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The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, who turns 90 on Sept. 11, 2025, is one of the most frequently performed contemporary classical composers in the world. Beyond the concert stage and cathedral choir, Pärt’s music features heavily in film and television soundtracks: “There Will Be Blood,” “Thin Red Line” or “Wit,” for instance. It is often used to evoke profound emotions and transcendent spirituality.

Many Estonians grew up hearing the music Pärt wrote for children’s films and Estonian cinema classics in the 1960s and ‘70s. Popes and Orthodox patriarchs honor him, and Pärt’s music has received the highest levels of recognition, including Grammy Awards. In 2025, Pärt is being celebrated in Estonia, at Carnegie Hall and around the world.

Behind much of Pärt’s popularity – and his listeners’ devotion – is his engagement with sacred Christian texts and Orthodox Christian spirituality. Yet his music has inspired a broad range of artists and thinkers: Icelandic singer Björk, who admires its beauty and discipline; the theater artist Robert Wilson, who was drawn to its quality of time; and Christian theologians, who appreciate its “bright sadness.”

As a music scholar with expertise in Estonian music and Orthodox Christianity, and a longtime Pärt fan, I am fascinated by how Pärt’s exploration of Christian traditions – at once subtle and fervent – appeals to so many. How does this happen musically?

Tintinnabuli

Pärt emerged from a period of personal artistic crisis in 1976. In a now-legendary concert, he introduced the world to new music composed using a technique he invented called “tintinnabuli,” an onomatopoeic Latin word meaning “little bells.”

Tintinnabuli is music reduced to its elemental components: simple melodic lines derived from sacred Christian texts or mathematical designs and married to basic harmonies. As Pärt describes it, tintinnabuli is the benefit of reduction rather than complexity – freeing the elemental beauty of his music and the message of his texts.

This was a departure from Pärt’s earlier modernist and experimental music, and expressed a yearslong struggle to reconcile his newfound commitment to Orthodox Christianity and his rigorous artistic ideals. Pärt’s journey is documented in the dozens of notebooks he kept, beginning in the 1970s: religious texts, diary entries, drawings and ideas for musical compositions – a documentary trove of Christian musical creativity.

Tintinnabuli was inspired, in part, by Pärt’s interest in much earlier styles of Christian music, including Gregorian chant – the single-voice singing of Roman Catholicism – and Renaissance polyphony, which weaves together multiple melodic lines. Because of its associations with the church, this music was ideologically fraught in an anti-religious Soviet Estonia.

In Pärt’s notebooks from the 1970s, there are pages and pages of musical sketches where he works out early music-inspired approaches to texts and prayers – the seeds of tintinnabuli. The technique became his answer to existential creative questions: How can music reconcile human subjectivity and divine truths? How can a composer get out of the way, so to speak, to let the sounds of sacred texts resonate? How can artists and audiences approach music so that, to use Pärt’s famous expression, “every blade of grass has the status of a flower”?

In a 2003 conversation with the Italian musicologist Enzo Restagno, Pärt’s wife, Nora, offered an equation to understand how tintinnabuli works: 1+1 = 1.

The first element – the first “1” – is melody, as singer and conductor Paul Hillier lays out in his 1997 book on Pärt. Melody expresses a subjective experience of moving through the world. It centers around a given musical note: the “A” key on the piano, for instance.

The second element – the “+1” – is tintinnabuli itself: the presence of three pitches, sounding together as a bell-like halo: A, C, E.

Finally, the third element – the “= 1” – is the unity of melodic and tintinnabuli voices in a single sound, oriented around a central musical note.

Formulas

Here’s the crux of Arvo Pärt’s work: the relationship of 1+1, melody and harmony, is ordered not by moment-to-moment choices, but by formulas meant to magnify the sound and structure of sacred texts.

A simple tintinnabuli formula might go like this: If the melody rises four notes with four syllables of text, the notes of the tintinnabuli triad will follow beneath that line without overlapping. It supports and steers. Or if the melody falls five notes with five syllables of text, the notes of the tintinnabuli triad will alternate above and below that line to create a different musical texture – all organized around symmetry.

Pärt often lets the number of syllables in a word, the length of a phrase or verse, and the sound of a language shape his formulas. That is why Pärt’s music in English, with its many single-syllable words, consonant clusters and diphthongs, sounds one way. And that is why his music in Church Slavonic, the liturgical language for many Orthodox Christians, sounds another way.

Tintinnabuli is about simplicity and beauty. The genius of Pärt’s work is how his formulas feel like the musical expression of timeless truths. In a 1978 interview with the journalist Ivalo Randalu, Nora Pärt recalled what her husband once said about tintinnabuli’s formulas: “I know a great secret, but I know it only through music, and I can only express it through music.”

Silence

If this all seems coldly formulaic, it isn’t. There is a sensuousness to Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli music that connects with listeners’ bodily experience. Pärt’s formulas, born out of long, prayerful periods with sacred texts, offer beauty in the warmth and friction of relationships: melody and tintinnabuli, word and the limits of language, sounds and silence.

“For me, ‘silent’ means the ‘nothing’ from which God created the world,” Pärt told the Estonian musicologist Leo Normet in 1988. “Ideally, a silent pause is something sacred.”

Silence is a common trope in Pärt’s music – indeed, the second movement of his tintinnabuli masterpiece “Tabula rasa,” the title work on the 1984 ECM Records release that brought him to global attention, is “Silentium.”

Any sounding music is not silent, of course – and, in human terms, silence is largely metaphorical, since we cannot escape sound into the silence of absolute zero or a vacuum.

But Pärt’s silence is different. It is spiritual stillness communicated through his musical formulas but made sensible through the action of human performers. It is a composer’s silence as he gets out of the way of a sacred text’s musicality to communicate its truth. Without paradox, Pärt’s popularity today may well arise from the silence of his music.

First it was referred to as a “mysterious illness.” Later it was called “gay cancer,” “gay plague” and “GRID,” an acronym for gay-related immune deficiency. Most egregiously, some called it “4H disease” – shorthand for “homosexuals, heroin addicts, hemophiliacs and Haitians,” the populations most afflicted in the early days.

While these names were ultimately replaced by AIDS – and later, after the virus was identified, by HIV – they reflected two key realities about AIDS at the time: a lack of understanding about the disease and its strong association with gay men.

Although the first report in the mainstream press about AIDS appeared in 1981, the first movies to explore the disease wouldn’t come for four more years.

When the feature film “Buddies” and the television film “An Early Frost” premiered 40 years ago, in the fall of 1985, AIDS had belatedly been breaking into the public consciousness.

Earlier that year, the first off-Broadway plays about AIDS opened: “As Is” by William Hoffman and “The Normal Heart” by writer and activist Larry Kramer. That summer, actor Rock Hudson disclosed that he had AIDS, becoming the first major celebrity to do so. Hudson, who died in October 1985, was a friend of President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan. Reagan, who had been noticeably silent on the subject of the disease, would go on to make his first – albeit brief – public remarks about AIDS in September 1985.

Five days before Reagan’s speech, “Buddies,” an independent film made for US$27,000 and shot in nine days, premiered at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco on Sept. 12, 1985.

A film on the front lines

If you haven’t heard of “Buddies,” that’s not surprising; the film mostly played art houses and festivals before disappearing.

Its filmmaker, Arthur J. Bressan Jr., was best known for his gay pornographic films, although he’d also made documentaries such as “Gay USA.” “Buddies” would go on to reach a wider audience thanks to a 2018 video release by Vinegar Syndrome, a distribution company that focuses on restoring cult cinema, exploitation films and other obscure titles.

It was inspired by the real-life buddies program at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an organization Kramer co-founded. At the time, many people dying of the disease had been rejected by family and friends, so a buddy might be the only person who visited a terminal AIDS patient.

The film feels like a play, in that most of the movie takes place in a single room and features just two characters: a naive young gay man named David and a young AIDS patient named Robert. Over the course of the film, the characters open up about their lives and their fears about the growing epidemic. It also includes a sex scene – something other early AIDS films completely avoided – in which David and Robert engage in safer sex.

AIDS packaged for the masses

The remarkably frank and intimate approach to the epidemic in “Buddies” contrasts sharply to the television film “An Early Frost,” which premiered on NBC on Nov. 11, 1985.

The film’s protagonist is a successful Chicago lawyer named Michael who hasn’t come out to his family, much to the distress of his long-term partner, Peter. When Michael finds out he has AIDS, he’s forced to come out to his parents, both as gay and as having AIDS.

Much of the film deals with Michael’s self-acceptance and his attempts to mend his relationships. Yet the production of “An Early Frost” was fraught with concerns about depicting both homosexuality and AIDS. Unlike David and Robert, Michael and Peter show no physical affection – they barely touch each other.

Knowledge of AIDS was still evolving – a test for HIV was approved in March 1985 – so screenwriters and life partners Daniel Lipman and Ron Cowen went through 13 revisions of the script. The real-life fears and misconceptions about how AIDS could and could not be transmitted were central to the storyline, adding extra pressure to be accurate in the face of evolving understanding of the virus.

Despite losing NBC $500,000 in advertisers, “An Early Frost” drew 34 million viewers and was showered with Emmy nominations the following year.

A quilt of stories emerges

“Buddies” and “An Early Frost” opened up AIDS and HIV as subject matters for film and television.

They begat two lanes of HIV storytelling that continue to this day.

The first is an approach geared to mainstream audiences that tends to avoid controversial issues such as sex or religion and instead focuses on characters who grapple with both the illness and the stigma of the virus.

The second is an indie approach that’s often more confrontational, irreverent and angry at the injustice and indifference AIDS patients faced.

The former approach is seen in 1993’s “Philadelphia,” which earned Tom Hanks his first Oscar. The critically and commercially successful film shares a number of story points with “An Early Frost”: Hanks’ character, a big-city lawyer, finds out he is HIV positive and must confront bias head-on. HIV also features prominently in later films such as “Precious” (2009) and “Dallas Buyers Club” (2013), both of which, like “Philadelphia,” became awards darlings.

The edgier, more critical approach can be seen in the New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s, a film movement that developed as a response to the epidemic. Gregg Araki’s “The Living End” (1992) is a key film in the movment: It tells the story of two HIV-positive men who become pseudo-vigilantes in the wake of their diagnoses.

Somewhere in between is “Longtime Companion” (1990), which was the first film about AIDS to receive a wide release and tracks the impact of the epidemic on a fictional group of gay men throughout the 1980s. The film was written by gay playwright and screenwriter Craig Lucas and directed by Norman Rene, who died of AIDS six years after the film’s release.

Studios still leery

In many ways, television is where the real breakthroughs have happened and continue to happen.

The first television episode to deal with AIDS appeared on the medical drama “St. Elsewhere” in 1983; AIDS was also the subject of episodes in the sitcoms “Mr. Belvedere,” “The Golden Girls” and “Designing Women.” “Killing All the Right People” was the title of the latter’s special episode – a phrase the show’s writer and co-creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason heard while her mother was being treated for AIDS.

More recently, producer Ryan Murphy has made a cottage industry of representations of queer people, particularly those with HIV. His stage revivals of “The Normal Heart” and Mart Crowley’s 1968 play “The Boys in the Band” were later adapted into films for television and streaming. He also produced “Pose,” a three-season series about drag ball culture in the 1980s that stars queer characters of color, several of whom are HIV positive.

Yet for all of these strides, representations of HIV in film are still hard to come by. In fact, out of the 256 films released by major distributors in 2024, the number of HIV-postive characters amounted to … zero.

Perhaps movie studios are less willing to risk even a character with HIV given the drop in movie theater attendance in the age of streaming.

If you think it’s an exaggeration to suggest that people might not want to be seen going to the theater to watch a film about characters with HIV, the results of a 2021 GLAAD survey may surprise you.

It found that the stigma around HIV is still very high, particularly for HIV-positive people working in schools and hospitals. One-third of respondents were unaware that medication is available to prevent the transmission of HIV. More than half didn’t know that HIV-positive people can reach undetectable status and not transmit the virus to others.

Another important finding from the survey: Only about half of the nonqueer respondents had seen a TV show or film about someone with HIV.

This reflects both the progress made since “Buddies” and “An Early Frost” and also why these films still matter today. They were released at a time when there was almost no cultural representation of HIV, and misinformation and disinformation were rampant. There have been so many advances, in both the treatment of HIV and its visibility in popular culture. That visibility still matters, because there’s still much more than can be done to end the stigma.