Many works within Arvo Pärt's output have been arranged for string quartet; the composer pared down Summa from its original forces, and Fratres is available for performance by more than a half dozen different instrumental combinations. Still, by the turn of the century Pärt's Psalom stood as the only work-other than some early student compositions-to have been originally conceived for four stings. Psalom is an extremely spare piece, even by Pärt's standards, and not just in its instrumentation. It consist of nine statements of theme, each one not so much a variation of the line but a reshuffling of its constituent elements-distinguishing itself from the others in the same subtle way in which one cloud out of several asserts its identity. The work utilizes sonorities from Pärt's signature "tintinnabula" style. Developed in the 1970s after years of introspection and experimentation (as well as careful analysis of medieval and renaissance composers like Machaut, Josquin, and Ockeghem), the tintinnabula technique seeks to glean the expressive essence from tonality while shedding the semiotics of "function." As a result, works such as Psalom are unquestionably tonal, but this tonic focus feels more like a center of gravity than a destination. This is because in the tintinnabula system, the tonic is always present, within lines that confine themselves to tonic chord tones only. Set against these so-called tintinnabula voices are melodic voices that move largely in scalar, diatonic motion. Since we never really leave the tonic, we never feel that urgent desire for return that characterizes romantic-era tonality (take, for example, the unbearably drawn out dominant chord that precedes the return of the tonic in the Liebestod). The usually homophonic, chord-by-chord texture of the tintinnabula process is made even more serene in Psalom, in that Pärt engages or disengaged the tintinnabula voices at will, frequently letting the melodic voice(s) carve out their austere lines without placing them in contrapuntal resistance to any tintinnabula lines. Elsewhere, drones make the tonic center omnipresent. All of the nine variations occupy more or less the same range except for the sixth, which features a sustained pedal tone that drops anchor in the deepest waters of the ensemble's range, with profound effect. One can read this piece as a portrayal of-or perhaps the very act of-some kind of personal religious devotional. The title (Psalom = "psalm") suggests a kind of concentrated spiritual poetry, and Pärt himself tells us that the combination of melodic and tintinnabula voices carries various religious symbolisms: sin and redemption, humanity and divinity, the immortal spirit and its mortal tabernacle. Of all the tintinnabula works whose process evokes these attitudes, the diminished forces and materials of Psalom seem to do so with an added measure of humility.

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