TI
Tintinnabuli
Tintinnabuli (from Latin tintinnabulum, a kind of bell, plural tintinnabula (Wiktionary) ) is a compositional style created by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, introduced in his Für Alina (1976), and
Pärt’s own comments on his style#
- “Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers – in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises – and everything that is unimportant falls away. Tintinnabulation is like this. . . . The three notes of a triad are like bells. And that is why I call it tintinnabulation.”
- “I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.” – from the essay White Light by Hermann Conen, as translated into English by Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (found in the liner notes of the ECM release of Alina).
- “Tintinnabuli is the mathematically exact connection from one line to another…..tintinnabuli is the rule where the melody and the accompaniment accompanying voice …is one. One and one, it is one – it is not two. This is the secret of this technique.” – from a conversation between Arvo Pärt and Antony Pitts recorded for BBC Radio 3 at the Royal Academy of Music in London on 29 March 2000, as printed in the liner notes of the Naxos Records release of Passio.
Further reading#
- Paul Hillier. Arvo Pärt (Oxford Studies of Composers). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
- Engelhardt, Jeffers: “Review: ‘Solfeggio per coro’; ‘Cantate Domino canticum novum’; ‘Missa syllabica’; ‘Sarah Was Ninety Years Old’; and Others.” Notes 57/4 (2001): 987–993.
External links#
- A Windows PC tool which can be used to generate tintinnabuli voicings in real-time: Arv-o-mat 1.10