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looking clo se r 5
this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this unimportant thing appear in many guises, and everything that is unimportant falls away.
I am frustrated by the answers I am getting. Maybe it’s enough just to enjoy the music. As quickly as I can ask, “Is Pärt a designer?” I am asking myself, “Should I try to be claiming him as one?” With “Fratres” on the stereo, I am on the noisy Internet, and it is getting later. I find I can type F-R-A-T-R-E-S with one hand.When I translate a French interview with Pärt, the word for “composer” comes out “type-setter.” I find that Pärt’s birthday is September 11, 1935—sixty-six years (two thirty-threes) before the towers fell. In his music, he says, the second iteration of the triad represents “terror.” I find the moment of Pärt’s musical transformation from his early serialism to his later minimalism coincides to the month with my own birth. I find a quote about the packaging of his music that coincides with this coincidence: Alex Ross of the New Yorker writes, “Even the packaging of the disks, all crisp lines and monochromatic fields, is a beautiful exemplar of minimalist style.” I find each of the package designs and note the typefaces: Palatino, Palatino Titling, Trajan, Gill Sans, stretched Avant Garde, Garamond Bold, Akzidenz Grotesk, Times Roman, Frutiger, Rotis Serif. These facts refuse me. Pärt says, We must count on the fact that our music will come to an end one day. Perhaps there will come a moment, even for the greatest artist, when he will no longer want to or have to make art. And perhaps at that very moment we will value his creation even more—because in this instant he will have transcended his work.
We reach a consensus on things, and these things should be noted down. Here is one: the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Here are my notes. The wine is done. The room is quiet. As I get ready for bed, I remind myself that there is, in fact, no problem here to be solved.