Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground, Hardcover

In Sounds Beyond, Kevin C. Karnes studies the interconnected alternative music and art scenes in the USSR during the second half of the 1970s, revealing the audacious origins of some of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's most famous music. Karnes shows how Pärt's work was created within a vital yet forgotten culture of collective experimentation, the Soviet underground.

Mining archives and oral history from across the former USSR, Sounds Beyond carefully situates modes of creative experimentation within their late socialist contexts. In documenting Pärt's work, Karnes reveals the rich creative culture that thrived covertly in the USSR and the network of figures that made underground performances possible: students, audio engineers, sympathetic administrators, star performers, and aspiring DJs. Sounds Beyond advances a new understanding of Pärt's music as an expression of the aesthetic and religious commitments shared, nurtured, and celebrated by many in Soviet underground circles. At the same time, this story attests to the lasting power of Pärt's music. Dislodging the mythology of the solitary creative genius, Karnes shows that Pärt's work would be impossible without community.

About author(s):Kevin C. Karnes is professor of music and associate dean for the arts at Emory University. He is the author of Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa, A Kingdom Not of This World: Wagner, the Arts, and Utopian Visions in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, and Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History.