The Cry of the Heart
A new graphic novel depicting the life of composer Arvo Pärt creates striking visual resonances for both music and prayer.
Review by Micah Clark
A monk-ish silhouette climbs a steep white line across a pitch-black page. His disconnected thoughts float around him inside perfect white circles. He feels the weight of Calvary on his shoulders. “This road to Golgotha will last an eternity,” he cries. He reaches the edge of the line and rests his hands on his knees, a skeptic before the abyss.
The next page is white, and a swirling black line descends from heaven, coming to rest as a black circle—is it a musical notehead?—just above infant Arvo Pärt’s head. As the story continues, the lines and circles move beyond simple musical notation mimics to represent the essence of anything that can’t be reduced to pictures and words. They’re ideas.
Joonas Sildre’s graphic novel Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to His Musical Language is a book about a man’s lifelong quest to transcribe prayer onto the musical page—not just words of prayer, but the deep, inexpressible cries of the heart. If it is impossible to draw the experience of writing and listening to music, then a graphic novel that attempts to do so is a ripe format to engage this tension. Sildre limits his color palette to black, white, and beige. Three colors, the hues of a spiritual and creative desert, one for each member of a musical triad, or for each member of the Trinity. His art style is as restrained as the music of his subject.
The creative process is not typically an interesting thing, nor is prayer.
The narrative is divided into four parts: Prologue, Credo, Silentium, and Tabula Rasa. It’s a common tale of the USSR: Pärt grows up musically gifted but stifled by the watchful eye of the state. Estonia is far from Moscow and, because the state had to squint to see him, Pärt enjoys greater freedom than most. In his youth, he is tutored by a faithful piano teacher who first plants the seed that studying music is the path to a deeper understanding. Upon his graduation, she writes, “the ability to notice and the talent to fully hear a single note are components of wisdom.” The writer of the Proverbs says the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and music is how God will reveal himself to Pärt.
Sildre sketches many vignettes of musical genesis, the burgeoning of what George Crumb calls one’s “musical DNA.” Pärt gets a job as a sound engineer at a lenient national radio station where he gains access to banned broadcasts. He accompanies children’s music groups and writes film music for cartoons. His personal compositions experiment with collage and modernism as he tries to forge his own voice. His audiences note that he has a “special aura” about him.
Despite all this, it’s important to Sildre that we experience the boring parts of Pärt’s story: the creative process is not typically an interesting thing, nor is prayer. Artists slave away in practice until the mundane becomes the joyful. Saints pray until they feel what they say deep inside them. At one point, Pärt describes composing as “bloodletting.” Softening the heart is a long process. Liturgy is a slog. His wife, Nora, encourages him to thank God for the chance to fail. Eureka moments don’t really occur for Pärt. It’s more like fumbling in the dark hoping to find something. Sildre’s drawing of one such moment recalls the black abyss of the opening, but this time it’s not in the abstract:
What once seemed a curse is now an opportunity.
This is where Sildre’s minimalist aesthetic is most impactful: it communicates that practice and prayer can be agonizing. When the black abyss motif occurs a third time, it is not a moment of personal triumph, but a leap into God’s hands. What once seemed a curse is now an opportunity.
It turns out to be Nora who prods Pärt to convert to Orthodoxy from Lutheranism, and here is where the figurative desert Sildre has been sketching becomes literal. He draws a story that Pärt reads in a foundational Orthodox text about a monk who lived in a cave praying without ceasing, then ties this to a new piece Pärt writes about the biblical figure of Sarah receiving a revelation from God. The circular symbols dwindle to eyeballs, no longer representing an idea but an absence of an idea: silence. Sildre uses the circle to carry us through Pärt’s transition: the scene transforms around the circle so it is recontextualized first as silence, then the monk’s eyeball, Pärt’s eyeball, and finally the kernel of a baby in Sarah’s womb. “Sarah Was Ninety Years Old” becomes Pärt’s first major work after a ten-year period of silence. The subtlety of Sildre’s visual language fits the theme of the story perfectly. No musical work or textual biography could capture it quite like this.
For that matter, no music theory class could plumb these depths. Sildre largely stays away from the technical details of Pärt’s new tintinnabuli technique, but he does illustrate Pärt’s music moving from dense textures to light ones. At performances of his early works, abrasive walls of lines and dots rush at the overwhelmed audience, and Sildre uses the full spread as a single large panel.
Contrast with where he ends up:
The new sound is difficult for Pärt to articulate when he’s asked. He claims his creative process has not changed, but he himself has been transformed. He says music contains a “great secret… only in music can I express it” and admits he doesn’t know what the secret is. He talks about composition like he is gaining access to some mystery, not that he himself is creating.
To read the novel is to seek after that mystery. If Pärt is showing me what prayer sounds like, Sildre shows us how talking to the Savior can be drawn. His style in the book is like Pärt’s music: the closer you look at his simple drawings, the more details appear. It’s an invitation to meditate with Pärt on the mysteries of what it means to speak to God. I left the book thinking not of swirling dots or lines but of Pärt’s humble devotion throughout his life. As a boy, he looked up to the loudspeaker in the town square to absorb the music. As an adult, he looks heavenward for God’s direction in his style. Whenever Sildre depicts one of Pärt’s concerts, he never shows the audience respond at the end. For Pärt, no earthly ear matters. He plays for an audience of one.
Micah Clark is a composer who lives outside Chicago. You can find his music at www.soundcloud.com/micahsclark
Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to His Musical Language was released in English, translated by Adam Cullen, by Plough Publishing House on September 3, 2024. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of an advance copy to our reviewer. You can purchase a copy here.
