Quick Analysis No.7

Arvo Pärt: Credo (1968)

If you are familiar with Arvo Pärt the odds are you will chiefly know him for his celebrated holy-minimalist works which he has been composing since the mid-1970s: Pieces like Fur Alina, Fratres and Spiegel im Spiegel have all received countless performances and recordings over the decades and are among the most famous concert pieces of the 20th and 21st Centuries. These pioneering works and their associated tintinnabuli technique along with the entirety of Pärt’s latter canon and his own devotion to eastern orthodoxy has rightly cemented him as one of the fathers of the ‘holy-minimilist’ style of composition (a subgenre of minimalism principally themed around religious or spiritual devotion, also popularised by John Tavener in the UK and Henryk Górecki in Poland). Pärt’s style is mostly thought of as solemn, poised, slow, thoughtful and harmonically very consonant and beautiful, taking much of its influence from European liturgical music and plainchant. However, before his breakthrough with the tintinnabuli technique and the galvanisation of his mid-to-late career compositional style, Pärt had a much wilder sound in his early years: still influenced by early music (chiefly by Bach) his style was a much more raucous mixture of the historical with the modernist.

In the 1960s Pärt was interested in evoking more than just the sacred and devotional aspects of his later work; by stark contrast he was also interested in balancing the profane and the hysterical alongside the sublime. His early output had a more overt relationship with elements such as direct musical quotation, pastiche composition, harsh stylistic juxtapositions, thick chromatic clusters, chaotic polytonality and aspects of musical collage. In fact, listening to a lot of Pärt’s 1960s output feels like listening to a composer who has more in common with someone like Alfred Schnittke than the Arvo Pärt of the next decade and beyond. Before arriving at 1968’s Credo it is briefly worth looking at a short movement from an earlier work: The Sarabande from 1964’s Collage Sur B-A-C-H, which, I believe, illustrates in a microcosm the core idea which is expanded and elaborated on in the Credo: In this period it feels like Pärt was attempting to reconcile the divergent strands of historical, diatonic western harmony with modern chromatic and atonal harmony.



Collage Sur B-A-C-H’s 2nd movement ‘Sarabande’ opens with a direct quotation of the Sarabande from Bach’s English Suite no.6, expanded beyond the original keyboard instrumentation and arranged for a Baroque-style orchestra featuring the main melody adapted for solo oboe accompanied by harpsichord and a full string section. The first two pages present the opening eight bars of Bach’s Saraband almost exactly verbatim for this expanded ensemble, perhaps lulling the audience into a false sense of security for what is about to occur. In the following page, after the first complete phrase of Bach’s Sarabande, Pärt lurches abruptly into a series of thick chromatic clusters which mirror the same tempo, phrasing and trajectory of the original but in which the harmony has become completely saturated. In addition to the strings which divide to play almost entirely chromatic clusters spanning an entire octave, Pärt substitutes the period appropriate harpsichord for a modern piano and writes full-octave chromatic clusters, reinforcing the strings and adding even more density and dissonance to the texture. The rest of the movement is spent swapping back and forth between these two textures: the harmonious and poised beauty of Bach’s original source contrasting Pärt’s brutally stark chromatisation of it, always abruptly juxtaposed against one another. It is this movement that, I believe, lays out the foundation for Pärt’s Credo; the strident side-by-side contrast of Bach’s quintessential tonal harmony with the complete semi-tonal-saturation of these modernist cluster harmonies suggests that Pärt is thinking about harmony on a spectrum with these two extremes being used as contrasting polar opposites. While the Sarabande from Collage Sur B-A-C-H presents the extremes of this harmonic spectrum in jarringly stark contrast his Credo does something more subtle with a gradated journey which winds back and forth across the whole spectrum.





To me, Pärt’s Credo seems to not only be exploring a spectrum of saturation between consonant, diatonic tonal harmony and hyper-saturated chromaticism, but it in it he is building up these layers of saturation via perhaps the ultimate tonal device: the cycle of fifths. Pärt again uses a source of quotation from Bach, in this case it is the C-Major prelude which begins his Well-Tempered Clavier suite of 48 preludes and Fugues; perhaps one of the most recognisable pieces of music ever written, and the simplest and most fundamental building block to a cycle in itself that will make use of all twenty-four major and minor keys. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that the C-Major prelude feels like it occupies a space as the platonic ideal of tonal harmony: that it is a foundational text in what feels like the default tonal key of European classical music. And this status makes it a perfect source for quotation when exploring the harmonic traversal from pure to saturated, from simple to complex, from tonal to a-tonal, from classical to modernist, from consonant to dissonant.



Credo somewhat takes the form of a piano concerto in that it features a prominent solo piano part accompanied by a large, modern orchestra, but in addition to this it also features a prominent part for SATB choir which makes much of the music feel grandiose and liturgical, perhaps charged with devotional meaning beyond that of abstract concert music such as a concerto would usually be, making many moments in the piece resemble the texture of works such as Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis or even Mozart’s Requiem. There seem to be nods to the entire history of European Classical music from the present moment back to Bach: Bach’s prelude itself, the form of the piano concerto, the Romantic grandiosity of the expanded orchestra and choir, and the presence of post-tonal and a-tonal elements, all of these represent a wide gamut influences bridging the historical with the modern. And as the piece unfolds, it’s clear that Pärt’s intention is to build these areas atop one another, using the basic principles of harmony itself to saturate and desaturate the music in order to play with the listener’s thresholds of perception and comprehensibility.

Credo opens quietly with a low C-natural drone over which the choir sings the titular word twice; the first time in the form of a C-major chord to a D-minor chord (or expressed tonally a I-ii progression), and the second in the form of a B-dim to a C-maj (or vii°-I). This opening five bars establishes a solid baseline of conventional tonal harmony, although somewhat blurred and updated due to the presence of the omnipresent pedal tone sustaining the tonic that will prove to be vitally important throughout the piece. The dynamics and texture then suddenly explode into a strong fortissimo with the orchestra playing tutti, bolstering the next incarnation of the choir’s refrain on ‘Credo’: This time on a 2nd inversion A-min to D-maj/C chord progression, and a G-maj fist inversion to C-maj/B, somewhat expanding the tonal complexity from the opening choral statement and adding some gentle yet aching dissonances into the harmony with the two whole-step and half-step slash chords (or 4th inversion 7th chords). Following this there are two short passages set to the words ‘In Jesum Christum’, the first of which resolves to D-minor and the second of which resolves in an elongated perfect cadence back to C-major. Following this, at bar 16, is the first entry of the solo piano which plays an excerpt from Bach’s C-major Prelude. Rather than picking up directly from the previous bar’s perfect cadence in C-major however, the piano begins midway through the prelude just at the point where the harmony is beginning to develop and depart the home key a little more drastically: beginning on the C-dominant 7th chord (with the B-flat) which evokes the sub-dominant key of F-major and progressing through verbatim until bar 27 where the male voices rejoin the music with a dramatic statement ‘Audivistis Dictum: oculum pro oculo, dentem pro dente’ or ‘You have heard it said: an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’ in a unison drone on G-natural.






This is followed by a pause and then begins the first process of tonal saturation via the cycle of fifths in the piece: In bar 37 the divisi violas sound a C-natural and G-natural perfect 5th lasting eleven crotchets in rhythmic unison, before swapping and playing the same 5th but with each note exchanged for the same duration. What now follows is a process of adding the next note from the cycle of fifths to the chord, adding one more voice and changing the instrumentation, and shortening each note by one crotchet, thus beginning a sequence that will gradually saturate itself chromatically via the cycle of fifths as more voices are added and each pitch is cycled through faster with increasingly dense chords. In bar 43 horns 1 and 3 and the first trumpet play a chord of C-natural, G-natural and D-natural lasting ten crotchets before each cycling their pitches (with some octave transpositions) for two more chords of equal duration. Further on in the process, at bar 108 nine voices from the wind and brass play a nine-note chord of F-sharp, E-natural, A-natural, B-natural, D-natural, G-natural, A-flat, D-flat and C-natural, lasting one semibreve followed by the same set of pitches cycled among the instruments another eight times. Finally at bar 138 we have a fully chromatic twelve note chord played by the piccolo, contrabassoon and strings cycling twelve times with each instance lasting just one crotchet. This is the logical end point of the process that Pärt sets up bar 37 with just an open perfect 5th. He reaches this endpoint of saturation entirely methodically, almost mechanically, fully committing to the procedure of adding voices and chords while shortening the duration of each instance, as if to turn the most fundamental building block of tonal harmony against itself by stacking it ad nauseum until it reaches a point of harsh saturation.








This twelve note cycle of all twelve chromatic pitches repeats in the wind and is then juxtaposed by a fast, descending variant of the arpeggios that make up the C-major prelude played by the solo piano, followed again by another twelve note cycle spread across the entire orchestra. These two pieces of material continue to alternate as Pärt introduces another mechanical process: one of diminution. The descending arpeggios are truncated by one minim each time and the twelve note cycles are truncated by a crotchet, losing their final incarnation of the cycle each time. Both parts getting shorter and shorter until at bar 227 the twelve not cycle is down to a single crotchet which triggers the choir to enter with their own twelve note chord, chanting ‘oculum pro oculo, dente pro dente’ in full chromatic saturation before the pitches are abandoned and the chant continues on an unpitched stage-whisper which crescendos to a shout as instruments from the orchestra join in playing the cycle of fifths expanding from a single crotchet to a full cycle of twelve pitches, all parts with their own starting point maximising the chaotic saturation.



Then at bar 260 all tonality is abandoned in favour of violent, atonal improvisation in which Pärt gives only the general register in which instruments should keep their improvised flurries within. The notation itself becomes dominated by thick black bars occupying the saves along with stark geometric shapes that indicate instrumental register. This section goes beyond the extreme of fully chromatic saturation that seemed to be at the far end of Pärt’s tonal spectrum, and into the realm of noise and chaos; almost more akin to an orchestral rendition of an experimental free improvisation for these few pages.



At bar 350 the dense and chaotic improvisations break to reveal a low C-natural played on the double basses and solo piano. The improvisations and this low drone on C-natural alternate until bar 356 when the choir joins the C-natural drone followed by an eleven note cycle of fifths passage in unison beginning on F-natural and ending on G-natural setting up a cadential entry for the solo piano which begins playing the entirety of the C-major prelude two-octaves above its originally written register. As this continues the piano faces some points of dissonant harmonic and rhythmic contrast with the brass playing cycle of fifth interjections, and the highly harmonious and emotive addition of the building choir turning the underlying harmonies of the C-major prelude into a chorale which runs in tandem with the solo piano. This reaches a huge climax as the orchestra surges with the piano and choir in the leadup to the final cadence of the C-major prelude. The final gesture is delayed with a brass and timpani surge into a climactic yet unexpected secondary dominant chord across the entire orchestra and choir: A D-major dominant 7th chord, implying the dominant 5th in the neighbouring key of G-major, acting as a kind-of heightened and intensified cadential suspension before pausing to then simply present the ascending tolling of every C-natural on the piano bolstered by the strings as the gesture to end the entire piece. This ending pulls back from the icy brink of chromatic saturation that the piece delved into and even went beyond earlier, coming full circle via Bach’s C-Major prelude to simply letting every octave of C-natural that the piano has access to hang in space and time as the conclusion. Pärt, I believe, is demonstrating that seemingly the simplest and most fundamental building blocks of tonality are capable, by fairly simple means and processes, of magnifying into a frenzy, and that there is great interest in the margins beyond what is often presented in European classical music, both in terms of simplicity and complexity of harmony and relative consonance and dissonance.



- Jocelyn Campbell, 2026


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