f52 T
hat, while fun, wasn’t the main musical direction that she was moving in, though. She’d come across about 600 recordings of Estonian fiddle music from the beginning of the 20th Century, and these scratchy sounds from the past were a revelation. “The emotion was ‘I’ve never heard anything like this’, and at the same time ‘Of course, it should be like this’. It’s not even just fiddle music, it’s a matter of the whole aesthetic that was in many ways cut off when the tradition died out.” She plunged into exploring and trying to get the measure of it. “You know, when you’ve discov- ered something new you get delusional about the technical aspects such as microtones and so on, and I was really analysing, being a scientist, transcribing and everything. You have to do these things, digging into the details, in order to start to see some wider view in the end. Rather than take it simply as musical material and add nice harmonies, variations or improvisation, I’m more interested in the process, how you can really go into the basic core, and then you start to discover what’s happening in there, during those three notes. There’s all this rhythmic sensibili- ty, elastic rhythm. It’s so connected with body weight and dance. These things got lost because of the change in music education; nowadays when young people train, they learn to make a clean sound, practise with a metronome and so on. I think the real value that I see in traditional music is getting lost. You try to find what was so special, why it was sustained for so many years.”
She wanted to play this music in the old style, but couldn’t find anyone who could dance it. Estonia holds its labajalg (flat- footed) dancing in nominal esteem, but today what’s done is usu- ally a fairly conga-like chain-dance, not the turning couple-dance that seems to have developed sometime early in the 19th Century. While researching she found another revelation: archive film of people dancing in the old style, with “turning and crazy varia- tion”, but it was silent footage, and hard to discern how it fitted the music. How to reunite dance and music?
By now she was studying folk music at Viljandi, and finding her own individual path toward her masters degree, which she’s in the process of finishing, occupying a pleasant little loft apartment with a view over Viljandi’s rooftops. She’d run into people across Europe who were also interested in the old ways of dance, and all were beginning to find similarities in their own countries, across the Baltics and Nordics. Something much deeper and more signifi- cant than just the steps: a whole different feel in balance and use
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