NOTE: Pärt defines T-voice positions slightly differently (see Paul Hillier's Arvo Pärt book). For Pärt, there are three broad categories: "superior," "inferior," and "alternating." For pedagogical purposes, I've presented positions without including "alternating" as an underlying position type. Rather than make "alternating" a fundamental *position*, I categorize it as a way of elaborating an underlying structure (by alternating between a position above and a position below). That's a pretty subtle adjustment, but wanted to mention it somewhere.

This has to be one of the best music theory videos on youtube and it blew my mind to see that this video has only 158 views. This is usually information I'd had to pay $80 for a textbook to get! Edit: spoke too soon

Omg, I'm having a musical paradigm shift watching this. Never had heard of Part before. His approach clicks with the way my brain works. Galen, really beautiful examples. Please make more tintinnabuli videos.

Pärt's brilliance is making mechanical process music so pop-sounding that it starts to feel deep. Boulez's Structures but diatonic and with vaguely religious names.

The best and clearest explanation of this technique, in any medium, anywhere on the internet.

So well done. What a great contribution to the KZfaq library of educational music theory/composition videos. No surprise it's finding such a big audience!

Great video. Nobody told me this at the conservatory.

I can’t even begin to express my amazement with your work, this is just incredible!

1:30 in and I’m sold. You got yourself a subscriber.

This video took me a couple of watches to fully grasp Pärt's style, but now i understand it, im having fun improvising at the piano. This guide broke the style down so well!

I was having a empty page syndrom for my composition: thanks, i found something! really well explained

Im not saying this lightly, but you man, are the best youtuber in the world. Amazing.

Elegant, beautiful, clear exposition. Thank you.

The clarity and excellence of this video are stunning. Your students are really fortunate and i could wish i was one of them. I’ll never listen to Pärt the same again, and my own compositions will also be affected. Thank you!

Very simple yet very effective. Excellent, thank you.

What a magnificent study and treatise. Enlightening and mind opening by equal measure. Thank you.

Great tutorial ! Thanks

What a good video!, precisely for a composition project I am needing to use Tintinnabuli and with your explanation it has become much clearer to me; I feel happy that just after a couple of days looking for information on the subject (which I feel is not so easy to find or that they know how to explain it correctly) it is a gem to have found your content today. I thank you deeply and I hope you continue creating more content of such good quality, you deserve much more reach and recognition for your work

The Pärt-Bach parallel you draw with the Cello Suite opening is super interesting. I think it expresses very neatly this feat you mentioned in the beginning for Pärt's music to sound both old and new, since he basically reconstructs this tension between counterpoint and chordal harmony that exists in baroque music, but entirely on his own terms. Very cool video, thanks.

How remarkably insightful!

Incredibly high quality. So much so that I feel no words could do this video justice. A spectacular masterpiece... every second shines with clearly obvious hours of effort and dedication.

This was incredibly informative and well-made, and it gave me some newfound appreciation for the music of Pärt, which in the past I found rather dull, before listening to pieces like Da Pacem.

Hats off gentlemen, a genius!

20/10, perfect video, thanks a lot. Keep making this high-quality job. PRICELESS

This is wonderfull, how deep You go in to this knowledge si really impressive

Great video, thanks !

It's been a while since I've watched a music theory video. This get's my thumbs up! 👍

Wonderful explanation, thank you 🙏 I'm looking to apply these compositional techniques to a world of electronic music and it's a cool puzzle to think about the various shapes, offsets and logic rules and how I can recreate them with components in software and hardware

Thank you for this video. All ideas were really clearly laid out and easy to understand. I love resources like this which give you the tools to try and start writing the music you love

Fascinating. Great video, thanks.

A beautiful presentation. Thanks so much. Earned a subscription!

Thank you so much for this, I’ve always wondered how Pärt approached harmony and this video made it so easy to understand!

Magnificent video. Thank you, this truly brings a new wat of thinking on music composition

Near the beginning of this year, I wrote several small choral pieces at a breakneck pace. My composition instructor commented how it reminded him of Pärt sometimes and told me to look him up. I never really understood tintinnabulation until now, but I am shocked to find that one of those short choral pieces (the one I consider my best) essentially uses T-voice construction throughout

Excellent video, my god man

Thank you very much for this. I wanted an idea for a new composition and this will be perfect as I would like to write a choral work.

Brilliant analysis. Thank you

Fantastic video. Thank you.

Thank you for this amazing video!

This is a brilliant video. I am amazed. Please keep going, brother.

Amazing video! Informative and concise

killer. i'm recommending this to my subscribers.

This was incredible, thank you

Fascinating !!

This was a brilliant video! So inspiring, and so genuinely educational! Arvo Part has been a new discovery of mine, and his Tintinnabuli style was brought up in one of my classes but not dived in to. This was such a happy coincidence to find on my feed! Will definitely be playing around with some of the principles you laid out in this (again) fantastic video!! Hope to see more great videos like this one from you in the future!!!

Fantastic content! Keep it up with the work! Thanks so much for sharing the information and hard work you put into it!

This is so beautiful. Great concepts thank you for sharing

Whaou ! Amazing content. Thank you so much for those great explanations

Very informative, thank you

Please make this a series

I’m taking AP Music Theory in school right now and I’m proud to say I can understand this… mostly lol 😅 I would love to see more of these types of videos!!

fantastic video!

Songs like the healing of arinushka are the most genius: how else to describe a melody that is so simple and logical yet so new and memorable and moving. Millions of musicians try to make melodies, but 99% fail and their melodies are grey, uninspiring or unoriginal. Making a simple yet new and memorable melody is a feat!

This is very good. Of course, species counterpoint is very helpful in understanding this kind of thinking. Plainsong and faux-bourdon doubling likewise.

This takes me back to my college days where I wrote a thesis analysing Kanon Pokajanen.

Thanks a lot for sharing. This is very inspiring

The game destiny and destiny 2 uses this technique everywhere

This music sounds like Perotin had never solved the first problems of counterpoint.

This is beautifully demonstrated, and such a clear narration. Would love to hear even more audio clips as each section is presented, especially the real Pärt examples - is there a copyright restriction on those sort of things?

Has anyone been mysteriously unsubscribed from a load of their favourite KZfaq channels therefore having to resubscribe again? I’m getting sick of it!

Great stuff!!!

Great video

Really great video!

Stellar !!!

Congrats on an awesome video

Pärt - will be spoken like Pjart

Fantastic.

This is really cool! I've been getting into Arvo Part's work recently, and it is amazing. Maybe a video about "Fratres"? No rush, but it would be cool to see :)

That's really great

Incredible

Thank you!

Brilliant !

Good stuff!

Thank You!

Thank you so much for this video. Would you be possible willing to the something like this som other of your other courses on composer´s techniques. I find this very fascinating. Greetings from Sweden. :)

Amazing!

Very good but more sonic representation of what you show would be greatly appreciated ! Thanks

Very enlightening and inspiring. What programs are you using for sound recording and animation? I am very interested in this.

This was phenomenal! Could I possibly wish upon a star for a similar video about Górecki's sacred/holy minimalism (i.e. the style of Symphony 2's second movement, Symphony 3, Beatus Vir, O Domina Nostra, etc.)?

Great video! Which Vsts/soundfont did you use for your voices/chorus?

This is super interesting. What are the limits to this? Can you use this system with any scale/mode and triads within that scale? Can you use it with atonal scales, such as whole-tone or diminished? I am truly fascinated by this. Subscribed and I will show this video to all my musician-friends. Thanks, and keep up the good work!

Great video. Great animations. What software are you using to create them?

Hi, what is the song playing in the background of the video.. thanks

Very clear teaching and useful information! My one recommendation to 'level up' the quality of the video would be to spend a bit of time in a DAW learning how to breathe life into your MIDI instruments, so that the beauty of your music can reach more people than just those who understand the theory of why it works.

🙂

1:10 does anyone know the name of the song please?

The results are beautiful but am I wrong in thinking it rather formulaic? I feel if only a tiny tiny bit cheated.

Hi, can I dm you?

which organ soundfont did you use?

Interesting system, but it doesnt tell you much about what youre actually writing. Definitely a nice tool in conjunction with other systems, but alone youll wnd up writing music you dont actually understand

Hm. This is utterly engrossing. I can tell a lot has happened to Common Practice theory since I sat enraptured by Henry Onderdonk and Andrew Imbrie, hearing them dissect Bach and Mozart within the textual guidance of Rameau, Schenker and Walter Piston. (By the way, in Wikipedia's otherwise estimable list of music theorists from all historic cultures that boasted a written or scholarly system of composition, notation, instrumentation, performance, choral song & modes, great thinkers who we do not ordinarily associate with music, like Rousseau, Kepler, Descartes and Euler are correctly mentioned for their interest and contributions to music. So it is then odd, bordering on illogical, to omit Pythagoras and Piston, of all characters! They are arguably the philosophical, emblematic bookends on the history of formal theory in Occidental music from Antiquity to Modernity. But the list and entries is great in the balance.) Back to the video, I must point out that Part's innovations, if that's how he refers to them, are not dramatically different in spirit from Boethian and Gregorian counterpoint, which form the bones of Purcell's triadic harmony, tonal home key and rounded melodic, narrative arc. The new terminology here addresses a new angle for seeing "sound through time," but the principles of proportion and symmetry, sequence & surprise, pause & happenstance, assertion & recapitulation cooperate just as before with sounds that strike our ear as "lyrical." So these foundational impulses are vertical in the history of all the arts, and also horizontal across them, as Raphael's plump-cheeked Madonnas and Titian's ravishing colors dazzle our eye as glorious, and prefigure the rounded, graceful arcs of melody in Bach and Handel as sweet and sacred, or in Brahms and Dvorak as alluvial and autumnal. The shape of beauty, sound of power and story of truth all rely on the same emotional fuels, visual codes and verbal physics because evolutionary psychology is a mix & match of dynamic, plastic responses, not rigid keys for specific locks to self-sealing cubbyholes. If that's how we learned or felt or tended toward, then mammals would never have gone off flying and birds wouldn't be swimming. Byron wouldn't have died as a rebel to liberate Greece and Borodin wouldn't have been a Nobel-worthy chemist. Part explored complex emotions with new sounds but not with a different human heart or unfamiliar sound waves.

I got 6 min in and gave up as the examples were presented visually rather than acoustically which made it all too abstract for me.

Not good I need audio examples

I don't wanna hate but... No I actually I want to hate: How is music just maths? Where is the meaning in this music of symetry? Even with bach you can always hear the "im honour of god" part. Music isn't valuated by music itself.

I love the asceticism but it seems a little too harsh sometimes, like the film "Babette's Feast" toward the beginning. Have an occasional (accidental) teaspoon of sugar or a (rhythm) bit of cheese with that stale bread. It won't hurt you I promise