Transcending the Icon: Spirituality and Postmodernism in Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa and Spiegel im Spiegel

Abstract

This essay explores the perceptions of value that circulate around Arvo Pärt’s early tintinnabuli works Tabula Rasa (1977) and Spiegel im Spiegel (1978). Western reception hears Pärt’s music as either ‘spiritually deep’ or musically ‘flat’. By understanding how modernist subjectivity translates into standards of musical value, I attempt to dismantle the biases inherent in both camps and go on to consider Pärt’s early tintinnabuli works in terms of both spirituality and postmodernism. Couched in the religious revivalism of the 1970s, Tabula Rasa offers a narrative of transcendence that performs a Neoplatonic model of subjectivity built directly from Orthodox praxis and supplies an alternative to dominant Soviet cultural narratives. By the 1980s Western marketing of tintinnabuli transformed the influence of religion into the visual and linguistic rhetoric of ‘holy minimalism’. Does commodification leech out spiritual ‘depth’ from Pärt’s music? The essay responds to this question by turning to Fredric Jameson’s ‘antinomies of postmodernism’ and an analysis of Spiegel im Spiegel’s musical stasis, process, surface, and depth. While Jameson’s postmodernism still finds value in modernist subjectivity, this essay suggests an alternative way of understanding musical value through a consideration of Pärt reception and experiences of illness.