Pärt's Fourth Symphony Essay

The piece is very unpredictable several day ways, especially rhythm. This could be down to the fact that there is no time signature given at the start of the piece - meaning that each bar is made up different lengths. This can therefore be hard for the listener to try and predict where the music is going next. Pärt doesn’t use many different note lengths, the only ones he uses are: crotchets, minims, dotted minims, semibreves and dotted semibreves - all of which are simple to count as they don’t go across the beat. The unpredictably also comes from the swapping and changing of the different lengths of the stressed syllables. An example of this, used by David Pinkerton (1997), is in the opening few bars. The syllable of ‘Magnificat’ is three
In comparison to Magnifcat, which is only written for mixed choir, this is written for reduced orchestra. This is his first piece to focus on an instrumental tintinnabulation as many of his other works were written for SATB choirs or smaller ensembles. The symphony was a joint commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and Esa-Pekka Salonen, whom was the conductor at the time and it is dedicated to the Russian oil executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky It was written 37 years after his previous symphony, which is of a completely different style as it was written before he created tintinnabulation. As it was awarded for a Grammy in 2010, it is clear that it was a success to the majority of the public audience. In a concert review by Mark Swed from the Los Angeles Times (2009), he describes it as “hauntingly beautiful”. Of course, like all music, it is not to everyone’s taste. In a review on the blogging website ‘5against4’ (2010), they describe it as “a peculiar & frustrating work, burning with earnest desires but seemingly incapable (unwilling?) to act on them.” It is accompanied by choral fragments from Pärt’s previous work ‘Kanon Pokajenen’, which is delivered with