Since 2011 Arvo Pärt has been among the most performed living composers in the world. Pärt possesses one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary classical music, the product of eclectic influences from the “official” Soviet aesthetic to Renaissance polyphony. Born near Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, Pärt began his formal musical education in 1954 at the Tallinn Music Secondary School entering the Tallinn Conservatory in 1957.

Immediately preceding World War II, Estonia was bloodlessly annexed by the Soviet Union, leaving the young Pärt with only limited access to the musical developments in the West. His early compositions, including his first two symphonies, employed serial techniques, but he soon tired of the rigid rules of twelve-tone composition. After studying French and Flemish choral music from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, Pärt began incorporating the style and spirit of early European polyphony into his own compositions, beginning in 1971with his Third Symphony.

If Bach had been a beekeeper, completed in 1976, is one of the works performed at a legendary concert by the early music ensemble Hortus Musicus on 27 October of the same year. This marked the beginning of Pärt’s new creative style. Intensive creative collaboration with the early music ensemble offered the composer an opportunity to use instruments played by the ensemble and experiment with their sounds.

The key to understanding the sound of this composition is provided by an ironic title Pärt initially gave it: Portrait of a Musicologist Against the Background of a Wasp Nest.

The basic form of the piece is Toccata (showpiece), Ricercare (fugal music) and Chorale (quote from Bach). In the Toccata Pärt embedded Bach’s name, (b–a–c–h: in German b=b flat and h=b natural) on several levels: melodic, sustained chords and tremolo. Then he surrounded Bach with string parts reminiscent of the buzzing of bees. The rhythmic pulse of the accompanying piano part consists of chords in B flat, A, C and B natural. The work resolves in a coda featuring music from Bach’s prelude in B minor from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1.The first half of Bach’s slowly paced prelude is played at half the speed, offering a relief from the previously tense music. Heavenly lightness begins to glow as the final chord is not played in the original minor, but in the bright major of the same tonality.