Between Two Sounds: Arvo Part’s Journey to His Musical Language

Reviewed by:

Title:

Between Two Sounds: Arvo Part’s Journey to His Musical Language

Author:

Joonas Sildre (Translated into English by Adam Cullen)

Publisher:

Plough Publishing

https://www.plough.com/en

Publication Date:

September 3, 2024 (original Estonian edition released in 2018)

Format:

Hardcover

Length:

224 pages

OVERVIEW

Few living composers have the kind of acclaim that Arvo Pärt recieves. Yet while his Eastern Orthodox faith plays a key role on his music in its competition style and in his content, he’s not all that often discussed in the west. This reviewer wants heard a music aficionado describe his fans as sophisticated pagans meaning Western meaning European intellectuals. Between two sounds aims to tell the story of pairs rise to fame from his childhood to his immigration out of Estonia in the 1980s. We see him going from his initial childhood piano music that interest him yet conforms to Soviet standards. Ultimately as he discovers his faith and becomes interested in medieval music, is work will take a direction that leaves him little choice but to leave his homeland.

Writing a graphic novel about musicians is frequently difficult because as the old adage goes writing about music is like dancing about architecture. There are people who can do it well, for example the same publisher plow released in a translation of the heartbreakingly beautiful novel Brisbane by Eugene badalozkin, a intriguing novel about a Ukrainian Russian composer. Here, the fact this is a graphic novel proves immensely helpful. The illustration starts engaging ways to show how the music affects people as it’s played. There’s even some clever effects highlighting the big breakthrough moments in Paris music when he decides to shift his style based on medieval blank to redefine the structure of his work.

The discussion about Paris faith also proves very interesting as specially as we see him grappling with the censorship concerns. One of his early works is dismissed as not socialist enough in subject and not nationalistic enough in tone. Another project, he is advised to say that it is dedicated to a recent political event that occurred. That makes his work appropriately leftist enough that judges let him get away with it. There’s also a beautiful moment in which he has to play his music on tapes to allow the Soviet authorities to let him take his music over the border when he leave the country. Beauty may start decimate evil as much as we wish it would, but sometimes it can have an effect.

The one thing that is perhaps a little frustrating about the book is that although it captures some great moments of pairs resisting Soviet pressures, and does a decent job at explaining why his music particularly later music that has over religious subjects shocked the establishment, it’s perhaps not as clear to non Estonian readers. This was initially published in Paris Homeland by Estonian writer, and their moments where you realize that it’s leaving some things left unsaid not marking the times clearly as it would, not defining every single big moment as clearly as it would, because it’s initially addressed to readers who have grown up with this history. People who even if they didn’t grow up during the ’70s and 80s when the USSR still had its hold over estonia, certainly have parents or grandparents remember that time. For American readers it’s a little harder to pick up some of the pieces. That perhaps is more about the American education problem, that we get the broad sketches about what happened in Russia during the USSR who crucial was who Gorbachev was, a few stories about Christian missionaries like brother Andrew but not much else). A continental European reader or Eastern European radio would probably find it much easier to pick up the context. Even so, it’s a shame that we don’t get something like what flowers recently done with their graphic novel blank where we have lots of footnotes and narration to fill in historical facts. In this case I would probably be sending the translator had to do and probably cause the annotated edition.

Even if the books format makes readers work a little bit to pick up on the contacts and do extra research, it doesn’t keep it from being a very compelling work. It’s a beautifully told look at a fascinating under discussed life at least for Western audiences. Cloud publishing continues to pick fascinating under discussed parts of Christian history, figures living and no longer with us who are well worth remembering and who often feel a little outside of the basic Sunday school Christian history lessons we’re used to.

(Like Brisbane, a book about orthodox faith https://eclalibraries.org/2023/11/11/brisbane-a-novel/

ASSESSMENT

Rating (1 to 5 stars):

4.5 out of 5 stars

Suggested Audience:

Leaders who are interested in Christianity and the Soviet era, under discussed classical composers, and generally graphic novels that portray musicians’ lives.

Christian Impact:

Blank does a vaccine job of showing how pairs increase interest in fate and christianity, any irony that he marries a Jewish woman who becomes orthodox and leads him to a faith that is tolerated but certainly not advertise much in his home land becomes key to his artistic growth as well as to a spiritual growth.

Readers interested in similar books may enjoy:

https://eclalibraries.org/2022/06/10/the-grand-inquisitor-a-graphic-novel-based-on-the-story-from-fyodor-dostoyevskys-the-brothers-karamazov/

https://eclalibraries.org/2021/03/18/freiheit-the-white-rose-graphic-novel/

https://www.amazon.com/