Born in Estonia on September 11, 1935, composer Arvo Pärt’s career was shaped by politics. His early compositions generally fall into one of two camps: neoclassical (Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Bartók particularly influenced him) or twelve-tone, following the lead of Schoenberg. After Soviet censors banned some of his music, Pärt stopped composing altogether, instead spending his time studying medieval and Renaissance music. Conductor and biographer Paul Hillier said, “He had reached a position of complete despair in which the composition of music appeared to be the most futile of gestures, and he lacked the musical faith and willpower to write even a single note.” 

In 1976, Pärt emerged from this silence with a group of seven pieces he called “tintinnabuli,” a term that defined his new stylistic direction. Most of these works illustrate the repetition, harmonic and rhythmic simplicity, and steady tempos that characterize some of his most popular works, including Spiegel im Spiegel, Tabula rasa, Fratres, and Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten. Completed in 1977, Cantus laments the death of Benjamin Britten, a composer with whom Pärt felt an unusual affinity. As he writes,  

Why did the date of Benjamin Britten's death—December 4, 1976—touch such a chord in me? During this time, I was obviously at the point where I could recognize the magnitude of such a loss. Inexplicable feelings of guilt, more than that even, arose in me. I had just discovered Britten for myself. Just before his death, I began to appreciate the unusual purity of his music—I had had the impression of the same kind of purity in the ballads of Guillaume de Machaut. And besides, for a long time, I had wanted to meet Britten personally—and now it would not come to that.