CHANGES IN ESTONIAN MUSIC AND COMPOSER’S IDENTITY IN THE LAST DECADE OF THE SOVIET PERIOD

Abstract

During the last decade of the Soviet period, both social and cultural as well as several musical changes took place in Estonia. Already since the 1970s we can find many signs of postmodern thinking in Estonian music and other arts, although the society as a whole was far from the postmodern situation giving arise to similar developments in the West. Estonia was separated from the West by the iron curtain, but communication with the West did exist, and knowledge about recent developments in arts arrived Estonia through various channels (recordings, musicians visiting international festivals, etc.). In the present paper, several impulses that were important for the changes that took place in Estonian music in the 1980s will be discussed using some compositions of Lepo Sumera (1950–2000) and Erkki-Sven Tüür (b. 1959) as well as their verbal manifestations as examples. In the works of Sumera we can establish minimalist features, but according to him this developed from rather different sources than American minimalism. Another aspect of postmodernism we can find in the works of Tüür, who is often boldly eclectic synthesizing various earlier styles, including rhythms and musical ideas of rock music. Nevertheless, some of these tendencies in Sumera’s and Tüür’s oeuvre might be understood as the reception to the previously listened Western music, revealing also something about their (musical) identity.