Best Of 800% Slower #3 - Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten by Arvo Pärt
Original track here:
Quoted from:
“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 in