Summa

Summa began life as a choral piece, Pärt's setting of the Credo from the Latin Mass, before he arranged it for strings alone, the version most orchestras and chamber groups now play. There are no movements or breaks to listen for, just one continuous span of a few minutes. The piece is built from Pärt's tintinnabuli technique, in which one voice moves stepwise through a scale while another voice, or several, outline the notes of a single triad, the kind of three-note chord you would find in a simple hymn. In practice this means you hear lines that seem to circle and settle rather than push forward dramatically. Listen for the way the parts enter one after another in close imitation, like a slow-motion round, each line a few beats behind the last, so the texture thickens gradually rather than all at once. There is no big climax; instead the interest lies in the quiet friction between the two kinds of motion, the stepping line and the chord-outlining line, which brush against each other in small dissonances that resolve almost as soon as they appear. The overall feeling is of something turning steadily in place, unhurried and untroubled, ending as quietly as it began.

Pärt composed Summa in 1977 as a choral setting of the Credo, the statement of belief from the Latin Mass, during the period just after he developed his tintinnabuli style, a spare technique built from simple triads and stepwise scales that he arrived at following years of studying early chant and polyphony. He later arranged the piece for string quartet and for string orchestra, and it exists today in several instrumental versions alongside the original choral one. Because the string arrangements strip away the words entirely, Summa is often heard purely as absolute music, its title, Latin for "summit" or "sum total," standing on its own without a sung text. It has become one of Pärt's most widely performed short works, taken up by string orchestras and chamber ensembles as a compact, self-contained piece that needs no additional forces or explanation.