JAVS Summer 2025

centering, like the tolling of a temple bell calling the body and breath back into alignment.

Footnotes 1 Michael Chikinda, “Pärt’s Evolving Tintinnabuli Style,” Perspectives of New Music 49, no.1 (Winter 2011): 183, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/ persnewmusi.49.1.0182. 2 Grace Kingsbury Muzzo, “Systems, Symbols, & Silence: The Tintinnabuli Technique of Arvo Pärt into the Twenty-First Century,” The Choral Journal 49, no. 6 (2008): 23, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23557279. 3 Qtd. in Grace Kingsbury Muzzo, “Systems, Symbols, & Silence: The Tintinnabuli Technique of Arvo Pärt into the Twenty-First Century,” The Choral Journal 49, no. 6 (2008): 24, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23557279. 4 Muzzo, 29. 5 Muzzo, 24. 7 Paul Hillier, “Arvo Pärt: Magister Ludi,” The Musical Times 130, no. 1753 (1989): 134, https://doi. org/10.2307/1193820. 8 Muzzo, 26. 9 All scores are © Copyright 1978 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/ © Copyright 1998 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien / UE31257. Bibliography Chikinda, Michael. “Pärt’s Evolving Tintinnabuli Style.” Perspectives of New Music 49, no.1 (Winter 2011): 183, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/ persnewmusi.49.1.0182 Hillier, Paul. “Arvo Pärt: Magister Ludi.” The Musical Times 130, no. 1753 (1989): 134–37. https://doi. org/10.2307/1193820. Lehman, Frank. Hollywood harmony: Musical wonder and the sound of cinema . New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Muzzo, Grace Kingsbury. “Systems, Symbols, & Silence: The Tintinnabuli Technique of Arvo Pärt into the Twenty-First Century.” The Choral Journal 49, no. 6 (2008): 22–35. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/23557279. Pärt, Arvo. Spiegel im Spiegel für Viola und Klavier. Wien: Universal Edition, 1998.

In performance, the piece often evokes a collective stillness in both audience and performer, a moment of liturgical intensity that transcends the boundaries of concert ritual. The hall becomes a chapel, and time is no longer measured in minutes but in breaths. The violist does not interpret so much as intone, becoming an instrument for the music’s unfolding. In Orthodox iconography, mirrors are not tools of vanity but of inner vision—portals through which one glimpses the divine. The “mirror” in Spiegel im Spiegel is not a surface but a depth, a medium of reflection that turns both inward and upward. The viola, in this spiritual schema, is not a soloistic ego but a vessel of inner sound. It refrains from asserting itself. Instead, it listens, responds, and reflects. It echoes the piano’s tintinnabuli with humility, not mimicry, absorbing its harmonic tensions and radiating a resonant calm. As such, the viola becomes not just an instrument but an icon—transparent to something greater, a medium through which sound approaches silence, and silence begins to sing. Pärt once said that his music seeks to answer a single question: “How can I live with integrity?” In Spiegel im Spiegel , the viola helps pose this question in sound. Through its quiet, chant-like line, it offers a musical theology of reflection and unity—a twofold single entity, as Pärt describes. The work’s minimalist means belie its maximal spiritual depth, and the violist stands at the heart of this paradox: bow poised between silence and resonance, body bowed in prayer. In the hands of the violist, Spiegel im Spiegel becomes more than a score. It becomes a sacred space—a mirror not only of sound, but of the soul. NOTE: Musical excerpts are used with the permission of Universal Edition A.G., Vienna. All rights reserved. These examples may not be reproduced, copied, or downloaded from this article. 9

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 41, Summer 2025 Online Issue