Since our first two Celtic Connections concerts (see my last blog), we’ve also heard – in the space of one concert – Irish, Norwegian, Scottish, Senegalese, and Welsh musicians, playing in a Church designed by the famed Glasgow architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. (As you probably know, Mackintosh’s Art School, amongst Glasgow’s most important historic buildings has burned down twice in recent years and is now in the process of being completely demolished.) At least in music, multiculturalism lives on. Perhaps this has always been the case, since wandering minstrels and fiddlers have been a feature of European civilization for millennia. When London became one of the great centres of international music performance in the eighteenth century, Germans and Italians played an important part – Handel being the most renowned of these, to the point at which it is debatable whether he is more a German or an English composer.
Meanwhile, following on having heard several Estonian performers on our first couple of forays into Celtic connections, I realized that Estonia is one of the countries of the European Union about which I know least. I’ve never been there and, alas, the fact that Tallinn is a major destination for stag and hen parties from Britain is not exactly encouraging. I’m not even sure that I’ve ever really known anyone from Estonia, though I did have an American friend who told me she came from an Estonian-speaking community in Milwaukee (this is one of the great things about America; another friend grew up in a Danish community in California …).
One of the few facts I did know before deciding to do some online finding-out (research would be too grand a word), was that it has the highest percentage of Russian speakers of the Baltic states. Like Latvia and Lithuania, it was part of the Soviet Union and there are still over 25% Russian speakers. This worries some, since it potentially exposes Estonia to the same kind of destabilization that has occurred in Ukraine. The difference is, of course, that Estonia is part of NATO, but in the currently uncertain case of American foreign policy don’t be too sure that it won’t happen. Putin, we can imagine, would like to see it – and he does seem to have friends in high places (or, at least, in white houses).
The other thing I knew was that it did have a strong musical tradition. In fact the whole Baltic area has recently come to be at the forefront of choral music. The best-known international representative of this resurgence is the Estonian Arvo Pärt, who has not only produced one of the most important bodies of Church music of the last forty years, but has also tried his hand at setting of Robert Burns. In the year I went to King’s, I saw Pärt sitting listening to a rehearsal of the carol he’d composed for the Nine Lessons and Carols, a small, stocky man, with a flowing beard. For those who know works such as the Berlin Mass, the carol would have been a surprise, since it sounds like a straight down the middle piece of Orthodox Church music in honour of the Virgin Mary – in fact, when I first heard it, I thought it was. One of the choir relished telling the anecdote that the Director of Music had found one bar of the score unclear and rang the composer up to ask just how long the note was meant to be, getting the reply ’It’s music. Just sing it’. I saw him one other time, when we were, in fact, in Berlin and got last-minute tickets for a performance of his Berlin Mass performed by the Estonian National Choir in the presence of the composer.
Pärt isn’t alone, and Estonia apparently has one of the world’s largest choral festivals. Their traditions of music go back a long way. It should be acknowledged that elite music education in the late Soviet Union was outstanding – thus the plethora of Russian conductors and performers now flooding Western European and American orchestras, so Estonia probably benefitted from that. In fact the 13thcentury chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus thinks it worthy of comment that Estonian warriors would spend the night before a battle singing. And, as I mentioned in the last blog, the singer we heard last week claimed that her instrument had a history going back 2000 years. Great traditions don’t come from nowhere.
We cannot envy Estonia having suffered the years of Soviet occupation. Today, however, I couldn’t help thinking that in nine weeks’ time, Estonians will still be enjoying the freedoms of the European Union and we will not. A touch of envy there. Music and other cultural activities will, of course, find ways of crossing borders, but at the moment it looks like we’re voluntarily rowing ourselves into a backwater, leaving it to others to make the most of the great broad river of European cultural life.
Confessions of a devout European 