Waves & Schemes: Reconciling Arvo Pärt’s Compositional Processes and Techniques Within an Improviser’s Practice

This research investigates the music of contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt from a practitioner’s perspective. It seeks to uncover and offer a series of strategies and procedures that demonstrate a method of employing Pärt’s compositional processes and techniques within the creative practice of an improviser/composer/performer. Analytical activity yielded the identification and extraction of a set of foundational techniques, pertaining to melodic, rhythmic and structural developments in Pärt’s music. This includes: an expanded definition and articulation of the notion of waves — distinguishable arcing movements which are the product of interplay between combinations of variable techniques; and the composer’s philosophies and approaches towards stringency, reduction and the nucleus. These techniques and processes have been adapted and repurposed in a series of original improvisational and compositional case studies, to be considered alongside the written thesis. Pärt’s schemes and diagrams (hand drawn images) proved pivotal in the research as impetus for the cultivation of new music and renewed practical frameworks. They incited a shift away from literality, towards an abstraction process that sparked the formation of a series of templates, functioning as generative models for ongoing improvisational and compositional activity. In turn, the self-generation of original schemes and diagrams triggered a reconditioning of notational scoring, producing a modified form that I have labelled reflective notation.