The late 1970s saw Arvo Pärt emerge from a long period of compositional silence with a distinctive and innovative new technique. This technique comprised a return to tonality, but without the implied functionality of traditional chord progressions. The new style featured a tonal center that was omnipresent, in lines that confined themselves to tones within the tonic chord. These "tintinnabular" voices (a designation referring to the sound of struck bells) leaped above and dipped beneath melodic voices moving across diatonic scales in largely stepwise motion. The result was a sonority that always maintained a tonal center but that highlighted and explored the various shades of intervals resistant to, or dissonant with, that center.

The style was publicly inaugurated by the 1976 premiere of seven pieces presented under the collective title "tintinnabuli." Most of these works (Pari intervallo and Trivium, for example) made a clean stylistic break from the aesthetically and technically complex collage style that had preceded Pärt's self-imposed sabbatical. Still, one piece in the collection, Wenn Bach Bienen gezüchtet hätte (If Bach had been a Beekeeper), was tied both to the emerging tintinnabular voice as well as the composer's earlier style.

To understand how this piece works, we first need a quick music-note spelling lesson: the German system of associating notes with letters of the alphabet assigns B flat to the letter "B" and B natural to the letter "H." Thus in several of his works the notes B flat-A-C-B natural are interpolated into the music to "secretly" spell BACH. This figure is a chromatic one, winding between four adjacent half steps, and generally poses unique and striking contrapuntal challenges. In If Bach had been a Beekeeper, Pärt utilizes the chromatic density of this figure to create a clever, multidimensional play on music and words.

Originally scored for winds, harpsichord, and tape, and later revised for winds, piano, and strings, the piece has numerous musical layers. At any given moment one is likely to here the same musical figure moving at different rates of speed in different voices—a technique taken to extremes in Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten and Festina Lente. These layers are comprised almost completely of the B-A-C-H motive and its transpositions, and quite frequently both occur at the same time: Bach's name appears horizontally as a motive and vertically as a harmony. This reincarnation of Bach is combined with another: musical material borrowed outright from Bach's Prelude in B minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier. This finds its most obvious musical ancestry in Pärt's Collage über B-A-C-H from 1964. Throughout, the predominant articulation is a buzzing tremolo in the string voices. As the texture gets thicker and thicker, the buzzing noise becomes more frenzied until it resembles an entire swarm of angry bees. One of the cleverest tricks in the work is that it mimics not only the sound of bees, but also the sight. As more and more voices enter, the three parallel black bands on the note stems make the notes themselves look like a hive full of bees, doing some cacophonously accompanied "which-way-to-the-rosebush" dance.

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