Between Two Sounds: An Interview with Joonas Sildre and Adam Cullen

Arvo Pärt is perhaps the world’s most beloved living composer, whose music has a depth that invites the listener into an encounter with the eternal. Few know the story of how he became a musician, however, as no official biography exists. A graphic novel, however, does. 

Joonas Sildren’s Between Two Sounds, translated from the original Estonian into English by Adam Cullen, now tells Pärt’s story. Image and word turned out to be the perfect medium to depict the emergence of Pärt’s unique sound and its wisdom of silence.

I recently spoke with Joonas and Adam about their unique project. Transcript edited for length and clarity.

TC: What brought you to Arvo Pärt’s music, and then to this project of telling his story through a graphic novel?

JS: It was a long process. Maybe the first starting point was near 2000, when a friend of mine gifted me a CD of Arvo Pärt’s music. Pärt was my introduction to classical music. I went from zero to one hundred and started to listen to Pärt’s music nonstop—I don’t know, maybe five years—after that. I would find the music everywhere I could. I found it very beautiful and very touching.

The idea for this book came five years later. There was this radio show about Pärt’s life and music, made by Estonian journalist Immo Mihkelson. And usually if I like somebody’s music, if I look into their lives and their philosophy, I find this gap between the person and the music quite huge. But this was not the case with Arvo Pärt, because I found out his ideas about music and life, his philosophy, everything, was very aligned with the music. At this moment I knew that I wanted to do this book.

At the time I was looking for that kind of story. I studied graphic design, and comics have always been a passion for me. I got tired of short format, so I was looking for long-format stories. I was really thrilled with some of the stories I read, and I was looking for my own story to tell, and this was it. But it wasn’t so easy, because it took me almost seven years before the drawing process really started in 2012.

TC: It’s such a project. You’re not just telling the biography, but you’re telling about the music, and the man and the music are so intertwined, as you said. I’m so fascinated by that challenge of articulating one medium using a different one—you’re bringing music to the page. But first, Adam, what had been your exposure to Pärt before this project, and how did you get roped in?

AC: I had very little connection to Pärt or his music, definitely not his history. Somehow at some point I’d been contacted by the Arvo Pärt Centre, and I helped translate a few things for other publications—a collection of Pärt’s children’s music, for example. And then the Centre put me in contact with Joonas when the book came out. The translation was ready about the same time as the book was published in Estonian. It was commissioned very early, and it had been just sitting on the shelf searching for the right publisher for several years. But it was through translating it that I really got to know Pärt and his music. In 2011 I lived in the same building as where Pärt has an apartment in Tallinn’s Old Town. Someone told me, “Oh, Arvo Pärt lives here, you might see him in the stairwell.”

But it was really fascinating, listening to his music while translating to really recreate the atmosphere. I sing in a mixed choir here in Estonia, and so we’ve sung Pärt on numerous occasions. And I have a deeper affection for his music now thanks to the work.

TC: How did you get into translating?

AC: At first it was my way of practicing learning Estonian. I moved here in 2007 with the goal of seeing if it was possible to learn Estonian mostly organically. I think I only took one class for one summer, and I was trying to learn the language through breaking it down, and translation was a tool for that—taking something and directly translating it. But then the sentence structure and syntax and everything is mixed up, so then you’re trying to figure out what it’s trying to say, what are the bones of this language. Then at some point I was translating on a volunteer basis for a nonprofit organization here, and through their Christmas party, in the same building was the office of the Estonian Literature Centre, which serves as a sort of literary agent for Estonian authors. They asked if I would be interested in translating literature, and I said, sure. That was 2010. I’ve been a freelance translator ever since.

TC: Speaking of translating, you’re both engaged in different kinds of translation work. Joonas, could you talk a bit about that process? What were the major challenges?

JS: During the seven years before I started drawing Between Two Sounds, I was thinking about it, looking for different examples of others’ works, trying out some things on my own, and of course listening more and reading about what I could at my house and watching a couple of documentaries about the Pärts. I made a tree picture comic about one sentence that Arvo Pärt had said, and it ended up as a Christmas gift to Arvo Pärt one year, a couple of years before I started my work. Somebody sent me a photo of it. This maybe also inspired me—that there’s actually something behind those ideas, and if I’ve somehow connected to Arvo Pärt, then maybe I should start work on the book.

In 2012, I received a phone call from Nora Pärt, the wife of Arvo Pärt. She had heard of this idea—before that, I had actually never met them—and she invited me over to talk about the project. I didn’t have much to show, but I made a sketch on an A0-size paper; there were very small squares on the paper and each square represented one page of the book. It kind of looked like a musical score, with names of chapters and topics and quotes and lines pointing here and there.

I had written about how Between Two Sounds should look, which showed my deep knowledge about their lives and the music. This was why they thought I could do this. To my surprise they said, “Okay, let’s do the book, and we will provide you with archive materials. If you can start, we can tell you things.”

I made a sketch of the book; they read what I had put together from the available information—there were actually lots of urban legends about the Pärts’ life and they had to correct those—and we would meet regularly through those years. This timeline of events had never before been collected. This radio show seemingly had this timeline, but it’s not accurate in some places: it had gaps, it had wrong information. Some people misrepresented themselves in events, whereas they wanted to stay true to the facts.

Our collaboration was quite extensive. I remember during the last year we were editing the book—and also the editor Aile Tooming from the Arvo Pärt Centre was involved—and we would exchange mail almost daily at some points, so this was quite intense. But before that, five years was the making process, very, very slow. I would work a bit, and then we would meet every couple of months, go over the details, then I would go back to the drawing table and work a bit more. This was the progress of the book. And of course, there were also a lot of creative challenges, like how to show the music. I had all the creative freedom I wanted. They never commented on my artistic choices or how I would set up the story, so if I put through something, they would say, it’s fine, do as you want to do it, just make sure the information is correct.

TC: How did you decide on the color palette? Was keeping it black, white, and sepia an early decision?

JS: From the beginning I was sure that Between Two Sounds would have a really, really limited palette. It came along with the timeline, I guess. It’s like a retro story. Also, the music is very minimalistic. So it felt just right, not to have any specific extra colors.

TC: Yeah, it’s interesting because thematically it works so well. When he’s realizing all wisdom lies in reduction and leaps off the precipice—there’s already been the idea that music is all around us, it’s already there, and the composer is the medium through which it is brought forth or revealed. The epiphany is like that: It comes through the medium of the book—it’s already there, there are the notes, the black and white, the soil in which Pärt’s work is growing, and then when he has the epiphany, it’s new, but still has that continuity with the earlier images. 

The whole time he’s under one sort of oppressive regime or another, so that’s the context in which he’s discovering the music, and then you end with them waiting to emigrate from Estonia. And, of course, they do return later on. But throughout you have that context of trying develop within those limits, those strictures of the USSR in Estonia at that time. You do so well in giving us a sense of what it was like to live under that kind of regime—the everyday life as well as specifically Pärt’s journey as a composer and person.

JS: Yes. I was born under the Soviet regime. I was ten when it was over, so I have very little personal experience, although I had heard a lot of stories about it.

Many things I learned about Arvo Pärt’s life were surprising to me, especially artists’ lives under this Soviet regime. You really had to serve the state, otherwise you couldn’t be an artist in Soviet Estonia. But if you were serving the state with your art, then you’re actually high-class in Estonia. You were basically a respected and wealthy person, considering the time. And how Arvo Pärt managed to not be part of that system is even more surprising. It requires a very special nature for a person to not go along. The stakes were high, so if you weren’t playing along, then you were thrown out of everything, from social life to artist’s life, to financial life. Because of that, at the time when Arvo Pärt wasn’t composing anything, the Pärts were actually quite poor. Still he didn’t care, or he wouldn’t go along.

When you finished school in the Soviet Union, you were directed to a workspace. Pärt was directed to a radio and was composing his own music at the same time. He was never in the “highest class,” getting all the benefits of that life, because he was always a “rebel.” As time progressed, he dropped out of everything, and the more they pressured him, the more he would work against the regime. He would make jokes about them whenever he could. He would just do something surprising or something that they wouldn’t like. I don’t know many similar people or even artists in Estonia who would do it the way he did.

TC: Yeah, Between Two Sounds shows his incredible integrity and also has that sense of humor he uses to buck against the regime whenever he can. He sometimes experienced the consequences but thankfully never completely shut down.

JS: Humor is an important word because he would always do jokes, but not in a bad way. He’s kind of this—there’s this concept of a trickster in Estonia.

AC: It’s this devil … I think Native American culture’s Coyote is a similar being—ill-intentioned but not entirely. It’s not an evil evil character.

TC: Yeah, the trickster. What does a trickster type do in a very humorless regime?

JS: He shakes it up. One story that didn’t end up in the book was when he sent a composition to Moscow to play. It started off with the anthem of the Soviet Union. Many big party bosses were in the audience, and they all stood up. Then it was followed by complete chaos.

TC: Adam, when you were translating this story into English, were there particular challenges to make sure that was all coming through clear to an English audience?

AC: I think the biggest challenge during the process was the format, Between Two Sounds being a graphic novel with comic-type text. Estonian is shorter than English generally, so when you’re putting things into speech bubbles then you need to be as concise as possible. I’ve translated a lot of poetry and I write poetry as well, so I luckily was able to draw upon that. Keeping it concise lends itself to Pärt’s work, given his brevity and appreciation of silence and of word.

TC: It’s fun to see the progression, the images of music and sound—the baby’s cry at the beginning, and he’s playing with the children when he’s working for the Estonian Radio Children’s Choir, and you see the musical notes. But the images also help illuminate his theory—the dialogue amongst the composers, talking shop, or when Bach’s “C Major Prelude” cuts into the clamoring sounds. On its own the text would have been challenging to follow.

We mentioned silence and minimalism being an integral part to Pärt’s journey and music. Could you both comment on the idea of the interplay of sound and silence? I have a friend who reviewed the book, and she said that Gregorian chant, when Pärt discovered it, “gave him a sound that was not afraid of silence.” What did you discover about silence or the soul’s journey through doing this project?

JS: Silence is a huge topic for Arvo Pärt. An integral part of the music is the silence between the notes—at the end of the piece, the beginning of the piece. He has some good quotes about that—I cannot tell them word for word—but the music is actually for the silence, so the music leads you into the silence and into silence you can hear your own soul speak.

In comics format, it’s the same. The leading comic theorist Scott McCloud has spoken of the emptiness between pictures, saying that this is the place where the story actually happens, between the frames. You show something, and you show something else, but what happens between the two pictures—the person has to generate that by himself. And the story becomes, or grows, from that space. This was a surprising discovery for me, that the silence between notes and the silence between pictures were so similar.

AC: Yeah, in that sense, the perfect medium for telling Arvo Pärt’s story is in graphic novel format. It’s harder to maintain that silence when it’s only words, because your eyes move to the next word, you’re progressing forward, but the pictures give that space for you to settle into an image and really kind of take it in—the different details and what’s happening. It slows down the story so that you can really be immersed in it, whereas if you’re reading, it’s easier to race through it. Music can be expressed so much better through images than through words.

TC: That was one thought I had reading it. I’m reading it in silence, but the format, the medium—it’s very striking how well it fits Pärt’s particular story. The subject and medium come together so well.

I’d like to move to Pärt’s relationship with God, and his movement towards God, in his music and his life. He’s writing about such deep elements of the soul, and he’s writing music because there’s nothing else that expresses what he’s trying to express. And he’ll say, What is the secret? I don’t know the secret, but it’s deep down things. These are deep waters, and the book guides us through them. All wisdom lies in reduction and searching for one beautiful sound: he climbs the tree and eventually leaps off.

What were the challenges of portraying this interplay between prayer and music in Pärt’s work?

JS: It was an interesting problem for me because I don’t see so much of that kind of storyline in comic format. I was reading many different graphic novels, and many of those are depressing and very negative. So what I also liked about this story is it’s actually uplifting, and it has a really nice ending also.

And all the spirituality that Arvo Pärt has and how he expresses it—I remember many struggles with it. How to keep it, let’s say, as light as possible and not be intrusive. And Pärt tries not to be intrusive with religion and spirituality. He’s always mild about it. So how to put it on paper, so it wouldn’t feel like preaching. Keeping it minimal was one trick, and the way that Pärt himself expresses his thoughts helps a lot. He always tries to find his own words. And when he speaks, he’s always searching for words and inventing even new words. Maybe Adam can comment on that. It’s a problem for every language when they translate Arvo Pärt’s quotes—it’s basically impossible to translate some of the things.

Arvo Pärt is always searching for something, searching for a higher truth, and searching for better ways of expressing himself—and, of course, searching for better music. He’s very open to all kinds of influences but at the same time putting it into tight structures. It’s hard to express this—finding the balance that describes his relationship with God and the reality we live in. He has said that he’s a practical person, but we can see at the same time he’s very spiritual. It’s a never-ending thing for a person—a journey and not a point where you reach an end in your life.

TC: Adam, what are your thoughts on the spiritual journey and on translating Pärt’s quotes?

AC: Estonian is malleable; new words can be created easily. You can make compound words, you can conjugate certain things to give deeper meaning—which makes translating poetry extremely difficult, because in a single word you can have a whole paragraph of meaning. So it can be bent to get to the core of a concept or thought, whereas in English you’d have to use a flurry of words, which isn’t as elegant, and you still can’t really get to that core meaning. So that was certainly a challenge with translating Pärt.

And his spirituality—I mostly know him through the book and singing some of his pieces with my choir, but with singing too, since the texts are religious, the spirituality is almost more upfront. But it’s in the way that he interprets that spirituality, with the silence and the pauses and beginning with silence and growing to this climax and then fading back out again—you feel the spirituality and the holiness, the sacred element of these wishing to express far beyond the words. The words are obviously important to him too, but even in the book, he says, “Man is not a creator of sounds but their mediator.” And that’s really what I think he does with his music and his silences. His understanding of God and of spirituality—he conveys that in this very grounded, very earthly way, although music is kind of supernatural too, it’s so elusive and so of the world but also this bridge to something else.

JS: There’s a quote in the book where he says each musical form can have a mathematical equation behind it, in the beginning where the “Perpetuum Mobile” piece is played. Actually, when we were writing this part, Arvo Pärt specifically pointed out this sentence is really, really important for him.

This has been his music writing method until this day: he would build up a musical piece based on some kind of algorithmic or mathematical system. And Nora said that when he doesn’t find emotion in the piece, then he has to scrap it and find another algorithm. But he wouldn’t cheat; he wouldn’t change the system just to make something sound better. He’s following this mathematical rule all the time. He once spent many months trying to find the original mathematics behind one of his older pieces. How the mathematics mixed with emotion—this is a mystery also. But he just goes along with this concept, to find this kind of divine language.

TC: That is fascinating. Music and mathematics have an intimate relationship. The mathematical formulae are just there, and using them to reveal something, maybe connecting it with the divine—that interplay also speaks to his intense focus and integrity. It has to be this, and not fiddled with in a way that doesn’t accord with the integrity he’s seeking.

What was your favorite part of this project? What have you taken with you, and what are you looking forward to, now that it’s come to fruition?

AC: The discovery was my favorite part of it—of Pärt, of his music, of his story. I was wondering if the story might continue with a second volume, to when they go to Germany?

I’m just happy that it’s finally out in the world. He’s the most performed living composer in the world, and his music touches so many people. This book is an invaluable complement to that musical knowledge.

TC: So will there be a second volume, Joonas?

JS: I’m happy that the novel is being published in different languages. This had been my dream project, and it still is my dream project. There’s not a single thing I didn’t like about this book. I’m also especially happy that Arvo Pärt likes the story. When we did the Estonian presentation, he joined us for the book signing, as if to say, “This is actually my story.”

Of course, meeting with my favorite composer for a period of five years—nothing can beat this in my professional or my creative life. Also, I enjoy the feedback. People from the States wrote to thank me for a wonderful book, and many are starting to listen to his music, which was one of my goals.

About the continuation of the story: I actually did some sketches. But our feeling was that the story belonged to the first book. At this point we are not planning to do a second, although I could write probably my own making-of book about the whole thing. But there’s not a similar story afterwards. This musical explosion happened in Soviet Estonia, and this was the story that was important for them to tell. They are happy about how it came out, but they don’t feel that it should continue. They don’t even want a “real biography” about Arvo Pärt, ever. I’m sure someone will write one eventually but not based on their actual accounts.

TC: Thank you both so much. And thank you for the work itself. After all those years of work, it’s coming to fruition and available around the world.