The Postman Whistles Für Alina
The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt is often portrayed as an enigmatic, monkish personality. He’s also possibly the most popular classical composer of our time. For the last 30 years, he’s collaborated closely with ECM producer Manfred Eicher and choir ensemble Vox Clamantis. The latter’s new album, And I heard a voice, turned into a stunning testament to these fruitful relationships, released on the occasion of Pärt’s 90th birthday in September.
The exact reasons for Arvo Pärt’s immense popularity with the listening public remain unclear. It’s not quite as hard to explain why the classical music establishment gravitates towards his restrained compositions: They just tend to draw a bigger amount and variety of people into modern concert halls than most of his contemporaries.
According to Steve Reich, the allure of musical minimalism is that it restores conventions around harmony and rhythm which had been abandoned in the first half of the 20th century. In Alvin Lucier’s “Eight Lectures on Experimental Music”, Reich argues that this was the main reason why contemporary classical music fell out of favour with the mainstream – a development that he humorously addressed with the witticism that “there is no postman on earth who whistles Arnold Schoenberg’s tunes.”
Similar to the works of American minimalists like Reich in the 1960s, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s works have managed to reach a wider audience without being trivial. The similarities stop right there – Pärt clearly isn’t a minimalist in the Reich’ian sense, but he’s carved out his very own lane with his Tintinabulli style of composition, harking back to early polyphony, Gregorian chants and other sacred forms of music.
A gifted composer who’d studied with masters in Tallinn and Moscow, Pärt started writing music in the mid−1950s in a relatively traditional “neo-classical” style (not related in any way to what’s sometimes called ‘neoclassical’ music today). While still at university, he started exploring Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique and the resulting serialist innovations of post-war New Music, combining these complex methods with his interest in early music and holy texts.
In 1968, Pärt temporarily stopped writing music as he’d hit a creative dead end. The Soviet regime had openly shown disdain for the religious undercurrents as well as the Western influences in his oeuvre. Briefly pivoting to a more compliant style inspired by collage technique, Pärt soon realized the natural limits of that approach. Stepping away from active composing, he turned towards Orthodox theology and early music for an intense period of study and retreat in his mid- to late 30s.
After a long break, Pärt returned with the ascetic piano piece Für Alina in 1976. During his absence from the public, he’d developed a new musical language from scratch, one which he’d call Tintinnabuli, reducing his melodic and harmonic material to the essential core. Finding that soft spot between formal simplicity and emotional resonance was highly difficult to achieve, as he wanted listeners to be able to increase their connection to the music just by following the seemingly simple melodies in a state of acute awareness.
Für Alina marked a quantum leap for Pärt, a creative breakthrough of sorts and the foundation of many more compositions in that style to come. Almost 20 years later, in July 1995, renowned German record producer Manfred Eicher orchestrated new performances of Für Alina and another of Pärt’s key compositions, Spiegel im Spiegel, at Frankfurt’s Festeburgkirche. The composer was present at the recording dates, supporting the producer and musicians with valuable input and inspiration.
Eicher had first heard Pärt’s music in the early 1980s, through a radio transmission during a fateful autobahn journey from Stuttgart to Zurich. Even though the radio signal kept cutting out due to bad reception, the producer heard enough to be lastingly enchanted by the Estonian’s piece. He later found out it was Tabula Rasa, a composition for piano and strings first publicly performed in 1977.
Today it seems virtually unimaginable that Pärt was everything but a household name in Western Europe at the time. Pärt’s works have been constantly played and performed all across the globe for several decades by now – but that clearly wasn’t the case then. His music was still most received in Russia, even though the composer lived in Vienna at the time, having been forced to leave the Soviet Union for political reasons in 1980.
Eicher would launch ECM New Series, a subdivision of the famous jazz and improvised music label that he’d co-founded in 1969, initially to be able to release that Arvo Pärt composition he’d fascinatedly listened to on his car stereo. He’d already made a few forays into contemporary classical music with recordings of Steve Reich’s music, but those were still released under the regular ECM banner. Tabula Rasa became the first album bearing the ECM New Series logo – the official kickoff for the new sublabel in 1984.
Since then, “ECM New Series has inarguably carved out a distinct place in the classical music ecosystem”, as the New York Times gushed recently, “and its austere visual aesthetic and spacious, pristine sound are recognizable calling cards.”
Even though Eicher and his team celebrated huge successes with music by Meredith Monk, Keith Jarrett, Andras Schiff, the Danish String Quartet or the Hilliard Ensemble, the label’s key composer remains Arvo Pärt, and for Pärt, ECM remains the ideal label home – both 1984’s Tabula Rasa and 1999’s Alina, which includes the aforementioned Frankfurt recordings of Alina and Spiegel im Spiegel, are perfect entry points into the composer’s rich discography.
Over 40 years, ECM had its fair share of well-performing records, but Eicher clearly doesn’t think of music in terms of commercial success. He’s a man of the arts himself, a seeker of truth and authenticity, and he sees ECM, as he told the New York Times, as “a cultural project, firstly, addressed to listeners who care about music.” Eicher has proven this type of dedication time and again by putting out notoriously difficult records, but for every obscure Baroque composer he’s unearthed, he’s also released a record like Officium, the unexpectedly popular album by Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble, one of the biggest ECM sellers of all time.
If there is such a thing as a key to success, for Eicher it is developing long-standing musical partnerships, such as that symbiotic connection with Arvo Pärt. In that same New York Times article, Eicher is quoted commenting on his philosophy on working with artists: “I believe what was crucial, was the natural growth of relationships – this weaving of performers and composers – and the time we allowed it to develop.”
It’s safe to say that the Eicher/Pärt connection has only deepened since their first mutual recordings. Zeroing in on the sacred, transcendent aspect of the Estonian composer’s work, And I heard a voice is already the 18th Pärt album on ECM New Series. Recorded in 2021 and 2022 in Haapsalu Cathedral, Estonia, and produced by Manfred Eicher, it was released shortly before the composer’s 90th birthday on September 11, 2025. A special release concert will take place on that day at the Church of St John the Baptist in Kärdla, on the island of Hiiumaa, Estonia.
After decades living abroad in Russia, Austria and Germany, Pärt has returned to his home country many years ago, where he’s said to spend a quiet, monkish life of restraint and self-communion. Still an actively working composer at age 90, he has assembled an astonishing catalogue of works that have clearly stood the test of time and remained wildly popular even beyond the core classical audience. Steve Reich might have been right and the classical-music-loving postmen will never whistle Schoenberg – but they might already be whistling Für Alina.
