I went to see a performance of Arvo Pärt pieces in celebration of the composer’s 90th birthday, performed by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. The end of the first act was “Te Deum,” considered one of Pärt’s most masterful works.

I’d become interested in this specific piece after reading about the seed that sparked it, recognizing in Pärt that same collector-of-ideas-I-want-to-hold-forever impulse that makes me squirrel away fragments and hope they’ll mean something later.

Years before composing “Te Deum” in 1984, Pärt met the Swiss painter Martin Ruf, who told him it’s possible to distinguish over 20 shades of blue in the mountains. This knowledge sat dormant in Pärt’s mind until it became the initial impulse for the piece. Its intention is to convey the feeling of serenity found in the infiniteness of space. “I had to draw this music gently out of silence and emptiness,” he explained.

“Te Deum” runs about thirty minutes. It uses tintinnabuli, Pärt’s signature harmonic technique where two voices operate simultaneously: one explores, progressing through a melody, while the other tethers it to something unchanging. It’s like a bell ringing from a fixed point. Movement and stillness at once.

Minute one: I’m incredibly distracted. One of the upright bass players looks like a young Beck. I’m wondering if the violinist has been stressed all day about the solo he’s standing for right now. I’m thinking about the apparent requirement that, in the middle of every live performance, at least one audience member must cough violently and drop a cup of ice. Then I blink, trance-like, and the conductor’s baton is frozen mid-air. The air is palpably hovering. The full thirty minutes have ended. What everyone describes about this performance is true: time warps, distorts, bends in half. The insolvability of “Te Deum” is its own embrace; an island in the middle of a journey where the only task is to rest. I’m full and empty, standing before a mountain. I could look at this for the rest of my life and never exhaust what’s there, I think.

Then of course I leave. I don’t stand before mountains. I get rained on mid-walk, a blister forming with each step in new shoes I regret buying. At home I procrastinate by making a piece of toast. This letter isn’t going to write itself.

It’s impossible to sustain attention. If the point is living perpetually in concert halls and gazing at metaphorical landscapes, I’m doomed. But this season always makes me think about the rhythm of return.

Harvest ended, as it always does, and I’m aware of how those compressed weeks were their own window where everything was held taut. Time is distorted there, too. Days that feel like minutes, hours that stretch impossibly long.

Tintinnabuli, winemaking, et al. The technique is the metaphor. We all have our ways of building life around cycles that demand our complete attention, then release us, then pull us back. Perhaps we are not seeking an escape into transcendence, but the language to recognize what we’re already doing. An intermission to see where we’ve landed.

I can’t always see the mountain, but knowing it’s there changes how I return. How many shades can I learn to see this time?

MH