Composed in the same year as the cello concerto "Pro et contra," Arvo Pärt's Symphony No. 2 from 1966 shares with the concerto an overall sense of stylistic opposition and conflict. This attitude of confrontation seems to represent rather accurately the aesthetic quandary the composer found himself in at the time—one that would soon lead him to withdraw from public composition altogether for a period of several years. When he re-emerged in the late 1970s with the famous "tintinnabuli" works such as Pari intervallo, Trivium, and the Missa Sillabica, his style had become one dominated by an omnipresent tonality and a taste for transparent, blendable timbres. While these new words were a far cry from the aggressive and even acerbic works of the late 60s, they were at least somewhat related by the rigor with which Pärt applies their constituent musical processes. In the later works, the process involves the careful construction of tintinnabular counterpoint; here in the Second Symphony, the musical procedure is a strictly serialist one, juxtaposed uncomfortably with tonal and aleatoric material.

Although the Cello Concerto and the Second Symphony both alternate between opposing compositional styles, the confrontation in the symphony seems much more dangerous, and casualties seem more likely. The orchestra and soloist in the concerto seem to be battling with toy weapons, wielding their stylistic references with carefully-calculated ineptitude: the solo cello is continually lingering after everyone else cuts off; when the orchestra is at a loss for words in the third movement, it suddenly ends the work with a ridiculously out-of-place baroque cadence. On the other hand, the Symphony asserts its allusions with a completely straight face, and the listener can sense the urgency of the aesthetic crisis that the work embodies.

The Symphony doesn't wield styles like toys—but it in fact wields actual toys, and with chilling effect. The piece's multifaceted texture is made of improvised pizzicati in the strings, pointillistic bleeps in the woodwinds, and (eerie in this context) nightmarish rubber squeaky toys. Prominent melodic lines in the brass and woodwinds are constructed from tone-rows, and eventually the dodecaphonic structure is used as a basis for vertical triadic constructions, built above the tone row and moving parallel to it. The successive triads are separated by sudden, jolting clusters covering the 12-note chromatic gamut, intensifying this uneasy combination of dodecaphonic and triadic material. At the end of the movement the crowd of pitches disperses, leaving only an unresolved D dominant seventh chord.

The second movement is characterized by pointillist tones scattered throughout the woodwinds. These pitches follow tone-row procedures, covering a broad range and drawing sharp angles between successive pitches. Below this Pärt gradually fills out the texture with sustained brass and clamoring percussion.

The third movement is the most violent, beginning with a huge chord in the strings and relentlessly rhythmic octaves in the timpani. These are interrupted by sudden flurries of notes in the strings and winds that appear with ever-increasing frequency. Once again a wall of sound is constructed, which finally topples to reveal a disconcertingly gentle rendition of Tchaikovsky's children's piece "Sweet Day-Dream." Though the lilting tune survives several dissonant attempts at subterfuge, it ends inconclusively just before the resolution of a cadence.

Clearly, Pärt himself has arrived at no satisfactory conclusions either. The angst reflected in the Symphony No. 2 is not an arbitrarily chosen subject, but a musical manifestation of a very real crisis. Pärt would address this confrontation once again in Credo (1968), before setting out in search of more satisfactory solutions.

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