"The festival's repertory ranged from thorny avant-garde creations by Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage to Terry Riley's mesmerically repetitive "In C," which had first been heard in San Francisco in 1964 and had more or less launched musical minimalism. Within this offbeat milieu, there arose an extraordinary new sound, one that combined minimalist tendencies with the sacred formulas of Gregorian chant."
"To be sure, the two composers had little in common, beyond being born in 1935. Riley was a pioneer of West Coast counterculture, whose ecstatically looping patterns had influenced psychedelic rock. Pärt was a devout individualist who had emerged from the Soviet cultural system and tested its strictures at every turn. But the Californian and the Estonian converged on a radical reinvention of fundamentals. Both zeroed in on age-old scales and harmonies, extracted them from their usual contexts, and transformed them into objects of contemplation."
Hardijs Lediņš organized a 1976 music festival in a disused Riga Anglican church, combining avant-garde works and Terry Riley's In C. Arvo Pärt premiered "Sarah Was Ninety Years Old," blending minimalist repetition with Gregorian chant and austere ritual elements. Baltic nonconformists embraced Pärt's music as a spiritual practice. Riley and Pärt independently reimagined musical fundamentals by focusing on age-old scales and harmonies, extracting them from traditional contexts and converting them into contemplative objects. Their music demanded new techniques of playing and listening. Minimalism later became commonplace in media, yet both composers maintained distinct, influential artistic trajectories.
Read at The New Yorker
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