His first serious study came in 1954 at the Tallinn Music Middle School, but less than a year later he temporarily abandoned it to fulfill military service, playing oboe and percussion in the army band.

[3] After his military service he attended the Tallinn Conservatory, where he studied composition with Heino Eller[4] and it was said of him, "he just seemed to shake his sleeves and the notes would fall out".

Although filmmaking and film music were not primary sources of inspiration for him, these compositions provided a medium for exploring serial and tonal techniques—an amalgamation that would later influence his collage works of the 1960s.

Tikhon Khrennikov criticized Pärt in 1962 for employing serialism in Nekrolog (1960), the first 12-tone music written in Estonia,[7] which exhibited his "susceptibility to foreign influences".

But nine months later Pärt won First Prize in a competition of 1,200 works, awarded by the all-Union Society of Composers, indicating the Soviet regime's inability to agree on what was permissible.

[11] In 2014 The Daily Telegraph described Pärt as possibly "the world's greatest living composer" and "by a long way, Estonia's most celebrated export".

Unlike many of his fellow Estonian composers, Pärt never found inspiration in the country's epic poem, Kalevipoeg, even in his early works.

In this period of Estonian history, Pärt was unable to encounter many musical influences from outside the Soviet Union except for a few illegal tapes and scores.

When Soviet censors banned early works, Pärt entered the first of several periods of contemplative silence, during which he studied choral music from the 14th to 16th centuries.

The Soviets eventually banned the work due to its clear religious context, even though it incorporated avant-garde and a constructivist procedure.

The Windsbach Boys Choir and soloists Sibylla Rubens, Ingeborg Danz, Markus Schäfer and Klaus Mertens performed Magnificat and Collage über B-A-C-H together with two Bach cantatas and one by Mendelssohn.

The Hilliard Ensemble, organist Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, the Rostock Motet Choir and the Hilliard instrumental ensemble, conducted by Markus Johannes Langer [de], performed a program of Pärt's organ music and works for voices (some a cappella), including Pari intervallo, De profundis, and Miserere.

[20] In response to the murder of the Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow on 7 October 2006, Pärt declared that all of his works performed in 2006 and 2007 would be in honour of her death, issuing the following statement: "Anna Politkovskaya staked her entire talent, energy and—in the end—even her life on saving people who had become victims of the abuses prevailing in Russia.

"[21] Pärt was honoured as the featured composer of the 2008 Raidió Teilifís Éireann Living Music Festival[22] in Dublin, Ireland.

It premiered in Los Angeles, California, at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on 10 January 2009,[25] and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition in 2010.

[26] On 26 January 2014, Tõnu Kaljuste, conducting the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, the Sinfonietta Riga, the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, the Latvian Radio Choir and the Vox Clamantis ensemble, won a Grammy for Best Choral Performance for a performance of Pärt's Adam's Lament.

[27] Describing aspects of Pärt's music as "glocal" in approach, Estonian musicologist Kerri Kotta noted that the composer "has been able to translate something very human into sound that crosses the borders normally separating people.

[60] In April 2020, although Pärt rarely gives interviews, he spoke to the Spanish newspaper ABC about the COVID-19 pandemic, stating that it was a "mega fast" and reminded him to follow the example of John Updike, who "once said that he tried to work with the same calm as the masters of the Middle Ages, who carved the church pews in places where it was impossible to see them".