Category: English

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Brian W. Stone, Associate Professor of Cognitive Psychology, Boise State University

When OpenAI released “study mode” in July 2025, the company touted ChatGPT’s educational benefits. “When ChatGPT is prompted to teach or tutor, it can significantly improve academic performance,” the company’s vice president of education told reporters at the product’s launch. But any dedicated teacher would be right to wonder: Is this just marketing, or does scholarly research really support such claims?

While generative AI tools are moving into classrooms at lightning speed, robust research on the question at hand hasn’t moved nearly as fast. Some early studies have shown benefits for certain groups such as computer programming students and English language learners. And there have been a number of other optimistic studies on AI in education, such as one published in the journal Nature in May 2025 suggesting that chatbots may aid learning and higher-order thinking. But scholars in the field have pointed to significant methodological weaknesses in many of these research papers.

Other studies have painted a grimmer picture, suggesting that AI may impair performance or cognitive abilities such as critical thinking skills. One paper showed that the more a student used ChatGPT while learning, the worse they did later on similar tasks when ChatGPT wasn’t available.

In other words, early research is only beginning to scratch the surface of how this technology will truly affect learning and cognition in the long run. Where else can we look for clues? As a cognitive psychologist who has studied how college students are using AI, I have found that my field offers valuable guidance for identifying when AI can be a brain booster and when it risks becoming a brain drain.

Skill comes from effort

Cognitive psychologists have argued that our thoughts and decisions are the result of two processing modes, commonly denoted as System 1 and System 2.

The former is a system of pattern matching, intuition and habit. It is fast and automatic, requiring little conscious attention or cognitive effort. Many of our routine daily activities – getting dressed, making coffee and riding a bike to work or school – fall into this category. System 2, on the other hand, is generally slow and deliberate, requiring more conscious attention and sometimes painful cognitive effort, but often yields more robust outputs.

We need both of these systems, but gaining knowledge and mastering new skills depend heavily on System 2. Struggle, friction and mental effort are crucial to the cognitive work of learning, remembering and strengthening connections in the brain. Every time a confident cyclist gets on a bike, they rely on the hard-won pattern recognition in their System 1 that they previously built up through many hours of effortful System 2 work spent learning to ride. You don’t get mastery and you can’t chunk information efficiently for higher-level processing without first putting in the cognitive effort and strain.

I tell my students the brain is a lot like a muscle: It takes genuine hard work to see gains. Without challenging that muscle, it won’t grow bigger.

What if a machine does the work for you?

Now imagine a robot that accompanies you to the gym and lifts the weights for you, no strain needed on your part. Before long, your own muscles will have atrophied and you’ll become reliant on the robot at home even for simple tasks like moving a heavy box.

AI, used poorly – to complete a quiz or write an essay, say – lets students bypass the very thing they need to develop knowledge and skills. It takes away the mental workout.

Using technology to effectively offload cognitive workouts can have a detrimental effect on learning and memory and can cause people to misread their own understanding or abilities, leading to what psychologists call metacognitive errors. Research has shown that habitually offloading car navigation to GPS may impair spatial memory and that using an external source like Google to answer questions makes people overconfident in their own personal knowledge and memory.

Are there similar risks when students hand off cognitive tasks to AI? One study found that students researching a topic using ChatGPT instead of a traditional web search had lower cognitive load during the task – they didn’t have to think as hard – and produced worse reasoning about the topic they had researched. Surface-level use of AI may mean less cognitive burden in the moment, but this is akin to letting a robot do your gym workout for you. It ultimately leads to poorer thinking skills.

In another study, students using AI to revise their essays scored higher than those revising without AI, often by simply copying and pasting sentences from ChatGPT. But these students showed no more actual knowledge gain or knowledge transfer than their peers who worked without it. The AI group also engaged in fewer rigorous System 2 thinking processes. The authors warn that such “metacognitive laziness” may prompt short-term performance improvements but also lead to the stagnation of long-term skills.

Offloading can be useful once foundations are in place. But those foundations can’t be formed unless your brain does the initial work necessary to encode, connect and understand the issues you’re trying to master.

Using AI to support learning

Returning to the gym metaphor, it may be useful for students to think of AI as a personal trainer who can keep them on task by tracking and scaffolding learning and pushing them to work harder. AI has great potential as a scalable learning tool, an individualized tutor with a vast knowledge base that never sleeps.

AI technology companies are seeking to design just that: the ultimate tutor. In addition to OpenAI’s entry into education, in April 2025 Anthropic released its learning mode for Claude. These models are supposed to engage in Socratic dialogue, to pose questions and provide hints, rather than just giving the answers.

Early research indicates AI tutors can be beneficial but introduce problems as well. For example, one study found high school students reviewing math with ChatGPT performed worse than students who didn’t use AI. Some students used the base version and others a customized tutor version that gave hints without revealing answers. When students took an exam later without AI access, those who’d used base ChatGPT did much worse than a group who’d studied without AI, yet they didn’t realize their performance was worse. Those who’d studied with the tutor bot did no better than students who’d reviewed without AI, but they mistakenly thought they had done better. So AI didn’t help, and it introduced metacognitive errors.

Even as tutor modes are refined and improved, students have to actively select that mode and, for now, also have to play along, deftly providing context and guiding the chatbot away from worthless, low-level questions or sycophancy.

The latter issues may be fixed with better design, system prompts and custom interfaces. But the temptation of using default-mode AI to avoid hard work will continue to be a more fundamental and classic problem of teaching, course design and motivating students to avoid shortcuts that undermine their cognitive workout.

As with other complex technologies such as smartphones, the internet or even writing itself, it will take more time for researchers to fully understand the true range of AI’s effects on cognition and learning. In the end, the picture will likely be a nuanced one that depends heavily on context and use case.

But what we know about learning tells us that deep knowledge and mastery of a skill will always require a genuine cognitive workout – with or without AI.

Brian W. Stone does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How does AI affect how we learn? A cognitive psychologist explains why you learn when the work is hard – https://theconversation.com/how-does-ai-affect-how-we-learn-a-cognitive-psychologist-explains-why-you-learn-when-the-work-is-hard-262863

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Scott Malia, Associate Professor of Theatre, College of the Holy Cross

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.

Scott Malia does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. 40 years ago, the first AIDS movies forced Americans to confront a disease they didn’t want to see – https://theconversation.com/40-years-ago-the-first-aids-movies-forced-americans-to-confront-a-disease-they-didnt-want-to-see-262421

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Patrick Aguilar, Managing Director of Health, Washington University in St. Louis

The share of doctors who belong to unions is rising quickly at a time when organized labor is losing ground with other professions. The Conversation U.S. asked Patrick Aguilar, a Washington University in St. Louis pulmonologist and management professor, to explain why the number of physicians joining unions is growing – a trend that appears likely to continue.

How long have there been health care unions?

U.S. nurses first joined labor unions in 1896. Today, about 1 in 5 registered nurses are union members, twice the rate of unionization in all professions.

The first physicians’ union formed in 1934, when hospital residents – doctors in training who tended then, as now, to be paid relatively little and forced to work long hours – organized to demand higher pay and shorter shifts. For the next eight decades, those unions grew slowly.

But the pace has picked up. The share of doctors who belong to unions rose from 5.7% in 2014 to 7.2% in 2019. By 2024, an estimated 8% of physicians were union members.

This swift growth contrasts with declining union membership overall. The share of American workers in unions fell by more than half, from 20.1% to 9.9%, between 1983 and 2024.

Residents and interns are particularly interested in joining unions. Nearly 2 in 3 have said they might want to join one. Membership in the Committee of Interns and Residents, a chapter of Service Employees International Union, rose by nearly 14% to 37,000 between late 2024 and early 2025. By September 2025, the union was saying that its ranks had grown to more than 40,000.

Several other U.S. unions also represent physicians. Doctors Council, which is also affiliated with Service Employees International Union, represents physicians, dentists, optometrists, podiatrists and veterinarians. The Union of American Physicians and Dentists, part of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, says it has at least 7,000 members.

Aren’t doctors too rich for labor organizing?

Just like labor unions that represent electricians or teachers, unions that represent doctors seek better working conditions, higher pay and better benefits for their members. While the typical U.S. doctor earns nearly US$240,000 a year, about four times what the typical American worker makes, their compensation varies widely depending on their medical specialty. A pediatric surgeon, for example, can earn twice as much as a pediatrician.

Despite their high wages, according to a poll of over 1,000 physicians, as many as 15% of physicians said they had cut back on their personal expenses, and 40% expected to delay retirement for financial reasons. The education and training required to become a doctor is lengthy and expensive, often leading to large amounts of student debt.

Additionally, many physicians are compensated for patient visits and not for work done outside of the exam room. The extra hours needed to document work, address patient concerns and maintain continuing education are often uncompensated, significantly reducing physicians’ effective hourly earnings.

Other unions advocate for higher wages and better conditions in well-compensated professions.

The National Football League Players Association is an example of a union with highly paid members that still advocates for their increased compensation. NFL players now earn a median salary of $860,000.

Baseball players earn even more. They have a median salary of $1.35 million, and all of the players are represented by the Major League Baseball Players Association, a union.

Why would doctors join unions?

An American Medical Association survey conducted in 1983 found that 75.8% of physicians were owners of their primary clinical practice. Four decades later, nearly 80% of physicians are employed by health care systems or other corporations.

As employees, physicians are now eligible to unionize and may have an interest in doing so to bargain with employers who set working conditions and compensation.

Residents and fellows, on the other hand, have been employees for much longer because of the structure of their training programs. Residents work longer hours, are paid significantly less and are obligated to complete their training programs in order to attain specialty certification.

These differences help explain the longer history of labor organizing for physician trainees.

Surveys point to several other possible causes besides concerns about employers.

An American Medical Association survey of 13,000 physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants in 2022 reflected rates of burnout exceeding 50% in several key specialties. More than half of those responding said they felt undervalued by their employer.

In 2023, the University of Michigan’s Center for Health and Research Transformation surveyed over 29,000 Michigan physicians. About 85% of them said administrative and regulatory requirements were a significant source of workplace stress.

The widespread adoption of electronic health records over the past 25 years, which has improved some aspects of medical diagnosis and treatment, has also given doctors more administrative responsibilities. Doctors spend nearly two additional hours updating electronic health records or doing related administrative tasks for every hour they spend with patients, according to one estimate.

Keeping the records up to date can contribute to burnout.

Are doctors worried about job security?

In recent years, nurse practitioners and physician assistants have taken on responsibilities previously reserved for doctors. Nurse practitioners or physician assistants saw patients for about 1 in 4 medical appointments, according to a 2023 study, up from around 1 in 5 a decade earlier.

Given significant differences in compensation between physicians and other kinds of health care providers, this trend raises concerns about the potential for health care employers to employ fewer doctors to save money on staff salaries.

Separately, there are growing concerns about the potential for the use of artificial intelligence and automation to replace some of the tasks that doctors do today.

Can labor organizing harm patients?

In April 2025, the American College of Physicians, which has 160,000 members, released a position paper with recommendations for responsible collective bargaining for doctors.

This group felt compelled to encourage the ethical engagement of its members in the midst of labor organizing because their work is often lifesaving and can be dangerous to disrupt due to strikes or other labor actions.

No study has empirically evaluated whether a doctor’s union membership affects their patients’ health. However, a 2022 meta-analysis of 17 studies found no significant impact on death rates when health care workers go on strike.

Despite the potential benefits, some doctors remain concerned that unionization may create divides among physicians, interfere with their ability in some cases to negotiate directly with their employers, and add layers of bureaucracy that don’t do patients or medical professionals any good.

Do doctors ever go on strike?

It’s historically been rare in the U.S., but that could be changing.

In January 2025, 70 doctors who belong to the Pacific Northwest Hospital Medicine Association joined thousands of nurses in a strike against Portland, Oregon-based Providence Health after more than a year of failed contract negotiations.

The strike lasted 27 days, delaying some elective procedures and making some emergency room wait times longer. Some patients had to go to other hospitals. The agreement the hospital ultimately reached with physicians boosted pay, expanded sick leave and included a commitment to change staffing models.

In June 2025, picket lines formed outside of four Minnesota health clinics for the first time in the state’s history. Members of the Doctors Council SEIU union were protesting after more than 18 months of failed negotiations for a new contract. The doctors, who all work for the Allina Health chain of hospitals, health clinics and urgent care sites, are seeking higher compensation, smaller workloads and more support staff.

Although no timeline has been announced, union members have authorized a strike if negotiations continue to fail. As of early September 2025, those negotiations were ongoing.

Patrick Aguilar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Doctors are joining unions in a bid to improve working conditions and raise wages in a stressful health care system – https://theconversation.com/doctors-are-joining-unions-in-a-bid-to-improve-working-conditions-and-raise-wages-in-a-stressful-health-care-system-259232

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Jeffers Engelhardt, Professor of Music, Amherst College

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.

Jeffers Engelhardt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Sacred texts and ‘little bells’: The building blocks of Arvo Pärt’s musical masterpieces – https://theconversation.com/sacred-texts-and-little-bells-the-building-blocks-of-arvo-parts-musical-masterpieces-261519