ESTONIAN SYMPHONIC MUSIC. THE FIRST CENTURY 1896-1996.
composers this work won first prize in its genre. The childish world, full of good
aspirations and feelings is seen as an ideal.
Pärt confined himself to instrumental music and sought an adequate expression,
and turned to use of dodecaphony. Later it became quite a novel technique in Estonian
music. His work was a milestone, demonstrating the possibilities but also the
boundaries of this technique. In 1960 Nekrolog (Obituary), a short one-movement
symphonic work was the transition to dodecaphonic technique, the first in Soviet
music. As Pärt told me he started to compose Nekrolog in the summer of 1960 and so
this work was quite an independent undertaking. For preparation he had got two books
through his Professor Heino Eller: Ernst Křenek’s Zwölfton-Kontrapunkt Studien
(Mainz, Schott 1952), and Herbert Eimert’s Lehrbuch der Zwölftontechnik (Wiesbaden,
Breitkopf und Härtel, 1958). At the beginning of the Sixties much was spoken and
annaabi.ee 
