Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten

One of Arvo Pärt’s most popular pieces, Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten is essentially a long crescendo that weaves together different string groups and meditates on the meaning of life. Pärt had become acquainted with Benjamin Britten’s music not long before the Suffolk-born composer’s death in 1976. Deeply affected, he repurposed a piece he was working on as a tribute to Britten. Scored for string orchestra and bell, the piece—roughly six minutes long—is built on a descending motif that is treated contrapuntally, using the pitches of the A-minor scale. The tonality and mood indicate the influence of early church music and chant on Pärt’s music of the late 1970s, following his landmark Symphony No. 3 (1971) and the modernist orchestral pieces of the 1960s. Cantus was premiered in 1977 by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra in Tallinn, Estonia. The Cantus opens with three bell tolls—a funeral bell for Britten—followed by violins. The rest of the string instruments, entering in groups, play the same descending scale but an octave lower and twice as slow, creating a polyphonic texture with layered melodies and overlapping tempos. The downward harmonic motion seemingly contemplates the inevitability of death; toward the end, the canonical layers finally arrive together at a low A-minor chord, followed by silence—a passing, or release, that suggests closure.