In his famous book The Little Prince, the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes: “I have always loved the desert. You can sit on a dune. You see nothing. You hear nothing. Yet something is still radiating in the silence.” The desert – or possibly in a metaphoric sense, tabula rasa – is presented here as a magnificent yet unpeopled space that facilitates this “radiating from silence.”

Arvo Pärt's longing for the purity of sound and his craving to draw closer to it through tintinnabulation is a lot like searching for a well in the desert. Similarly, the conviction that ‘radiation from silence’ may be attained exclusively by reduction of means and personal spiritual denial is shared by both artists. Saint-Exupéry's drawing at the end of the book is moving – two straight lines at the bottom symbolizing the desert and a small awkward starlet at the top; the words Pärt uses to describe the bell style are similarly significant: “Tintinnabuli is an amazing moment – the escape into a self-imposed asceticism: holy men have left behind all their wealth and are heading for the desert. Similarly, the composer wishes to leave behind the entire modern arsenal and save himself through naked monophony carrying only that which is crucial – the triad.”