*2.2. Reception: Spiegel im Spiegel in the Public Domain*

An acute attention to the performative and contextual aspects of Pärt's music supplies a window on the spectrum of values that early tintinnabuli pieces offer listeners ([22], p. 76).

We move to the perspective of *external esthesics*: what does the reception of Pärt's music say about the music itself? Before we do so, a word on the importance of reception and *where* we look to in order to perceive it. There is a basic theological truth that affirms that the People of God have been gifted with an indefectible guarantee of divine presence through the Spirit poured out into our hearts, which the Church has long identified and honoured as the *sensus fidelium*: an inner sense, or taste for the things of God and their right understanding. With due attention to processes of discernment and calling on the diversity of roles in all things Christian and ecclesial, this basic Christian principle calls us to listen to the Spirit, wherever she may blow [37]. As a consequence, without excluding the voices of those we deem experts, we need also to listen to the ground-swell, of popular opinion and fandom, even our own [38]! So when we look at the reception of any given piece of music, we look to the experts and to the general public. In relation to the music of Arvo Pärt, this is already being done [39]. As our own window in this article I have decided to look at *Spiegel im Spiegel*'s use in film, and in particular Mike Nichols 2001 *Wit* [40], based on the 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning play of the same title by Margaret Edson, albeit drawing some small references from Tom Tykfer's 2002 *Heaven* [41].

I am aware that this brings another complex, multi-media artistic form into the arena, with the analytical demands that this implies and which the space of this article must postpone for further development, yet the fact remains that for many people, it is, in reality, through film that they first meet Arvo Pärt's music, and even more importantly, due to the non-referential and non-representational nature of music's symbolic form, it is, in a sense, another way of accessing the meaning people make of it, both by the director and the public [42]. As such it has something to offer us. How this music is thematically placed and paired is not indifferent to what *Spiegel im Spiegel mirrors* for contemporary western culture. Maimets-Volts, drawing on Dean Duncan's thesis on the benefits of looking at "serious" music through the lens of film [43], specifically presents the use of Arvo Part's music in film as a helpful way to access what she calls "complex meaning categories" such as "sacred" or "transcendent", or what Philip Tagg calls the "paramusical [44] field of connotation" meaning, which canonical musicological discourse tends to avoid, but which serious attention to its reception can help us access ([8], pp. 16–17). It is a form of *external esthesics* and the particularity and clarity to be found in this approach to musical meaning may be an aid to contemporary theological reflection in avoiding the generalisations that often plague commentary on music. It also obeys the incarnational principle of our access to the universal being through the particular, recognised also in studies on interpretation as the capacity of the concrete to give us access to the universal ([11], p. 18).

So what can we discover in these films? Once again, I would invite the reader to preface his reading of this section with some experiential entry points: 4 scenes in *Wit* have *Spiegel im Spiegel* as part of their "soundscape" [45], as well as playing us out during the final credits. It is not necessary to repeat the attentive and thorough analysis already presented elsewhere (*cf*. [8], pp. 146–58), but suffice it to say the film narrates the journey of 48 year-old professor Vivian Bearing (played by Emma Thompson) through terminal cancer to death. Dr. Bearing is an intense and demanding John Donne scholar, and the first appearance of this music in the film comes at minute (0:06:27), while listening to the equally rigorous professor E. M. Ashford (played by Eileen Atkins)'s explanation of John's Donne's "Death be not Proud". The point of the explanation is the importance of right punctuation:

*Gardner's edition of the Holy Sonnets returns to the Westmoreland manuscript source of 1610. Not for sentimental reasons, I assure you, but because Helen Gardner is a scholar: "and death shall be no more, (comma) death thou shalt die. Nothing but a breath, a comma separates death from life everlasting. Very simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. Death is a comma, a pause. This way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from the poem, life death, soul, past present, not insuperable barriers, not semi colons, just a comma….*

The second time it appears is as part of a soliloquy of Vivian (who often "breaks the fourth wall to address the 'audience'") on the passing of time (0:28:11):

*Do not forget that you are seeing the most interesting aspects of my tenure as an in-patient receiving experimental chemotherapy of advanced metastatic ovarian cancer. But as I am a scholar I feel obliged to document what it is like here most of the time between the dramatic climaxes. In truth, it is like this: "You cannot imagine how time can be so still...It hangs. It weighs. And yet there is so little of it. It goes so slowly. And yet it is so scarce. If I were writing this scene it would last a full 15 minutes. I would lie here and you would sit there... Not to worry: Brevity is the soul of wit.* 

The third time the music appears at (1:17:30), considered by some to be the centre of the film, it accompanies a movingly human and compassionate re-encounter between the suffering professor Ashford and Vivian, just before she dies, in which Ashford sits beside her on the bed and reads, not Donne's metaphysical poetry, but rather a child's story: *The Runaway Bunny* (by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd), a little "allegory of the soul" and leaves her, ("Time to go"), now sleeping peacefully, with a kiss and the words of Shakespeare: "And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

Finally, the voice of Vivian reciting John Donne's "Death Be Not Proud" is the over-voice in the final scene of her, dead, in the hospital bed, and continues through the credits.

So the underlying themes are those of life, suffering, death, time, eternity, truth, humanity, compassion…to name the most obvious. And the film is masterfully done [46]. The music accompanies tragic themes without being melodramatic or sentimental ([22], p. 74; [47]). It seems to open a space and time in which to experience "something" which in this case is eloquently verbalised through the poetry of Donne. In saying this I do not wish to present the soundscape of these scenes as the ultimate key to understanding *Spiegel im Spiegel*'s meaning, nor to claim that the sense this film gives it (and it gives the film) is the "right" one, but rather to illustrate the potential of this music to accompany and highlight these kinds of themes. It is not an isolated instance. Without going into such detail, Tom Tykfer's *Heaven* deals with themes of redemption, forgiveness, justice and even, albeit implicitly, ascension and heaven, with a similar use of *Spiegel im Spiegel* and another early tintinnabuli piece: *Für Alina*. In *Heaven, Mirror in the Mirror* appears non-diagetically [48] as the backdrop to our main character's "confession" and forgiveness. The common denominator seems to be the music's capacity, not so much to reflect the emotions of the characters, or provoke emotion in the audience, but rather to "slow down time" and open a space in which we can *feel* or experience at a deeper and freer level. It exemplifies Kutter Callaway's description of the shift in contemporary film music from "predetermined emotionality to an invitation to feel" ([49], pp. 18–26).

Maimets-Volt talks of tintinnabuli music as used in film as opening a "sphere of beyond", or even "third presence" ([8], pp. 132–35; 170–73). By this she means a "gaze from a transcendental sphere" ([8], p. 172), a timeless sphere beyond space and time (*cf*. [8], p. 135). She attributes this to the way in which the music is situated in the film—thematic, rather than compositional-technical and takes it quite far, understanding this space as one of "eternal values", albeit not necessarily understood in an explicitly religious sense. Pärt's compositions:

create and belong to a sphere of eternal spiritual values or ideals … [such as] humanity/humaneness, empathy, mercy, compassion, goodness/ kindness […] categories of the sacred, spiritual, and transcendental present in this sphere—though not necessarily in an ecclesiastical sense ([8], p. 172).

Whether or not one agrees that this capacity is inherent to the music, or rather that its combination with depth of thought in narrative, gifted acting, directing, and producing, it seems to me that something of its potential is witnessed to in this, and other films, both from the way they are integrated in the films' soundscapes and its reception by the general public: it opens us to the sense of a presence which is neither that of the actors and their understanding of the narrative, nor the viewers. Without stating that the music explicitly mediates divine presence, or even values we attribute to God, it creates space to negotiate between the human realm and that which is "Other", the awareness of questions that although not easily answered, are not impossible either; "inhabited" space, (if only by those few notes/bells) that is not desolate, and yet still space.

"Third" is an interesting word with theological resonances of perfection and a Trinitarian. Cultural studies and education refer to "third space" as an "in-between" space on the boundary to navigate between different forms of understanding [50], or between clearly defined cultures in hybrid situations; a place that bridges, converses and transforms [51]. From a theological perspective, Trinitarian theology has long appreciated the need for a "Third" to open up relationships, and there are many liminal and boundary situations in Christian faith: God and humanity; Christian faith, other faiths, and the ever increasing "nones"; not to mention the muddled up world we carry inside, where doubt and faith cohabit peacefully or otherwise. In the fast-paced world we live in, where finding the "space" to "reflect, rest and reset" [52] in-between activities is challenging, music such as *Spiegel im Spiegel* is proving useful for that "third presence". The question of what could be "happening" theologically in that open space is one I will come back to in the final moment of this article. First, let us turn to the composer.
