The ninetieth birthday of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt snuck up on me last week. One of the best books I read last year was Between Two Soundsby Joonas Sildre, a beautiful biographical graphic novel about Pärt that blew me away. I especially loved how Sildre depicted the shape and size of sounds themselves.
This complete recording of Arvo Pärt's symphonies came out in 2018. I don't find a lot to latch on to in the first two (which come from Pärt's abandoned serial period), but the Third Symphony is a unique window into that compositional "silence" referenced in Between Two Sounds. It's a fascinating transitional work from a period when Pärt wrote almost nothing.
Another unexpected “Between” book that I read this summer was Between Two Firesby Christopher Buehlman. It is not in a genre I typically read (technically Horror?!) but I was captivated by its religious surrealism.
