Music and Lent part II: Arvo Pärt’s Kanon Pokajanen

A few years back, right after Christmas, we were driving from Connecticut back to our home in Pennsylvania and crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge late at night. Our radio picked up these deep and ethereal vocal harmonies transitioning between gradual elevation, abrupt changes and returns into complete calm while staying in a consistent mood. There was a tonal quality almost like bells or organ pipes, so pure, not in the sense of innocent, but in it’s perfection. The music transitions between quiet and full, high voices against the dark voices resonating on the bottom. Listening to the powerful and stirring music was an experience of meditation.

I was introduced to the mesmerizing, beautiful and cathartic Kanon Pokajanen by the estonian composer Arvo Pärt, which was commissioned for the 750th anniversary celebration of the Cologne Cathedral in ‘98 and was recorded in Tallinn/Estonia in Niguliste Church by the outstanding Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. It took Pärt two years to write this very long piece that has tremendous meaning to him.

When the human voice transcends something higher, transforms into a pure instrument and the frequencies, the movement and synergy of the voices in a minimalist cacophony create an emotional state which spoke to something so deep within me, something no thoughts can reach. It was like an auditory epiphany. The music conveyed to me a point of connection between earth and heaven, between reality and spirituality, between dark and light and it touched me in a profound and unforgettable way.

Quite often I would listen to it, wallowing in the immense beauty and the feeling of it, but I never tried to analyze it. I had given the CDs to a friend who was interested and she returned them to me and since they were in the car, I started listening again and a lot (driving hours every day). It was as if the music allowed me to be inside it and at the same time was inside me, speaking from the composer’s to my innermost being and I recognized that this music symbolizes and expresses my feelings of repentance and lent. I decided to write about Kanon Pokajanen and started with reading the CD’s booklet, just to find out that the music had told me all along.

The text is based on the canon of repentance of the Russian Orthodox Church and is sung in the old Slavic language. The text was very important to Arvo Pärt, he said: “In this composition, as in many of my vocal works, I tried to use language as a point of departure. I wanted the word to be able to find its own sound, to draw its own melodic line. Somewhat to my surprise, the resulting music is entirely immersed in the particular character of Church Slavonic, a language used exclusively in ecclesiastical texts." What I consider amazing is the because the text is phonetically so foreign to me that I do not hear recognizable words which allows me to forgo my rationale and reach a spiritual depth that allows me to feel and understand the meaning without even attempting to make a connection to the text. When music can speak that universally, it is genial.

From the booklet notes by Marina Bobrik-Fromke: "It is a song of change and transformation. In the symbolism of the church, it invokes the border between day and night, Old and New Testament, old Adam and new Adam (Christ), prophecy and fulfillment, the here and the hereafter. Applied to a person, it recalls the border between human and divine, weakness and strength, suffering and salvation. In the canon of repentance, the text is devoted to the theme of personal transformation. Repentance appears as a necessary threshold, as a kind of purification on the way to salvation in paradise. The difficulty of following the way is shown by the inner tension between the respective eirmos and the following stanzas, that is, between the praise of the Lord and the lamentation of one's own weakness."

There is a very good editorial review by Evan Cater here.

Next: Why is lent so important for an agnostic like me?