Arvo Pärt’s organ piece Annum per Annum has something to say to those who are always looking for the next new thing in the life of the Church.

 

 3MT : Doing the old things well [5:16m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (85)

 

 Annum per Annum : David Goode (organ) [8:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (61)

We live in a neophiliac age. Not necrophiliac, although there may be something in that accusation as well (James Dean or Marilyn Monroe anybody?). No, neophiliac means the constant lust for novelty which seems to be the besetting sin of every organisation. If it ain’t new (look! Something shiny!) then we’re not interested.

Because the Church sups deeply of the spirit of the age the same thing is true for life within Holy Mother Church as well. We are called to find “Fresh Expressions”, new ways of “being church” (I particularly dislike the latter expression, because it makes “church” sound like an adjective, like “cool” or “new” or “shiny!”).

Which leads to an interesting problem when the Church is asked to celebrate or commemorate an anniversary, something which, by definition, happened in the past when things weren’t cool or new or shiny.

In 1980 the Cathedral in the Rhineland town of Speyer celebrated its 900th anniversary. How best to commemorate the building of such a glory of Romanesque architecture? The cathedral community had the great foresight and great good taste to commission an organ piece from the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt: Born in 1935, Pärt had been a successful composer in the 1960s in the Soviet Union, but by the early 1970s he had reached a professional crisis point: the orthodoxies of musical composition and doctrinal atheism were for Pärt a dead end, and for some years he withdrew from composing. He rediscovered his voice in 1976 with a piece for solo piano Für Alina. This was the first example of his new style of composing which he called “tintinnabuli” in which he arranged groups of triads (three related notes) in bell-like clusters. His music also began to reflect his increasing courageous avowal of Christianity. By 1980, when Speyer came calling, he had emigrated from the Soviet Union.

The piece Part wrote was Annum per annum, which means year by year, an appropriate idea and title with which to celebrate the 900 years by year marked in the worshipping life of Speyer Cathedral. Pärt’s piece is written in seven short movements, an introduction and a coda wrapped around five movements identified by letters: K, G, C, S, A.

The introduction begins with a galloping, crashing series of notes (open fifths between D and A) as the sound swiftly dies away, in a curiously strangulated diminuendo: Pärt recommends turning off the electric blowers for the organ, and so the introduction literally runs out of breath. When the sound has died away completely, the five inner movements begin, each lettered movement representing the Ordinary of Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei), offered year by year in the worship of the Cathedral. The movements begin in a minor key, shifting to the major in the middle of the Credo, and Pärt cleverly echoes the rhythmic patterns from beginning to end. The coda plays out in the same rhythm as the introduction, but uses a completed D Major chord instead of the provisional and uncomfortable open fifths of the introduction.

What is Pärt saying with this piece? Obviously the title is an important clue; Pärt identifies the “year by year” with the offering of the mass and so tells us what we should value in the passing of those years. The introduction and the coda stand, I think, for the world outside the sanctuary, galloping, noisy and insistent, and yet without the power to dominant the quiet fragility of the Church’s worship. And even the coda, with its gradual building up into triple-forte loudness, has been transformed into a resolved wholeness. It’s not the new things which will save us, Pärt is saying. It’s doing the old things well.

(If you haven’t already heard Annum per Annum for yourself then I have attached a recording of a live recital given by the incomparable David Goode on the Rieger organ of Christ Church, Oxford)