Best Of 800% Slower #3 - Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten by Arvo Pärt

Original track here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82-xbhfNR2g

Quoted from: http://jayarava.org/cantus.html

"Arvo Part's biographer suggests that "how we live depends on our relationship with death: how we make music depends on our relationship to silence". [9] It is death that sparks this piece. The characteristic Buddhist response to death is to search for the deathless. In the story of the four sights the Buddha-to-be goes forth into homelessness, into the unknown, in order to solve the problems of old age, sickness and death. In listening to Cantus, especially for the first time, we go into the unknown. The bell heralds death, it is the funeral bell and the initial response is instability. The first few bars seem to teeter on the edge of chaos, and we may be asking ourselves: "is this going to be one of those discordant, morbid, 'modern' works?". But soon things settle into a more recognisable pattern, and the entry of the lower voiced, slower moving instruments provides much needed stability. The quest has begun, each voice begins searching downwards, repeatedly pushing lower and lower, seeking something. The result is a sonorous tapestry, swirling with colour and unexpected conjunctions of tension and relaxation, which result not from the whim of the composer, but come from the structure of the canon itself.

And then one by one each voice finds the pitch it has been seeking, sustains it until the end, which is more than 250 beats in the case of the 1st violins. The spiritual life is like this. We search around looking for answers to the big questions. Then when we find the Dharma, we don't get answers, but we get practices which can take us to a place where the questions are transcended. Once we have the practices it's just a matter of sawing away until we reach the goal. We do this on an ever deeper level until at last the light of Bodhi dawns, and we are transformed in the deepest level of our being. As the double basses finally hit their note there is a palpable sense of relief, of relaxation combined with energy.

And then suddenly the music stops - or almost. In this moment there is a sense of spiritual death. As Bodhi dawns we die to our old self, our old self-centeredness. But with spiritual death there is spiritual renewal, and even though we don't hear the striking of the bell, it is struck, and rings on after the reverberations of the strings have died away. This last bell is the opening of the door to the deathless, or perhaps more prosaically it is the opening of the imagination to the possibility of the deathless. At this point there is little more to be said, since Nirvana is ineffable. And so we return to silence, once again written into the score. But this is not the silence of the absence of sound. It is the silence that is sound, and the sound is silence."

Видео Best Of 800% Slower #3 - Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten by Arvo Pärt канала Kenny Saunders