Several pentagonal patios in the building's structure symbolise the silences in Pärt's music. The columns have different thicknesses, like the trees in a forest.
In his early years, Pärt composed mainly modernist serial works. After Credo (1968), a composition in which he confessed to the Orthodox Church, he clashed with the atheistic Soviet authorities and his work was no longer allowed to be performed. After that, he reached an impasse. He renounced his earlier musical style and ended up in a creative crisis that would last eight years.
He threw himself into an intensive study of Gregorian and medieval music and eventually developed his own style that he called 'tintinnabuli', which means 'little bells' in Latin. Tintinnabuli combines two monodic lines of music: a melodic line and below it a triadic line of three notes each. It is concentrated music, leaving only the very essentials.
For Pärt, the melodic voice represents the sins he committed, while the triadic line beneath it forgives and wipes out those sins.
The 'formula' Pärt attributed to tintinnabuli is 1+1=1. That is, there is an inherent duality, but the two components form an inseparable whole. It is the audible expression of the temporary and the timeless, the physical and the spiritual, the subjective and objective, the earthly and heavenly, the negative and positive, the dynamic and static.
Pärt feels responsible for the impact of his music on the mind of the listener. Therefore, he considers every musical decision very deeply.
Well-known examples of Tintinnabuli are Für Aline, Fratres, Tabula Rasa and Spiegel im spiegel.
