Arvo Pärt's Concerto Piccolo über B-A-C-H for trumpet, strings, harpsichord, and piano is a brief yet challenging work in the trumpet repertoire. A carefully articulated performance guide is necessary to aid trumpeters in overcoming the numerous musical challenges presented in this piece. Currently, there is no resource that helps in solving performance choices and difficulties in this work. This first section of this document provides historical and contextual information on Arvo Pärt, his compositional output during his experimental period, and subsequently, Concerto Piccolo. The second section includes a performance analysis of the work, while the third gives trumpet players pedagogical suggestions and practical exercises for proper preparation of Concerto Piccolo. This guide presents performers with relevant background, analytical, and pedagogical information required for an informed and high-level performance.

After the strict processes of mid-twentieth-century minimalism, a new musical style has emerged which retains extensive use of repetition, but is generally more aurally accessible, based in non-functional triadic harmony, and flexible in its compositional structure. Frequent use of non-minimalist resources, musical resources from multiple styles in a single composition, and quotation from previous historical periods define this flexibility. American choral music has many popular compositions that exhibit characteristics of this new musical style, in part because of its accessibility relative to earlier minimalist styles, and in part because it adapts easily to the choral setting. At the same time, teaching this music to choirs requires resources that are not in standard-practice choral pedagogy textbooks or peer-reviewed choral journals. This monograph utilizes newer research in musical analysis and several recent writings attempting to generalize the postminimalist style to develop a definition of choral postminimalism. Then, this monograph also suggests analytical approaches and resources for choral warm-ups, score preparation, and other pedagogical tools for three pieces: Arvo Pärt’s The Beatitudes, Nico Muhly’s Bright Mass with Canons, and Tarik O’Regan’s The Ecstasies Above.

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Arvo Pärt, an Estonian composer, was born in 1935. Most of the works at the beginning of his career were for piano in the neo-classical style. After that, he turned his interest to serial music and continued creating works with serial techniques throughout the 1960s. After his "self-imposed silence" period (during the years 1968-1976), Pärt emerged with a new musical style, which he called tintinnabuli. Although, this technique was influenced by music from the medieval period, the texture and function of its musical style cannot be described easily in terms of any single musical technique of the past. This study explores the evolution of Arvo Pärt's tintinnabuli technique in its first decade 1976-1985, which is divided into three different types. It provides musical examples from the scores of selected works, Für Alina, Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, Cantate Domino canticum novum, Missa Sillabica, Stabat Mater and Es sang vor langen Jahren, and their analyses with supporting interpretative sketches. The goal of this thesis is to provide the reader a basis for understanding and recognizing the different types of Pärt's tintinnabuli technique.