In a normal world, Peteris Vasks would be the most famous composer alive. He writes music for an apocalyptic age, in which culture is coming full circle, providing exactly what the world needs: spirituality, depth, presence, beauty.
“I want to nourish the soul, that is what I preach in my works.” —Pēteris Vasks
Pēteris Vasks
I have been haunted for some time by the music of Pēteris Vasks, the contemporary composer from Latvia who was born in 1946. Mr. Vasks writes music of mystery, introspection, and exultation that can truly be characterized as “luminous.” You should understand that I rarely ever venture into music by contemporary (i.e., living) composers and that my musical interests generally end in the mid-20th century. That is a gauge of how special I think Vasks’s music is.
Vasks has been part of a revival of traditional values in music. Coming of age at a time when avant-gardism dominated academia, Vasks eventually rejected these styles and instead wrote the music that he found beautiful and meaningful. His stylistic peers are composers like Arvo Pärt, Henryk Gorecki, and John Tavener (and the Americans Morten Lauridsen and Frank La Rocca, and many others), who similarly broke with the avant-garde and embraced contemplative spirituality in their music, based on the repetition of simple musical materials and a still, hypnotic feeling that sometimes draws from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Similar to those other composers, Vasks’s music is broadly tonal or modal with a distinctly “Eastern European” modality, though he does not exclude dissonance for expressive ends, with close harmonies that can tug at the heart. And the silence around the notes is often just as important as the notes themselves.
These composers were not just reacting against the musical avant-garde. They were reacting against the entire technocratic character of modern times. In a world going faster and faster, they were holding up a sign telling people to slow down and reflect. Vasks himself has said that modern music should provide a harmony and stability that is lacking in modern life. Yet it is equally true that the music of Vasks and his peers has picked up the best traditions of tonal mid-20th-century music; it was not a “step backwards” but a continuation.
Their style has been dubbed “holy minimalism,” “mystic minimalism,” or “spiritual minimalism.” Terms such as “New Simplicity” and “New Consonance” have also been evoked. Vasks bears some similarities with this group but some marked differences too. The comparison with the Estonian Arvo Pärt, Vasks’s good friend, is illustrative of what I believe makes Vasks unique. Pärt’s music is so spare and reiterative that it often seems to go nowhere, and that is the point: it has nowhere to go because it is in a sense already there (the essence of contemplation, I suppose). Vasks’s music, by contrast, has somewhere to go; it is still in the world, fighting a spiritual battle. Vasks maintains the elements of narrative, contrast, and drama—the hallmarks of the Western musical tradition—in his compositions. For this reason, I find his art more satisfying. Vasks is aware of the contrast of light in dark in life, and he seeks to reflect this dichotomy in his music.
In this respect, Vasks’s music is inseparable from his life experiences as a citizen of Latvia, a Baltic country that suffered under communist domination for many years. Vasks was the son of a Baptist pastor in a country where religion was officially outlawed. Because his father was considered an enemy of the state, Vasks was denied the opportunity to study music and had to travel to nearby Lithuania for his education; he remains largely self-taught as a composer. The fall of the communist regime in the early 1990s was a milestone for Vasks. He had already become a voice for the oppressed Latvian people; now he emerged into the wider world as a composer with a message worth listening to. His reputation has grown steadily since, and his works composed in the 2000s seem to me his best.
Vasks has commented with regard to his heritage, “Our roots are full of sadness and suffering, just as they are in many other Eastern European countries. But in artistic terms, our tragic history has given us a terrific impulse to be creative, to express our emotions.” Indeed, there is a strength and a defiance in Vasks’s music that counterbalances its more tranquil moments, giving it an expressive range that I feel is lacking in some of his peers. His music chimes with something that the Ukrainian-Canadian musician Yaroslav Senyshyn said in an interview for Fanfare magazine: “The post-Soviet musical environment […] carried a sense of existential urgency. Music was not just performance; it was survival, resistance, identity.”
I have glanced at Vasks’s choral music in previous essays* but here I would like to concentrate on his instrumental works, which are just as intensely powerful and moving. Being a violinist, I am grateful for his contributions to that instrument and to music for strings in general. The combination of violin and string orchestra is one that Vasks favors, with always stirring results. An example is one of his best-known compositions, the Violin Concerto No. 1, “Distant Light,” from 1997. The piece was created for Vasks’s lifelong friend and fellow Latvian, violinist Gidon Kremer. Vasks writes for the violin like one who truly knows and understand the instrument (he himself plays the double bass, and you can believe it when you see his burly physique).
The idea of light is inherent in many of Vasks’s compositions. Here, the idea being conveyed is that of “a better future world to come, which cannot yet be recognized but still sensed. A ray of light on the horizon, a glimmer of hope” (Susanne Schmerda). Not for Vasks is the concerto a light, entertaining genre; his concertos are long and emotionally significant dramas for a soloist and orchestra. The composer comments: “In this work, joy and sadness are combined, as so often in my music, but hope prevails in the end.” Sometimes Vasks pushes the violin and the orchestra to the brink of chaos, then pulls back. The composer is not against using light avant-garde elements, including aleatoric techniques (based on randomness or chance) for expressive purposes, creating moments of passionate fury that eventually dissolve back into ethereal calm.
“Distant Light” (Tālā gaisma in the Latvian) encapsulates what Vasks’s music is all about: spiritual solace glimpsed from afar; paradise not yet found, but yearned for.
Vasks’s contributions for the violin have been crowned by two more recent works, his Violin Concerto No. 2, “In Evening Light” (again scored for violin and string orchestra) and Sonata estiva (Summer Sonata) for unaccompanied violin. The concerto was written in 2020, and the sonata just last year. My own summer has been graced by Vasks’s idyll as I work my way through the sonata in the new edition published by Schott. It is music so deceptively simple and consonant—yet so sincere in its expressivity—as to be beyond time and fashion.
The concerto represents the reflection of an older man on his life. It is a contemplative work filled with half-lights and gentle musings. But just when you think Vasks is lulling you into a gentle reverie, he reminds you of the emotional range his music can have. The middle section of the piece moves into more jagged and dissonant territory, as if Vasks is remembering the turmoil of his life. Throughout the work the violin soars above the string orchestra; the concerto concludes in a mood tranquil optimism, with the violin ascending and hovering in the heights. It strikes me that Vasks has composed a musical analogue to Thomas Cole’s great painting “Old Age,” from his series The Voyage of Life. The concerto is nothing less than a tribute to old age, looking back wistfully on life and perhaps with a longing for eternity.
Looking over the Vasks catalog, you notice that he has moved away from the 20th-century tradition of giving works abstract, impersonal titles like Concerto grosso, String Quartet No. 1, or Concert Music. Instead, Vasks graces his works with titles like Lonely Angel, Distant Light, Vox amoris (Voice of Love), and Epiphany, not to mention his Musica trilogy (Musica serena, Musica dolorosa, and Musica appassionata), titles which announce the works’ programmatic intent. Thus, Vasks’s music is unabashedly emotional, concerned with the world beyond music—the world of images and the word. In this respect, Vasks understands the central importance of narrative in the postmodern world. Vasks communicates definite meaning in his music, starting with the poetic titles and continuing with the emotional content of the music itself. The aforementioned Lonely Angel invites the listener to imagine, in the composer’s words, “an angel, flying over the world; the angel looks at the world’s condition with grieving eyes, but an almost imperceptible, loving touch of the angel’s wings brings comfort and healing.”
There was a time when it seemed that modern serious music was in danger of becoming nothing more than a mind game for a small circle of academics. So much emphasis was placed on technique—the way a piece of music was put together—that music’s soul got lost. The music of the experimentalists (people like Boulez, Babbitt, and Stockhausen) had lost contact not only with folk roots but with folks; it had no bearing on the lives of most people, and consequently, and in my view deservedly, it has not survived.
Vasks, and others, showed that the technical means that a composer uses—the use of dissonant or consonant harmonies, for example, which the extreme modernists seemed to elevate to the highest place—is less important than the emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual effect he is seeking to convey. Sincerity and the communication of meaning are the main thing, and whether a composer does this by using a traditional chord or a more innovatively arranged series of pitches does not matter.
Complementary to his embrace of imagery and narrative, Vasks has escaped the framework of classical form in his compositions. He does not write in the standard forms inherited from the 18th century: sonata-allegro, variations, etc., which even 20th-century neoclassicists used. Yet his music always has a strong sense of structure. How does he achieve this? I think there is a compelling emotional logic in Vasks’s works, hard to define objectively. It carries you rhapsodically along, though you don’t quite know how. Debussy tried to escape from the limitations of traditional form, but I often miss the presence of structural backbone in his music, which can be vaporous and wispy.
But Vasks’s music succeeds. He has hit a wonderful balance of combining stillness and contemplation with movement and development in the best Western tradition. Vasks has kept the art of melody alive—again, not a given in the work of other mystical minimalists, who are just as apt to compose sound patterns as a genuine tune. Although often simple, Vasks’s music is never simplistic, and though immediate in its appeal it never panders. It is never heart-on-sleeve and maintains a certain austerity. Like all the great music of the West, it is for both the head and the heart: you can let it simply wash over you in its glorious sound, yet it also repays the closest attention. As I wrote in my review of “In Evening Light” for Fanfare, “In his own unselfconscious way, Vasks carries on the Western musical tradition, with links to Stravinsky and Shostakovich, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky.”
It is significant too that Vasks is, like the Romantics, much concerned with nature. Imitations of birdsong and woodpeckers are frequently to be heard in his works (such as in his First Symphony for strings, subtitled “Voices,” and his lovely Oboe Concerto), and his music has been said to evoke the forests, plains, and coastline along the Baltic Sea, as well as the folk songs and rhythms of Latvia. Vasks is much concerned for the conservation of nature and has spoken out against its degradation. And for all that he is a spokesman for his home country and its beauties and experiences, his art turns out to be universal much like the “nationalist” composers of the classical tradition.
Vasks writes music for an apocalyptic age, in which culture is coming full circle. He does not rebel against the past, because there is no longer anything to rebel against. Instead, Vasks constructs a consistent musical style that conveys personal sincerity and emotional truth. Quite simply, his music communicates because he has lived much and felt deeply. He has achieved what many composers dream of: an utterly unmistakable musical style.
In a normal world, Peteris Vasks would be the most famous composer, or at least one of the most famous, alive. He would be constantly celebrated and his works constantly performed. If you asked someone on the street to “name a modern composer,” the name “Vasks” would come readily to their lips. As things stand, I suppose Mr. Vasks could walk unrecognized into any supermarket, or even concert hall. Yet musicians clearly love to play his music, as evidenced by the scores of recordings of his works, including many works that have been recorded multiple times.
As for listeners, there are many who would enjoy music like Vasks’s but for whom he remains unknown. There are times when listening to Vasks’s music that I think, enraptured, “How can the world not know about this? How is it possible for living, sentient human beings not to be acquainted with this heavenly music?” This is due to a host of reasons, including the triumph of pop over serious culture and a general overproduction in all art forms, creating a sense of overkill. Too many people of good will have been told that “modern music” is rubbish that they need not bother with, and thus many genuinely good artists go unrecognized. Artists like Vasks provide exactly what the world needs: spirituality, depth, presence, beauty. But their message is crowded out by the very noise they are protesting against.
Look upon this essay as my little effort at evangelization. Not that this modern master—with whom I recently discovered I share a birthday—needs my help; he is to my mind one of the select group of artists who can be considered an instant classic.
*See “Spiritual Renewal and Modern Choral Music” and “Music for Contemplation.”
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