Some music is made for play­ing whilst cruis­ing down the high­way or get­ting ready to go out on the town. And some music is made for play­ing whilst wear­ing slip­pers, sip­ping cof­fee and glanc­ing at the Sun­day papers. Spiegel im Spiegel is most def­i­nite­ly in the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry.

Writ­ten by Arvo Pärt in 1978, in his native Esto­nia, Spiegel im Spiegel is a min­i­mal­ist piece in the so-called tintinnab­u­lar style of com­po­si­tion (a term coined by Pärt him­self, from the Latin tintinnab­u­lum, “bell”), where­in a melod­ic voice oper­at­ing over dia­ton­ic scales, and a tintinnab­u­lar voice, oper­at­ing with­in a tri­ad on the ton­ic, accom­pa­ny each oth­er. The effect is calm­ing and med­i­ta­tive.

The piece was writ­ten for a sin­gle piano and vio­lin, and here is a beau­ti­ful ver­sion fea­tur­ing Nico­la Benedet­ti on vio­lin and Alex­ei Grynyuk on piano. The piano plays ris­ing crotch­et tri­ads and the vio­lin plays slow, sus­tained notes, alter­nate­ly ris­ing and falling, and of increas­ing length.

Inci­den­tal­ly, Spiegel im Spiegel in Ger­man lit­er­al­ly means “mir­ror in the mir­ror”, rep­re­sent­ing, I sup­pose, the idea of an infin­i­ty of images reflect­ed by par­al­lel plane mir­rors: the ton­ic tri­ads are end­less­ly repeat­ed with small vari­a­tions, as if reflect­ed back and forth. In any event, if, like me, you cher­ish an occa­sion­al calm and still envi­ron­ment in a hec­tic world, this is for you. I rec­om­mend just putting the piece on at a qui­et time and, rather than con­cen­trat­ing on it, sim­ply let it fill the room with its serene qual­i­ty whilst you do some­thing else. You will be spir­i­tu­al­ly refreshed with­out even real­is­ing it!