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Arvo Pärt's Trisagion (1992) blurs the distinction between evocation and portrayal, expression and imitation. Written in honor of the 500th anniversary of the parish of Prophet Elias in Ilomantsi, the music itself seems to take on a devotional attitude. It is composed in Pärt's distinctive “tintinnabula“ style -- a spare contrapuntal structure rich with religious symbolism. Moreover, the structure and phraseology of the work -- the contours that the lines follow -- are derived in a very real way from a religious text, even though the work is composed for strings only. The tintinnabula style as seen at work in Trisagion involves the combination of two kinds of voices: one type follows gentle, diatonic, scalar lines along stepwise paths; the other type, called tintinnabula lines (after the Latin word for “bell“), engages in counterpoint with the melodic voice by leaping between tones above and below it, always confining itself to tones within the tonic chord. The result
