One Is in Everything: Arvo Pärt and Juri Lotman in Search of Wholeness

Introducing the lecture, Marek Tamm writes:

“Arvo Pärt and Juri Lotman lived and worked for decades within the same small cultural milieu, yet, as far as we know, they never met or commented on one another’s work. And yet, striking parallels can be found in their thinking. This lecture imagines a meeting that never took place and explores how Lotman’s cultural theory might shed new light on Pärt’s intellectual world and the ideas underlying his musical compositions.

Drawing on Pärt’s musical diaries and interviews, as well as Lotman’s writings, the lecture examines Pärt’s understanding of the relationship between part and whole through the lens of Lotman’s cultural theory. Both thinkers seem to share the conviction that the smallest element—a musical note or a sign—acquires meaning only within a larger whole; that creativity emerges from the tension between differences and opposites; and that past, present, and eternity can converge in a single moment.

Ultimately, these parallels lead to a deeper question: does this vision of wholeness also carry an ethical dimension? What does it mean to live in a world where no part exists entirely separate from the others?”

Marek Tamm is Professor of Cultural History at Tallinn University and Vice-President of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on the cultural history of medieval Europe, the theory and methodology of history, and cultural memory studies. He has recently published Breakthroughs in Cultural Psychology (ed. with Jaan Valsiner; Tallinn University Press, 2024), The Fabric of Historical Time (co-authored with Zoltán Boldizsár Simon; Cambridge University Press, 2023), The Companion to Juri Lotman: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (ed. with Peeter Torop; Bloomsbury, 2022,), A Cultural History of Memory in the Early Modern Age (ed. with Alessandro Arcangeli; Bloomsbury, 2020), Making Livonia: Actors and Networks in the Medieval Baltic Sea Region (ed. with Anu Mänd; Routledge, 2019), Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism (ed. with Laurent Olivier; Bloomsbury, 2019) and Debating New Approaches to History (ed. with Peter Burke; Bloomsbury, 2018).