Arvo Pärt, composer

Born: September 11, 1935, in Paide, Estonia

Beginnings: music school at age 7, composing at 14. His teacher at Tallinn Conservatory said of him, "he just seemed to shake his sleeves and notes would fall out.”

Compositions: Our Garden, Stride of the World, Nekrolog, Symphonie No. 1, Symphonie No. 2, Perpetuum Mobile, Collage über BACH, Credo, Sympony No. 3, Für Alina, Fratres, Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, Tabula Rasa

Music in film: Väike motoroller, Promised Land, Léos Carax's Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Mike Nichols' Wit, the mountain climbing documentary Touching the Void, Gus van Sant's Gerry

Honors: elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters; “Contemporary Music Award” at the Classical Brit Awards ceremony at London's Royal Albert Hall in 2003

Music style: "mystic minimalism" or "sacred minimalism." He is considered a pioneer of this style, along with contemporaries Henryk Górecki and John Tavener.

Pärt invented the musical technique he calls “tintinnabuli” (from the Latin, little bells). The basic guiding principle behind tintinnabulation is the composition of two simultaneous voices as one line — one voice moving stepwise from and to a central pitch, first up, then down, and the other sounding the notes of the triad.

Quotable: “I love his music, and I love the fact that he is such a brave, talented man. He's completely out of step with the zeitgeist and yet he's enormously popular, which is so inspiring. His music fulfills a deep human need that has nothing to do with fashion.” — Steve Reich

Resides: in Berlin since 1980