JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR

The 62-year-old Part grew up in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, and did not encounter classical music until his teens, when he heard some over a loudspeaker in a public square. He entered the local conservatory and later worked as a sound engineer, doing his composing after hours. He wrote music for films in the early 1960s, and developed a minor reputation as a composer of “serialist” music on the complicated, atonal model of the Austrians Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg.

Toward the end of that decade, however, Part underwent a jarring conversion, musical and otherwise. He suspended most of his professional activities for almost eight years in order to pore over the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance and to inquire deeply into Eastern Orthodoxy. He emerged in the mid-1970s a startlingly different composer, stripped of all of his accumulated musical sophistication. He had arrived at a backward-looking minimalism — based on the simple, repeated elements of “plain-song” (the ritual music of early Christianity, which culminated in the Gregorian chant) and “tintinnabulism” (the mystical sounding of bells). Part called it a ” voluntary flight to poverty,” a reduction of musical thought to an infantile core, in which a piece containing only one note is “the most beautiful possible utopia — I never stop dreaming of it.” The Soviet authorities did not share Part’s dreams, though, and he left for the West in 1980.

There, Part found that others were working along similar lines, most prominently the English composer John Tavener (a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy) and the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki (a Roman Catholic). Together, they have been called “holy minimalists,” who practice a “new simplicity” that is at once revolutionary and conservative. Tavener, for instance, claims that ” since the Renaissance, art has gone sweeping downhill.”

Some in the Christian press discern in Part’s popularity a thirsting for spiritual affirmation and an escape from the flesh. His words to the public have been few but instructive: “Every step we take,” he says, “everything we do, has to do with God, whether we like it or not.” His catalogue of works seems audaciously out of place today: magnificats, Te Deums, passions, misereres, and stabat maters.

And now Litany, with its 24 prayers, one for each hour of the day and night. The piece begins with a couple of descending notes in the strings. It is as though we have entered an old, stone church at a long-ago time. The sound is eerily spare — bled of color and without a hint of sensuousness. What we hear is so shocking that we need it repeated; and — this being minimalism — it is. The music is unrelievedly bleak, importunate, and severe, but then, so are the prayers of St. John Chrysostom. (“O Lord, deliver me from the eternal torments”; “O Lord, give me tears and remembrance of death, and contrition”; “O Lord, shelter me from certain men, from demons and passions, and from any other unbecoming thing.”)

Just when we can stand it no longer, Part gives us some variation, ever so subtle: a touch of syncopation, some unexpected brass, an additional layer, but all of it uncluttered. After the first 12 prayers, there is an Amen, then a change of key, which, given our stupor, comes as a thunderclap. The second 12 prayers are similarly guilt-ridden, penitent, and desperate. There is a lot of cross in this Christianity and little of the stone rolled away, but the piece conveys absolutely the intensity of one striving toward God. Upon the final, growly Amen, we are, if sympathetic at all, shaken for a moment or two, but aware that we have experienced something that is, if not pleasant, at least compellingly unusual.

While Part is known primarily for his choral and liturgical music, he is a skillful symphonist, as evidenced by his Symphony No. 3, available on a recent recording by the London Philharmonic and the conductor Franz Welser- Most. For all its economy and Orthodox grimness, it is a beautiful and evocative piece, religious even though wordless, as if Gregorian monks had happened on the symphonic form. Also of value is the recording Fratres, which features six of Part’s chamber pieces, including his well-known Tabula Rasa, whose title indicates the composer’s life-purpose of starting music afresh. His Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten is a pulsing, throat-grabbing threnody that could become a pop favorite, along the lines of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, if it were more widely known.

The most ardent Part cultists celebrate his Passio, based on the Gospel of John, as a masterwork, but only the most convinced advocate of minimalism will be able to bear it. Others will either make for the exits or reach for the Stop button.

Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.