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Developing an interest in the contemporary 12-tone system (an early 20th-century composing method generally credited to Arnold Schoenberg), he experimented with it in his own striking composition Nekrolog (1960), the first 12-tone piece written in Estonia. Pärt’s first work written in this new, austere style was a piano piece titled Für Alina (1976), the work in which he discovered the triad series, which he made his “simple, little guiding rule.” Describing the sound of the triad as like that of pealing bells, he called his new method of composition “tintinnabuli style.” With it he produced a simple, intense, and ravishing sound that seemed to communicate directly to a new generation in search of spiritual connection. It did not, however, win the approval of the authorities, and in 1980 Pärt moved with his family to Vienna; later he settled in West Berlin. Pärt’s style was described as “holy minimalism” by one reviewer and as neo-Baroque by others. In 1995 the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, on their first North American tour, featured Pärt’s works in concert. Their program’s particular draw was Pärt’s Te Deum, which they had recorded (1993) on the ECM label and which had topped the classical music charts.

In 1996 Pärt was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He continued to write orchestral and choral works, many of which were recorded. The music of his later period was characterized by slow tempi, long stretches of silence, medieval tonal and rhythmic devices, and the controlled use of dissonance, among other features. In 2009, the year in which his fourth symphony (Los Angeles) premiered, the Arvo Pärt Archive was established in Harjumaa, Estonia. In 2014 Pärt received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for music.