"And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever... that there should be time no longer." -Revelations 10:5-6 (KJV)

Hobby cosmologists have always been interested in trying to conceive of time and space in new dimensions, across different planes. In recent years this interest has sparked a whole field of pop-science literature that blends physics with metaphysics, Newton with Nostradamus. All of these allude to the same general question: what would space or time look like from the outside?

Miserere, like much of the music of Arvo Pärt, poses similar questions. The musical processes with which he constructs this work combine strict, almost Newtonian laws of counterpoint with a harmonic stasis that suspends any sense of trajectory. The result is a kind of sonorous quantum cloud in which—at particular moments—tension and resolution no longer have causal, horizontal and vertical relationships, but rather occupy the same space at the same time.

The work calls for a large and unusual ensemble: choir and soloists; a wind quartet; trumpet and trombone; a large battery of percussion; organ; and electric guitar and bass. This unusual emphasis on instrumental color marks Miserere as rather unique within Pärt's output.

The work relies on Pärt's trademark "tintinnabular" technique, which first emerged in the mid-1970s. Named after a Latin word for bell, this style resonates with an omnipresent tonic while incorporating complex layers of other sounds on top of it. This is accomplished by combining scalar, diatonic voices that move in simple melodic lines and arcs, with voices that maintain the tonic center by confining themselves to notes within the tonic triad. Despite the variety of striking harmonic and textural effects achieved in Miserere, the interaction between the melodic and triadic voices is controlled by a rather rigid set of contrapuntal rules, the observance of which Pärt only rarely suspends.

The text is taken from two sources: the "Miserere" passage beginning in the third verse of Psalm 50, and thirteenth-century writer Thomas de Celano's prophetic Dies irae.

The work begins with the third verse of the psalm, set in a cool, sparse texture. An unaccompanied tenor intones the text one word at a time, with the kind of careful recitational declamation found in Pärt's Magnificat and his Seven Magnificat Antiphons. Between words, the clarinet leaps gingerly between widely spaced chord tones, while a bass clarinet provides a drone. The texture thickens in the fourth verse, and the instrumental interpolations become more active. The remaining vocal soloists join in, and a timpani roll gradually builds from ppp to ff. At this point, the entire ensemble suddenly enters on a startling fortissimo, as Pärt interrupts the psalm text and shift to the apocalyptic Dies irae. Seven verses of this poem are given, followed by several psalm verses and ending with the eighth Dies irae verse.

It is in the central Dies irae section that Pärt engages in one of his time games. This section is constructed as a mensuration canon, a technique present in several of his works. This technique builds layers of texture made up of the same musical material moving at different speeds—in this case, a descending A minor scale moving at five different rates concurrently. In portraying the end of the world, Pärt in effect has built a time-suspending musical hologram: a linear musical figure that occupies a given span of time is viewed concurrently from various angles and distances.

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