Twenty years before the Soviet Union imploded in 1989, the composer Arvo Pärt, who had not always been a compliant servant of the Communist Party, experienced his own loss of confidence and found himself unable to continue to write music. He was in his mid-thirties and had worked for a decade in Soviet radio, albeit in his native Estonia, on the far-flung western fringe of the “empire”, but now he could see only the pointlessness of art and retreated into silence. Seeking to identify the origins of his malaise, he traced Western music back to the early Church, the formulaic invention of plainsong and the ringing of bells. He resumed creativity in the mid-1970s with a simplified, pared-down style he called tintinnabulation because it wallows in the glorious tones and overt