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Arvo Pärt was born near Tallinn in Estonia in 1935. His childhood was stamped with the Soviet occupation of Estonia, an occupation that lasted for half a century until the mid-1990s. From an early age, Pärt turned his attention to exploring the world of music, first by improvising on the piano, and, as a teenager, by listening to the radio. This passion for the radio later led to a job as a recording engineer for Estonian Radio and brought him into contact with as much new music as was allowed in an era of ideological control. Pärt became the first Estonian composer to use Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique - in Nekrolog (1960/1961), an orchestral piece which he wrote while still a student at Tallinn Conservatory. This piece attracted strong official disapproval for its connection with the music of the decadent West, but not enough to prevent Pärt from being one of the winners of a USSR-wide competition for young composers in 1962
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