Research: The Renaissance music and Arvo Pärt's output
My masters' dissertation was about the process in the music of Steve Reich, an American Minimalistic composer. I was very glad about the conclusion and after my master's defense, my primary focus was on a doctorate project about the process, butnot quite limited to Minimalism. That's when I found the music of Arvo Pärt, a very well known European composer. According to my research, he uses Minimalism techniques, but also mathematics (algebra) and was influenced by Medieval/Renaissance music. It opened a door to doctoral research, as this variety of subjects can be treated interdisciplinary. To complete the background of my project, Paul Hillier in his book Arvo Pärt: Oxford studies of composers (1997) says that process is important to the composer not only in the recent years of his career but, as I attested, in more recent pieces. After this initial research, I finish the project proposing a methodology that investigates all these characteristics above separately, according to the French author Antoine Bonnet, in his paper Theorie du processus (1996). His analytical proposal is to approach each process (he use the term local process) and then join them in a global meaning. In my case, we would investigate each influence (math, minimalism, and
renaissance music) separately and try to understand how the composer joins them together in his music.