Fratres for string quartet (1977–89)

Fratres must have seemed a good title when Pärt first applied it to an instrumental piece inspired by plainchant. In the 16 years following the original Fratres, written in 1977 for the early music ensemble Hortus Musicus, it became an ever better title as it acquired seven brothers, with a more or less close family likeness, in the form of arrangements or versions for other ensembles – violin and piano (1980), eight cellos (1983), strings and percussion (1983, revised 1991), string quartet (1989), wind octet (1990), violin, strings and percussion (1992), and trombone, strings and percusion (1993).

Perhaps the most often performed, alongside the version for violin and piano, is the arrangement for string quartet. Far from being a model of string-quartet scoring – the second violin, for example, does nothing but sustain an open fifth on its G and D strings for the nine minutes the piece lasts – it is, even so, a most effectively written piece. While the second violin and cello are tuned as normal, the botttom strings of the first violin and viola are tuned down, to E flat and B flat respectively, to accommodate the gradual decline in pitch which is one of the principal features of the work. The essential feature of Fratres, however, is the cycle of modal plainchant material, rhythmically expressed in minims and crotchets in six bars of regularly changing metres, that recurs eight times in all. The only other material is the two bars of pizzicato cello chords, reflecting the second-violin drone, which are heard nine times – at the beginning and then after each occurence of the plainchant material. As the pitch declines, from the comparatively high harmonics of the opening bars to the lowest registers of all but the second violin at the end, the volume rises from pp to f and più f and finally falls away to ppp. The effect, intended or not, is that of a slowly approaching and rather more quickly receding ritualised procession.