Just listened to: Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten (1978) as recorded just this year by the Estonian Festival Orchestra under Parvo Järvi. Other than the bell, this is almost certainly what I’d sound like if I had:
- one electric toothbrush sounding an A4,
- a commission to score a tragedy, and
- a few dozen of me, humming.
Seen from another angle, this is Adagio for Strings, redux, except in the form of a single-chord prolation canon and probably even better suited to accompany Platoon. That Pärt wrote this to grieve to death of a man he’d never met fascinates me.