rarely depart from this model. Bach’s prelude is not only one of the most well-known of these pieces, but also one of the most formulaic and, in fact, has often been used as accompaniment in arrangements of other pieces-Charles Gounod’s famous setting of the Ave Maria, for instance. This piece allowed Pärt a great freedom to work with the piece within a tonal framework, yet gave him the flexibility to develop variations on the main theme.
Pärt contrasts, then, this zenith of tonal music against the height of atonality, symbolized by a Schoenberg-inspired pitch set. Perhaps nothing could be more at odds to Bach’s meticulously constructed counterpoint than a tone row chosen for some purely mathematical progression, more relying upon complex formulas than aural edification for the guiding direction of composition. By itself the tone row would sound somewhat dissonant and perhaps even displeasing to a tonally-trained listener, but in conjunction with the well-known prelude, it produces a dislike bordering on revulsion. More simply, the pitch set is made more disturbing by being intermingled within the tonality of the Bach.
Some critics, however, view this amalgamation of tonal and twelve-tone as negative or perhaps even foolish. David Clarke, in his work analyzing the evolution of Pärt’s modern (post-1970s) style, claimed:
“Initial attempts, which we now see as transitional, to restore tonality to his music resulted in an unintegrated and at times frankly crude juxtaposition of tonal and atonal soundworlds in which the former is…naively presented as the eventually triumphant adversary of ‘bad’ atonality (as in Credo).”[v]
This seems like harsh criticism, and while it is not his design, Clarke provides a perfect summation of the goal of this piece: to provide a “crude juxtaposition” of those two great musical philosophies. Indeed, were Pärt to integrate them seamlessly into the composition, it wouldn’t demonstrate the same sort of conflict in its design-the key component of the work at large. It is that very unintegrated nature that makes this piece so profound.
The second chief battle of the piece is between the sacred and the secular. It is interesting to note that this piece was Pärt’s first setting of a sacred text, and after this point, the vast majority of Pärt’s works were liturgical in nature. While Pärt’s conversion to Russian Orthodoxy undoubtedly holds a large portion of the explanation for this fact, it still demonstrates the degree to which this second battle shaped music in the twentieth century. Many composers associated the sacred with the old standards of tonality and rhythm, and thus in their quest to rid themselves of the musical styles of their predecessors, attempted to discard the inherent religiosity-part of the musical tradition since the very first primitive ritual-along with the other vestiges of previous institutions. Additionally, many composers-Terry Riley and Edgard Varèse, for instance-drew their inspiration less from Western sacred texts like the Vulgate or Talmud, but instead from the gamelan ensembles of Indonesia or the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindi holy text. This rebellion against the sacred in both the music of the period and the political realities-in large part due to the state-sponsored atheism of the numerous Communist nations during the period-became so prevalent that a composer like Arvo Pärt wouldn’t write a sacred piece in the first ten years of his compositional period. Contrast this to the baroque or classical period, where regardless of personal belief, most composers wrote sacred music-either as commissioned by the church or because it was the prevailing sentiment of the day.
However, Pärt is not merely rebelling against his contemporaries with the association of tonality with the sacred. He does not view this correlation between the two in an overarching symbolic sense, but he views tonal music as genuinely and truly a manifestation of God.[vi] Thus, this sacralizing view of music[vii] also demonstrates the inverse: atonal music, by very definition, is music without the presence of God. This violent conflict, then, becomes more than just a commentary on historical views of the purpose of music; much more, it is a literal clash between atheism and theism, played out across the arena of a single composition.
With this in mind, Pärt’s compositional gesture in favor of theism appears even more dramatic. Not only is this piece based upon a sacred text, but upon perhaps the two most recognizable and overtly Christian texts of the Western tradition: the Apostles’ Creed and Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Additionally, the choir begins singing these texts during the Bach quotation, and in fact throughout the piece sings in harmony with the prelude. Thus, Pärt firmly affixes the sacred text with the tonal tradition in the minds of the listeners. The secular is left with nothing but squealing instruments and a deafening cacophony-the choir conspicuously absent, except as quiet pleas for resolution in the background.
The final battle-that conflict between order and chaos-governs the mood of the entire piece. Both of the previous conflicts ultimately trace back to this one chief opposition, which summarizes most thoroughly the twentieth century musical experience. In fact, every composer of this period can be placed into one of these two categories, and this antagonism drove the evolution of music.
Stravinsky, for instance, began the fight against the order that predominated in music with his Rite of Spring, lacing it with atypical rhythms and harmonies that defied previous notions of tonality. He pioneered a technique called dissociation, which further broke down the order of a tonal system:
“Dissociation in Stravinsky’s music may be seen as a type of counterpoint, but one that differs profoundly from traditional, tonal counterpoint…the audible separation of contrasting, superimposed layers of musical material is primary, prohibiting the formation of a vertically unifying harmonic progression…”[viii]
Another composer largely oriented towards chaos was John Cage, who became famous for pieces that utilized unusual instrumentation and prepared piano, a trend he was instrumental in developing. Perhaps the most striking example of his chaotic approach to composition was his adherence to aleatoricism, a musical philosophy of chance.[ix] Cage applies this philosophy to his piece Music for Piano, which relies upon the ancient Chinese book of chance I-Ching for certain compositional elements, and even directs the performer to flip a coin to determine the clefs for the performance.[x]
However, men like Webern and Schoenberg moved in the opposite direction from Cage and Boulez, towards extreme rationality and mathematical precision. Twelve-tone serialism is philosophically contrasted with aleatoricism, for the whim of the composer became nothing more than a secondary or tertiary input on the compositional process. In a way, twelve-tone serialism reduced the composer from the supreme originator of the music to a technical director, designing note-rows and intervals not from inspiration but from a pre-devised mathematical formula. “[Schoenberg and others developed] the idea that musical composition, in analogy to science, was not an aesthetic project but rather a kind of problem solving.[xi] Thus we have the exact philosophical opposite to the chaos and indeterminacy of Cage: the supreme, rational order of Schoenberg.
Pärt represents these two extremes metaphorically in Credo, again through his juxtaposition of the two musical ideas that dominate the piece. Viewing the score itself provides the apparent contrast in a simple visual manner: the passages with the Bach quotation are regular, ordered, and easily analyzed using tonal music theory; the opposing passages are sloppy, seemingly random, and provide no easily discernable reason to them. Even more fascinating, at the emotional climax of the dissonance, Pärt abandons traditional notation in favor of black bars filling the staff, requiring the musicians to improvise parts based off the tone-row at fff.[xii] This, then, demonstrates a true musical in-joke: the passages that symbolize this sense of chaos are in fact the passages meant almost as a parody of twelve-tone serialism-the system presented as a rational and ordered compositional philosophy. Pärt takes the twelve-tone idea and twists it in with the Cage-like throes of violent aleatoric dissonance, and seems to shake his head as he gazes upon these composers and their respective ideas. In this sort of interpretative look at a musical composition, it is easy to read too deeply into the piece, but this sort of deliberate mockery of aleatoricism and serialism seems to be borne out by an interview with Pärt given in 1999. Geoff Smith, the interviewer, inquires about a statement Pärt once made about composers in the West playing children’s games. He responded:
“I did once speak of a ‘sand pit game’ referring to a kind of composition commonly associated with the Darmstadt-School. I wouldn’t even know if I myself have risen above those ‘children’s games’ yet. It is difficult to tell. But at the time it was an attempt at-and a conscious decision for-a correction.”[xiii]
Pärt looked upon the works of Boulez, Stockhausen, and Webern, and derisively characterized them as more suitable for a child’s sandbox than professional composition, and Credo functions in a way as a continuation of that mockery. To Pärt, both the proponents of musical order and musical chaos fell too far to the extremes of their philosophies and were creating nothing more than artificial art. Thus, in the same interview, he claimed, “I wanted to free and distance myself from making artificial art. Rather I wanted to combine two different issues; namely, art and life, art and being.”[xiv]
The Credo ultimately provides us with a fascinating insight into the mind of one of the world’s great living composers. Not only does it provide a clever and evident criticism of the growth of twentieth century music, but it demonstrates Pärt’s personal philosophy as to what would bring salvation to the collapsing musical world: the works and ideas that came before. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that after Credo, Pärt experienced a sort of musical crisis, and withdrew from composition on a sort of spiritual hiatus, again emerging in 1976 with an entirely new style, tintinnabulation. Indeed, Paul Hillier goes so far as to say, “Pärt had reached a position of despair…he lacked the musical faith and will-power to write even a single note.”[xv] The ideas he discussed in Credo affected him so personally and intensely that he never again composed in the twelve-tone style, and his intensely religious compositions from the 1970s to the present speak not of orchestral bombast but of quiet, almost mystical contemplation. Ultimately, that is the real legacy of Credo: it provides a window into the very soul of a composer, and shows the thoughts and philosophies that dramatically changed him as a person. This, in conjunction with the historical understanding shown through a careful analysis of the component parts, thrusts Credo aloft as one of the most culturally significant pieces of the twentieth century, and, indeed, of all of musical history.
[i] Quinn, Peter. Out with the Old and in with the New: Arvo Pärt’s ‘Credo’.
Tempo, New Ser., No. 211. (Jan., 2000), pp. 16-20.
[ii] This passage, as all of the text in this piece, is written in Latin: “Audivistis dictum oculum pro oculo dentem pro dente, autem ego vobis dico: Non esses resistendum injuriae.”
[iii] Any reference to the duration of this piece is, of course, imperfect and approximate, as it varies from performance to performance. The performance I have analyzed here was released on the album “Credo” in 2004 by Deutsche Grammophon, and features Esa-Pekka Salonen, Hélène Grimaud, Stefan Parkman, Sveriges Radiokor, and the Sveriges Radiokorkester.
[iv] Quinn, Peter. Out with the Old and in with the New: Arvo Pärt’s ‘Credo’.
Tempo, New Ser., No. 211. (Jan., 2000), pp. 16-20.
[v] Clarke, David. Parting Glances: David Clarke Reappraises the Music and Aesthetics of Arvo Pärt. The Musical Times, Vol. 134, No. 1810. (Dec., 1993), pp. 680-684.
[vi] Hillier, Paul. Arvo Pärt. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 92.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii]Rogers, Lynne. Stravinsky’s Break with Contrapuntal Tradition: A Sketch Study. The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 476-507 Published by: University of California Press.
[ix] The word comes from the Latin alea, meaning “dice.”
[x] Riley, Howard. Aleatoric Procedures in Contemporary Piano Music. The Musical Times, Vol. 107, No. 1478 (Apr., 1966), pp. 311-312.
[xi] Ashby, Arved. Schoenberg, Boulez, and Twelve-Tone Composition as “Ideal Type”. Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 585-625.
[xii] Hillier, Paul. Arvo Pärt. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 62.
[xiii] Smith, Geoff. An Interview with Arvo Pärt: Sources of Invention.TheInvention.The Musical Times, Vol. 140, No. 1868. (Autumn, 1999), pp. 19-22+24-25.
[xiv] Ibid.
[xv] Hillier, Paul. Arvo Pärt. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 64
