Minimalist Icons: Vasks, Pärt & Górecki

Beginning in the 1970s, composers influenced by so-called minimalist music began fusing the repetition and tonal progressions associated with this movement with religious plainchant and motives of liturgical music. One of the best-known works to synthesize these elements, Henryk Górecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” is among the few classical works to ever rank on the Billboard charts. A setting of three Polish laments—a 15th-century text of the Virgin Mary lamenting the crucifixion of Jesus, a bit of graffiti scrawled on a Gestapo prison, and a mother mourning the loss of her son during an early 20th-century Polish uprising—the symphony has been used to powerful effect in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, Peter Weir’s Fearless, Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat, and many others. Arvo Pärt, “whose music demands love and dedication from its interpreters yet almost nothing of its listeners, offering a timeless sound redolent of both the Renaissance and modern Minimalism,” (The New York Ti