Stabat Mater is a musical setting of the

Stabat Mater The Stabat Mater is a 13th-century Christian hymn to the Virgin Mary that portrays her suffering as mother during the crucifixion of her son Jesus Christ. Its author may be either the Franciscan friar Jacopone da Todi or Pope Innocent III.Saba ...

sequence In mathematics, a sequence is an enumerated collection of objects in which repetitions are allowed and order matters. Like a set, it contains members (also called ''elements'', or ''terms''). The number of elements (possibly infinite) is cal ...

composed by

Arvo Pärt Arvo Pärt (; born 11 September 1935) is an Estonian composer of contemporary classical music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs tintinnabuli, a compositional technique he invented. Pärt's music is in p ...

in 1985, a commission of the Alban Berg Foundation. The piece is scored for a trio of singers:

soprano A soprano () is a type of classical singing voice and has the highest vocal range of all voice types. The soprano's vocal range (using scientific pitch notation) is from approximately middle C (C4) = 261 Hertz, Hz to A5 in Choir, choral ...

alto The musical term alto, meaning "high" in Italian (Latin: '' altus''), historically refers to the contrapuntal part higher than the tenor and its associated vocal range. In four-part voice leading alto is the second-highest part, sung in ch ...

, and

tenor A tenor is a type of male singing voice whose vocal range lies between the countertenor and baritone voice types. It is the highest male chest voice type. Composers typically write music for this voice in the range from the second B below m ...

; and a trio of string instruments:

violin The violin, sometimes referred to as a fiddle, is a wooden chordophone, and is the smallest, and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in regular use in the violin family. Smaller violin-type instruments exist, including the violino picc ...

viola The viola ( , () ) is a string instrument of the violin family, and is usually bowed when played. Violas are slightly larger than violins, and have a lower and deeper sound. Since the 18th century, it has been the middle or alto voice of the ...

, and

violoncello The violoncello ( , ), commonly abbreviated as cello ( ), is a middle pitched bowed (sometimes plucked and occasionally hit) string instrument of the violin family. Its four strings are usually tuned in perfect fifths: from low to high, C ...

; it has a duration of approximately 24 minutes. A version with expanded forces (mixed chorus and orchestra) was premiered on 12 June 2008 at the Großer Musikvereinssaal during the Wiener Festwochen 2008 with Kristjan Järvi conducting the Singverein der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien and the Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich. This new version was commissioned by the Tonkünstler-Orchester. ''Stabat Mater'' is composed in Pärt's characteristic

tintinnabuli Tintinnabuli (singular. ''tintinnabulum''; from the Latin ''tintinnabulum'', "a bell") is a compositional style created by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, introduced in his '' Für Alina'' (1976), and used again in ''Spiegel im Spiegel'' (1978). ...

style (which he has employed nearly exclusively since 1976) in which arpeggiations of a

major Major most commonly refers to: * Major (rank), a military rank * Academic major, an academic discipline to which an undergraduate student formally commits * People named Major, including given names, surnames, nicknames * Major and minor in musi ...

minor Minor may refer to: Common meanings * Minor (law), a person not under the age of certain legal activities. * Academic minor, a secondary field of study in undergraduate education Mathematics * Minor (graph theory), a relation of one graph to an ...

triad are combined with ascending or descending

diatonic Diatonic and chromatic are terms in music theory that are used to characterize scales. The terms are also applied to musical instruments, intervals, chords, notes, musical styles, and kinds of harmony. They are very often used as a pair ...

scales Scale or scales may refer to: Mathematics * Scale (descriptive set theory), an object defined on a set of points * Scale (ratio), the ratio of a linear dimension of a model to the corresponding dimension of the original * Scale factor, a number ...

Structure

The text of the

consists of ten

stanza In poetry, a stanza (; from Italian ''stanza'', ; ) is a group of lines within a poem, usually set off from others by a blank line or indentation. Stanzas can have regular rhyme and metrical schemes, but they are not required to have either. ...

s, in an AABCCB

rhyme A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds (usually the exact same phonemes) in the final Stress (linguistics), stressed syllables and any following syllables of two or more words. Most often, this kind of rhyming (''perfect rhyming'') is consciou ...

scheme and a syllabic meter of 887887. The poetic feet are all

trochee In poetic metre, a trochee ( ) is a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, unstressed one, in qualitative meter, as found in English, and in modern linguistics; or in quantitative meter, as found in ...

s. This verse form is characteristic of the later metrical sequence. As in several of Pärt's works, measure breaks are determined not by regular groupings of beats and stress, but rather by the words themselves. Pärt places dotted lines in the score at line breaks in the poetry, and as in '' Passio'', there is usually a rest following any punctuation. On a large scale, Pärt frames the ten stanzas with a 108- measure introduction and coda nearly identical in structure and musical materials; the vocalists sing only the word "Amen". Within these frames, Pärt divides the ten stanzas into four groups, separated by instrumental interludes of a vastly different musical character. The four groups are stanzas 1–2, 3–5, 6–8, and 9–10. This grouping of 2+3+3+2 and its surrounding frame creates a perfectly

symmetrical Symmetry () in everyday life refers to a sense of harmonious and beautiful proportion and balance. In mathematics, the term has a more precise definition and is usually used to refer to an object that is invariant under some transformations ...

structure. It is possible to measure each of these sections' lengths in terms of both the measures created by the number of words and the rhythmic groupings of the underlying triple pulse. The chart below represents the proportions by means of the rhythmic groupings. The introduction is exactly the same length as the coda, the 2nd and 3rd interlude are each half the length of the 1st interlude, and stanzas 1–2 and 3–5 are roughly equal to 9–10 and 4–6.

References

* Chiesa, Silvana. "Un progetto di analisi stilistica dello Stabat mater di Arvo Pärt" project for stylistic analysis of Arvo Pärt's Stabat Mater ''Analisi''

taly Taly () is a types of inhabited localities in Russia, rural locality (a Village#Russia, settlement) in Alexandrovskoye Urban Settlement, Alexandrovsky District, Perm Krai, Russia. The population was 17 as of 2010. There are 11 streets. Geography ...

Vol. 6; Issue 18; Sept 1995, pp. 12–21. * Hillier, Paul. ''Arvo Part''. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. * Jeffers, Ron. ''Translations and Annotations of Choral Repertoire, Volume 1: Sacred Latin Texts''. Corvallis, Oregon: Earthsongs, 1988. * Supin, Dorian. ''Arvo Pärt: 24 Preludes for a Fugue'', DVD. Idéale Audience International, 2002. {{DEFAULTSORT:Stabat Mater (Part) Compositions by Arvo Pärt Part, Arvo 1985 compositions Chamber music compositions Choral compositions by Arvo Pärt