51 f Forward Thinking
There’s folk revival and there’s folk reinvention. It’s the latter that Estonia’s Maarja Nuut is now engaged in, for which we should all be very grateful. Andrew Cronshaw introduces an inspiring young musician.
Q
uite often, I’ve found, in look- ing for the action in, or a way into, a place’s current tradi- tion-rooted scene, one comes across a person who’s the key. Musically outstanding, quest-
ing and driven, not only in their own music but creating turning points within and beyond their milieu; a one to watch. For example, Mercedes Peón in Galicia, Svetlana Spajic in Serbia – and in Estonia’s quite young folk revival I reckon it could be violinist-singer Maarja Nuut. When I first met her seven years ago she was at a turning point of her own, finding that although she was becoming a notable classical violinist that wasn’t her path; folk music is.
“At that time there was almost nobody doing it. But Sofia Joons lived in Tallinn, so I asked if I could play with her. She played some Estonian tunes, but we played mainly Swedish music.”
Actually her break from classical music was brought to a head by a physical reac- tion. “I overplayed with my hands practis- ing Paganini’s Variations On Mozart’s Air On A G-string too much.” And so she had to take a sabbatical year, and in it she went to study in India. “When I was four my mother had old cassettes of Indian ragas, and she thought there was some- thing wrong with me because I could sit for hours and listen to them. There’s some- thing in it that has always attracted me; I think it’s connected with what a big world you can create around only one note.”
She’d run into an Indian musician in the Czech Republic, and mentioned that someday she’d like to go to India. He set up contacts for her, and she went and spent seven months in New Delhi studying with Saskia Rao De Haas who, though Dutch-born, has become a major and respected figure in Hindustani classical music playing a cello fitted with sympa- thetic strings. Apart from the music, it seems to have been an interesting trip: her money was stolen on the way there, she lived in a paper house on a rooftop, and had to escape her landlord’s son’s nuptial plans.
She also began going to the interna- tional Ethno camps which workshop folk music with young musicians from around the world, and became particularly involved in the very lively and slightly mad one known as Ethno Histeria, run by Slovenian accordeonist-puppeteer Matija Solce. She, Matija, Chilean Nano Stern and others formed a sort of travelling Ethno- outreach band, Ethno In Transit
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