Resounding Beauty: The Organ Music of Arvo Pärt
Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) is undoubtedly one of the most significant and popular composers of the twenty-first century. Around 1976, he developed a new musical technique called “tintinnabulation.” Since then, he has composed more than sixty pieces for choir and/or organ in this style, which have been embraced by both performers and listeners alike and used extensively in film, television, and social media. This workshop introduces the five works for solo organ and also addresses how to interpret the organ parts of the choral works that use organ.
Andrew Shenton
Andrew Shenton is a scholar, prize-winning author, performer, and educator based in Boston. He first studied at The Royal College of Music in London, and holds bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from London, Yale, and Harvard universities, respectively. He holds the Choir Training and Fellowship diplomas of the Royal College of Organists. He has toured extensively in Europe and the United States as a conductor, recitalist, and clinician, and has received numerous scholarships and awards, including Harvard’s Certificate of Distinction in Teaching and a Junior Fellowship from the Humanities Foundation at Boston University. Moving freely between musicology and ethnomusicology, his work is best subsumed under the heading “music and transcendence,” and includes several major publications on Messiaen, Pärt, and others. He is associate professor of music at Boston University, artistic director of the Boston Choral Ensemble, and director of music at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Weston, Massachusetts.