THE PRESENCE OF ORDER:

Atonal music is antihierarchical. It is supposed to give each note its full presence by not linking it to a tonal center. What's striking is how completely atonal music fails to do this. The notes of Webern's Variations, Op. 27, for example, are flat and forgettable. Their independence from a complex structure, where they have no discernable melodic relationship to the other notes in the composition, does not give them a presence. It erases it.

But the opposite is the case in Pärt's Fratres. It is in A minor. The melodies and movement encourage attention to the individual notes. In fact, more than any modern composer I'm aware of, Pärt's music rewards attempts to hear each individual note. (I recommend listening to Pärt with a Bourbon neat, turning off the lights, and cranking up the stereo so you can concentrate on each note and feel the movement of the piece.)

Pärt accomplishes this not by abandoning hierarchy but by acknowledging its inescapability. It is impossible to create a purely egalitarian work of art. Something must always structure the work. Without that something, there is no work at all. Supposedly egalitarian works are always ugly because they are attempts to create a work of art against the very principles of art.

Pärt converted to the Orthodox church sometime before Fratres, and his work expresses his view that in life "sorrow and consolation, brokenness and wholeness" are intertwined, as Peter C. Bouteneff puts it in his excellent Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence. Pärt's Adam's Lament, based on a text of Saint Silouan of Mount Athos, captures the Christian's "state of sober, watchful mourning, unshakably faithful in God's love, Christ's self-emptying victory," Bouteneff writes. This is what the faithful are supposed to practice with greater attention during Lent.

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