Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt (Estonian pronunciation: [ˈɑrvo ˈpært]; born 11 September 1935) is an Estonian composer of classical and sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-invented compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music is in part inspired by Gregorian chant. Pärt has been the most performed living composer in the world for 5 consecutive years.

Life

Pärt was born in Paide, Järva County, Estonia, and was raised by his mother and stepfather in Rakvere in northern Estonia. He began to experiment with the top and bottom notes as the family's piano's middle register was damaged. His first serious study came in 1954 at the Tallinn Music Middle School, but less than a year later he temporarily abandoned it to fulfill military service, playing oboe and percussion in the army band. While at the Tallinn Conservatory, he studied composition with Heino Eller. As a student, he produced music for film and the stage. During the 1950s, he also completed his first vocal composition, the cantata Meie aed ('Our Garden') for children's choir and orchestra. He graduated in 1963. From 1957 to 1967, he worked as a sound producer for Estonian radio.

Symphony No. 3 (Schuman)

American composer William Schuman's Symphony No. 3 was completed on January 11, 1941, and premiered on October 17 of that year by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitsky, to whom it is dedicated.

Instrumentation

The symphony is scored for an orchestra consisting of piccolo (doubling flute), 2 flutes, 2 oboes, clarinet in E♭, 2 clarinets in B♭, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns in F, 4 trumpets in C, 4 trombones, tuba, snare drum, cymbals, bass drum, xylophone, timpani and strings, with third flute (doubling second piccolo), third oboe, third clarinet in B♭, third bassoon, contrabassoon, 4 more horns in F, and piano listed as "optional, but very desirable".

Structure

Rather than the usual four movements, the symphony is in two parts, each consisting of two continuous sections in a tempo relation of slow-fast and given titles suggesting Baroque formal practices, though Schuman does not follow these forms strictly:

Symphony No. 3 (MacMillan)

The Symphony No. 3 (also known as Symphony No. 3 "Silence") is the third symphony by the Scottish composer James MacMillan. The piece was first performed on April 17, 2003 in NHK Hall, Tokyo, by the NHK Symphony Orchestra under the conductor Charles Dutoit.

Composition

The symphony has a duration of roughly 36 minutes and is composed in one continuous movement. The title of the piece comes from the 1966 novel Silence by the Japanese author Shūsaku Endō. MacMillan described this inspiration in the score program notes, writing:

For Endo, though, this silence is not absence but presence. It is the silence of accompaniment rather than "nihil". This is a notion that has many musical analogies. Music itself grows out of silence. The emptiness and solitude of a composer's silence is nevertheless pregnant with the promise of possibility and potency. The immateriality of music points to the reality of different types of existence. Music is not a physical reality in the sense that we are, or any other thing is. You cannot see, touch or taste music, but its powerful presence always makes itself felt.

Symphony No. 3 (Popov)

Gavriil Popov composed his Symphony No. 3 for string orchestra, subtitled Heroic Symphony but also known as the Spanish, between 1939 and 1946. At ca. 55 minutes it is Popov's longest symphony. It consists of five movements, four highly dynamic movements drawing on Spanish dances framing a twenty minutes long memorial on the Spanish Civil War.

Following the ban of his Symphony No. 1 and the subsequent official condemnation of him being a formalist composer Popov focused on composing film music. In 1939 he arranged a suite from his soundtrack for Esfir Shub's documentary on the Spanish Civil War Spain and conceived in parallel a Concerto grosso for string orchestra (on the basis of the string episodes from Spain), as it can be read in the composer's diary on September 17. Work in the project was halted soon after completing the first movement, but Popov resumed it five years later, changing the work's title from Concerto grosso to his third Symphony. After two years of work, it was finished on September 1946. The premiere took place in Moscow on January 31, 1947. Popov's Symphony No. 2, which had earned the composer a Stalin Prize the previous year, marked his provisional rehabilitation, and the third symphony met a favorable reception. In his diary Popov notes his former teacher Vladimir Shcherbachov believes Symphony No. 3 is my best achievement. A meeting to discuss its nomination for the Stalin Prizes was arranged, but it was subsequently cancelled and the next year Popov was instead blacklisted in the resolution of the infamous First Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers.