Pärt - Für Alina for piano

For Arvo Pärt, 1976 was to be the year he made his decisive breakthrough with a miniature for piano, Für Alina. Pärt says of this work: “It was the first piece that was on a new plateau. It was here that I discovered the triad series, which I made my simple guiding rule.” The ‘triad series’ to which he refers later developed into a style Pärt calls ‘Tintinnabulation’. Tintinnabulation, Latin for ‘a small bell’, points to Pärt’s use of the simple overtone series of the bell as the basis for his music. The series provides both pitch variety and a very firm grounding in the physical nature of sound itself. But Pärt’s interest in this ideal is not primarily scientific, but spiritual. Arvo Pärt says: “Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers – in my life, my music, my work. In my dark outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-facetted only confuses me, and I must search for unity.”