What is it about the music of Arvo Part that makes its listeners become cultish in their devotion to hearing it? “According to the unsentimental evidence of record sales, Pärt’s music reaches far beyond the conspiracy of connoisseurs who support most new classical music. He is a composer who speaks in hauntingly clear, familiar tones, yet he does not duplicate the music of the past. He has put his finger on something that is almost impossible to put into words—something to do with the power of music to obliterate the rigidities of space and time.”