Balm for the Soul: the music of Arvo Pärt (靈魂的香膏: 阿福·佩爾特的音樂)

The past week has been very traumatic. After the police shooting  of blacks in Minnesota and Louisiana and the shooting of five policemen in Dallas, the lorry massacre of more than 200  in Nice, the arson in Western District Hong Kong which killed all four and the shooting of hundreds of civilians in the failed coup d'état in Ankara and Instanbul, it seems the world has gone mad in a wave of violence. I reached my hands into my CD rack and instinctively picked out a disc I haven't heard for a long time:the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's Fur Alina.

The notes come out one by one, as if from a pitch dark background, each like a shining dew in the morning sunlight, crystal clear, shining, radiant. The silence between the notes in which the harmonics continue to reverberate in the air long after the principal tone has died out, has a strangely soothing effect. Just what I need.