The year 2026 marks 50 years since the birth of Arvo Pärt’s distinctive compositional style, tintinnabuli. The Arvo Pärt Centre will commemorate the occasion with a film screening, a listening session, a special exhibition and the publication of a collection of essays. The first event, a screening of the documentary A Goodnight Kiss, will take place on 7 February.
According to the composer’s wife, Nora Pärt, 7 February 1976 was the day Arvo Pärt, after eight years of searching, wrote a short piano piece that would come to be titled Für Alina. In this work, Pärt’s original musical language – later named tintinnabuli – appears for the first time.
Over the past half-century, this compositional method has become a rich and inexhaustible source of creative inspiration for Pärt. Through it, he has expanded our understanding of tonal and modal music in the broadest sense, and in doing so, has profoundly influenced much of contemporary music.
“Tintinnabuli can be described both as a compositional technique based on certain rules and as a distinctive personal style characterised by an aesthetic of silence and reduction. For Arvo Pärt himself, however, the most important aspect is that tintinnabuli became a language – a means of communication through which to express his convictions and worldview, his relationship with God, and his search for beauty and truth,” said Kristina Kõrver of the Arvo Pärt Centre.
The first event at the Arvo Pärt Centre marking the composer’s arrival at his distinctive creative style will take place on 7 February, when a new documentary by Lithuanian director Giedrė Žickytė, A Goodnight Kiss (2025), will be screened. The film is a moving tribute to the distinguished Lithuanian cultural figure Irena Veisaitė, a close friend of Arvo and Nora Pärt. It was after Irena’s daughter Alina that Pärt named his first tintinnabuli work, Für Alina, as a gesture of consolation for mother and daughter, whom life had separated.
In March, the Arvo Pärt Centre will dedicate a separate event in its Listening In series to this small but significant piano piece, exploring its musical, theological and cultural-historical dimensions, as well as presenting the Centre’s latest archival findings and discoveries related to the manuscripts of Für Alina.
The story behind the creation of Für Alina and its broader context will also be presented in a special exhibition planned for early summer. Alongside archival discoveries, the exhibition will introduce the key figures associated with the work and trace the development of its interpretation and reception.
“Visitors will learn who Alina is, how many manuscripts of the piece are known to exist worldwide and where they are held. The exhibition also considers the many ways in which this small piano work can be interpreted and how it has inspired creators in different artistic fields, influenced listeners and resonated with critics. For the exhibition, we have gathered personal memories and experiences related to the piece, offering insight into what this beautiful work has meant to its audiences,” explained Kai Kutman, one of the exhibition’s curators.
This year will also see the publication of an Estonian-language collection of articles and essays examining various aspects of tintinnabuli. Contributors include leading international scholars such as Kevin C. Karnes and Peter Bouteneff (United States) and Leopold Brauneiss (Austria), as well as Estonian researchers working on Pärt’s music, including Arvo Pärt Centre researchers Kristina Kõrver and Toomas Siitan, cultural historian Marek Tamm and icon painter Deacon Nikita Andrejev. Their perspectives are complemented by essays from performers reflecting on Pärt’s music from the standpoint of performance practice. The volume also includes Italian musicologist Enzo Restagno’s extensive 2005 interview with Pärt, which has frequently been requested from the Centre and is now made more readily accessible to readers.