'We Should Know Who We Are': Veljo Tormis in Conversation

Author(s): Martin Anderson and Veljo Tormis

Source: Tempo, New Series, No. 211 (Jan., 2000), pp. 24-27
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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MartinAnderson
'We Should Know Who We Are':
Veljo Tormis in Conversation
Veljo Tormis, who will be 70 on 7 August 2000,
has become - de facto rather than through any
external sign of age - the Grand Old Man of
Estonian music.' He will celebrate the event in
an Estonia enjoying its tenth year of liberty, but
for the three preceding decades, through most
of the dark night of Russian occupation,
Tormis's music, based on regilaul, the primitive
runic folksong of the Estonian people, was an
important repository of ethnic identity.
Born at Kuusalu, some 30 miles due east of
Tallinn, Tormis first studied organ in August
Topman's class in the Tallinn Conservatory in
1942-44, graduating from the Tallinn Music
School as an organist (under S. Krull) in 1947.
Still at the Tallinn Music School he then studied
as a choral conductor under Jiiri Variste; before
taking composition lessons from Villem Kapp in
1950-51.2 After his composition studies with
Kapp, Tormis moved to Moscow, where he
studied with Shostakovich's friend Vissarion
Shebalin (1902-63), graduating in 1956. From
1955 to 1960 Tormis himself taught music theory and composition in Tallinn Music School
and has been active as a freelance composer
since 1969. His output is vast, its backbone
formed by some 250 choral pieces: some of them
free-standing songs but others cycles of considerable scope. Like many composers in the former
Soviet Union Tormis turned his hand to film
music, writing some three dozen scores. There
is also a handful of orchestral and instrumental
works in his catalogue, early works all of
t
Strictly
speaking,that title shouldbelong to Heimarlives,
whose85th birthdayfell on 15 September1999.But though
his reputationas a highly respectedteacherand powerful
composerendures,livesthesedaysis asmucha privatefigure
as Tormisis a publicone.
2
Kapp(1913-64, nephew of ArturKapp)likewisestudied
organwith Topman,in 1938,andin 1944took composition
lessonsfrom Heino Eller(1882-1970),who taughtvirtually
all the importantEstoniancomposersof the next threegenerations,his youngeststudentsnow active includingArvo
Part andLepo Sumera.Villem Kapp'sown compositions,
somewhatRomantic in style and incorporatingelements
fromEstonianfolk music,includetwo symphonies,a wind
and a cantata,Kevadele('To
quintet, an opera (Lembitu)
Spring'),as well as other chamberworks,piano music and
some 50 choralsongs.

them,3since when he has composed almost

exclusively for chorus.
In the Estonia Concert Hall in Tallinn I asked
Tormis, an affable and easy-going man with a
ready laugh, when his involvement with choral
music began. 'Since childhood I have been living
in choral music: my fatherwas a choir conductor
and organist in a little village'. And was folk
music, too, a prominent part of his childhood?
'It was mostly church music, not folk music, and
it was not connected directly with folk music. I
had my first connections with folk music
through Estonian composers, not directly: Mart
Saar,4 Cyrillus Kreek,' etc., etc'. Did he begin
his own researches from that point onwards? 'It
was as a student in the Conservatoire that I
became acquainted with folk music. Edgar Arro"
sent me to the countryside, museums, and so on;
we have very rich archives'.7 So it was a joy in
3

Tormis's OvertureNo. 1 dates from 1956 and the Overture

No.2 from 1959;earlierstill (1952-53)is a three-movement

ViolinSonata,andThreePreludesandFuguesforpianowere
composedin 1958.
4 Saar
of modern
(1882-1962)is one of the father-figures
Estonianmusic.Like Rudolf Tobias(1873-1918),the true
founderof the Estoniantraditionof classicalmusic,Saarstudied in St Petersburgwith Louis Homilius (organ) and
(composition).He was one of the firstto
Rimsky-Korsakov
begin the sytematiccollection of Estonianfolksongs,and
manyof his own compositions,like Tormis's,drawon folksong for theirinspirationandmaterial.Two earlyorchestral
worksandhis organcompositionswere destroyedin a firein
1921; some piano and organpieces apart,almostall of his
survivingmusicis for voice, in the formof solo and choral
songsandsuites.
5 Kreek(1889-1962)is anotherof the foundersof modern
hiscomposition
Estonianmusic,againstudyingatStPetersburg,
teachersbeingVasiliKalafati,
JazepVitols,MikhailTcherov
andNikolaiTcherepnin.Kreek,too, wrotea generousquanchoralmusic(including150 choralsongsand
tity of a cappella
andwasactiveasa choralconductor.He
1,300folk-chorales)
andchorusand
alsocomposeda numberof worksfororchestra
of 1927.
the best-knownbeingthe Estonian
orchestra,
Requiem
6
EdgarArro(1911-78)studiedat the TallinnConservatory
with AugustTopman(organ)andArturKapp(composition)
andtaughttherehimselffrom 1972. From1952 to 1966 he
wassecretaryof the EstonianUnion of Composers.His own
compositionsincludea numberof worksfororgan,some 130
choralsongsand (togetherwith Leo Normet) the operetta
at the
RummuJiri, which ran for over 200 performances
VanemuineTheatrein Tartu.

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'We ShouldKnow Who We Are': VeljoTormisin Conversation 25

(photo:Tonu Tormis,courtesyof ECM Records)

the ethnomusicology discoveries he made there

that sparked an ambition to compose? 'No, first
I wanted to be an organist and then later a
choir-master. But then in '48 the organ classwas
closed on ideological grounds; it was Stalin.
Then I had to choose another profession! What
could I do in my situation? Then I tried choral
conducting, but that didn't work: there weren't
any churches. Then my choir professor said:
"It's not for you - choose another profession".
So composition was the third possibility!'
Harry Olt's invaluable guide Estonian Music
offers a useful thumbnail guide to the constituent
elements of Tormis's style: 'Imitation, parallel
chords in gradual, step-by-step motion, rhythmic variationswith respect to the rhythm of the
text, and monotonous repetitions around certain
motifs'. How did the runo-song primitivism
that makes Tormis's music so distinctive evolve?
'I didn't just discover it one day; I was a long
way on the approach to it. It was ten years after
I was at the Moscow Conservatory, after I had
written orchestral pieces and an opera,' that I
'Tormis is not exaggerating: by 1914 the Estonian Student
Union (Kreck, Saar, Peeter Siida, Juhan Aavik and others)
had collected no fewer than 13,226 folk tunes, and the
archives in Tartu now hold over 30,000 folk melodies probably one of the biggest collections in the world.
8 Tallinn: Perioodika, 1980, p.148-49.

Luigelend(The Flight of the Swan), 1965.

discovered the real value of this regilaul.Then I

tried to bring the structure of regilaulinto my
own compositions. My first big work was
EstonianCalendarSongs.'"
Tormis's studies of the folksong tradition on
which he has drawn ever since drew him to the
conclusion that
old Estonianfolksongsarean intactpartof an ancient
culturewhere all the componentsare combinedin
structure:the melody, the words, the performance,
etc. It also became clear that it is a very old preChristianculturewhich is shamanisticin substance,
andextremelycloseto naturein the ecologicalsense.'
But his attraction to Estonia's distant past is no
mere nostalgia:
" Eesti kalendrilaulud,composed in 1966-67, comprises five
smaller cycles containing a total of 29 songs: Martinlmas
Songs
(male chorus), St Catherine's Day Songs (femnalechrous),
ShrovetideSongs (male chorus), Swing Songs (female chorus)
and St John's Day Son,gsforMidsuitmer'sEve (mixed chorus).
The CalendarSongshave been recorded, together with Three
Estonian GaCmeSongs, by Tonu Kaljuste and the Estonian
Philharmonic Chamber Choir on Virgin Classics 7243 5
45185 2 2. In his notes to this recording Tormis statesproudly
that 'Estonianshave lived within the boundariesof their present
habitat for about five thousand years (a European record?)'.
"
Quoted in Tiia Jarg's notes to the Forte CD Epic Fields
(FD0030/2), a Tormis anthology recorded by the Estonian
Radio Mixed Chorus conducted by Tonu Kangron and Ants
Uleoja, released in 1995.

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26

'We ShouldKnow Who We Are': VeljoTormisin Conversation

Self-apprehension and self-cognition is vital for maintaining balance and viability. We should know who
we are and where our roots lie. Then it is easier to set
up goals for the future.'2
One obvious characteristic of Tormis's music,
apart from the rhythmic punch of its relentless
ostinati, is its harmonic astringency. As a result,
it looks deceptively bald on the page: the sense
of growing excitement that immediately hits the
ear isn't always obvious to the score-reading eye.
'I often build works over a pedal point. Our solo
songs don't lend themselves to harmonization, as
it used to be done in Romantic music. Our
classical composers also use these melodies - very
short, in three, four stages. You can't harmonize
them, so I was looking for other possibilities:
parallel, chords, clusters....'
For Estonia under the Soviet yoke, as for the
other two Baltic countries, Latvia and Lithuania,
song was a vital expression of national identity.
The Soviet authorities tolerated, and tamed, the
Uldlaulupidu, or United Song Festivals, that have
been held in Tallinn (and, initially, Tartu) every
five years since 1869, attracting some third of the
entire population of Estonia as performers (30,000)
or listeners (sometimes nearly 300,000)." One
imagines that Tormis's explicitly nationalist
must have generated political
compositions
difficulties for him. 'Yes, during the days of
Stalin, of course, and they were forbidden in the
'60s and '70s, these works. It's complicated, and
paradoxical. In 1948, when they were shouting
about formalism, they said, "Please look for
folksongs" - but it was a very good slogan for
me! In the '60s and '70s the Ministry of Culture
here said, ah, that's nationalism. It took them
30 years to understand what I was doing! I was
not a fighter, not a dissident4 - but our public
understood what I wanted to say in my national,
folk-based work'.
'2Quoted in Vaike Sarv's notes to the Finlandia CD Peopleof
Kalevala(0630-12245-2) a 1996 Tormis anthology sung by
the R.A.M. Choir (National Male Choir of Estonia); no
conductor indicated. In a second Tormis collection released
by Finlandia in 1996 - Bridgeof Song (4509-96937-2) - the
Estonian Radio Choir is conducted by Toomas Kapten.
"Having attended the Latvian Song Festival in Riga in July
1998, I can vouch for the effectiveness of these occasions in
inculcating a dignified sense of national identity: the sound of
hundreds of thousands of voices all around you picking up a
national hymn does more than stir the hair at the base of your
neck - it touches something very basic in the human makeup. A Forte CD (FD0009-2), recorded in part live at a number
of Estonian song festivals, coomunicates something of the
electric atmosphere of these events.
4
Tormis nonetheless often sailed close to the political wind
in his choice of the texts he set, the meaning of which must
occasionallyhave been hard to overlook. In (for example)

The ability to communicate through art is a

constant in discussionswith musicianswho lived
through the Soviet oppression. The best-known
practitioner of such virtuous double-speak is
Shostakovich, of course. I tell Tormis what the
Czech composer and organistPetr Eben told me
in interview how he used music to reach to his
audience past the censors:'
art could sometimes say things that otherwise couldn't
be told. For the same reasons that things didn't get
into the newspapers, people would like to go to the
small theatresratherthan the National Theatre because
there things were said that couldn't be pronounced
elsewhere. People became accustomed to reading
between the lines. In literature and painting it was
quite difficult because the censors understood if there
was something against the government. But music
was abstractand it was not so easy to survey. So if I
quoted a Gregorianmotif, the people from the churches
would know it and enjoy it; they would know that this
was a spiritual work - but the Union of Composers
would have no idea! In this way composing for me
was a sort of message for the people.
Tormis laughs at the bitter-sweet memories this
account invokes. 'We had a joke here that you
must sing in Latin. Some songs you had to sing
in Latin, in order that our Communists would
not understand: they knew only Russian. Some
songs were translated into Latin to protect the
songs, though their original language was
Estonian. Now, of course, it's good because you
can sing it all over the world and everybody
knows the Latin language. All the Kalevala, the
Finnish national epic, is translated into Latin that's something! Latin is a very good language
to translate the Kalevala and Kalevipoeg." The
old Greek and Latin epics are in quantitative
verse, and we have quantitative verse in regilaul
as well'.
MaarjamaaBalaad(Balladof Mary'sLand), composed in 1969,
the inference ofJaan Kaplinki's text, ostensibly about events
in the 13th century, must have been fairly obvious: 'hammers
are hewing stones on the hill, a foreign language is heard'.
His 1981 cycleJuhan Liivi sarkasmid(JuhanLiiv's Sarcasms)was
banned outright.
" Fanfare,Vol.19, No.6, July/August 1996, p.49.
"'The Kalevipoeg is the Estonian national epic, closely related
to the Finnish Kalevala;and as the Kalevalawas collected and
fashioned by Elias Lonnrot, so, too, the Kalevipoeg was
compounded from folk material collected in field trips by
Fnedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803-82). Cf: the website
maintained by the Institute of Baltic Studies
and
(http://moon.ibs.ee/literature/kalvipoeg/index.html)
Helen McEwan, 'National Epics and Their Role in NationBuilding: The Estonian Case', Slovo, Vol.11, 1999, pp.103119. Tormis has used the Kalevipoeg in several works, the
biggest of them being the 'Epic Cantata' Kalevipoeg, for
tenor, baritone, mixed chorus and orchestra (1954-56) and
Vanemiune,a cantata for mixed chorus and orchestra (1967).

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'We ShouldKnow Who We Are': VeljoTormisin Conversation 27

This talk of epics raisesanother question: now
that Tormis is free from political constraints to
compose whatever he wants, does he have plans
for any larger-scaleworks?Wagner, afterall, contemplated crowning his careerwith a symphony,
and Bruckner was toying with the idea of an
opera. 'These formsare not for me. I have written
a big stage work: that was Estonian Ballads, a
cantata-ballet.'7The libretto was written by my
wife [Lea]. Everything in it is from folksongs'.
One of Tormis's biggest works is Forgotten
Peoples, a cycle of six further cycles based on
songs by ethnic groups who, as the title suggests,
were already dying out or were dead as living
cultures when in 1970 Tormis began the 20year task of its composition: the Livonians from
the Gulf of Livonia (renamed the Gulf of Riga
by the Communists, long after the Livonians
had been subsumed by Latvianculture);Votians,
Izhorians and Ingermanland Finns (Ingrians)
from the coastal areas between Tallinn and
Leningrad;the Vepses, east of Lake Ladoga;and
the Karelians in the part of Finland north of
Leningradthat was capturedby the Soviet Union
during the Second World War, though there
were pockets of Kareliansas far south as Tver.'8
Is Tormis's music now all that is left of these
ancient peoples? 'The Vepses are still alive, and
so are the Karelians. But the Livonians,
Votians...' His voice trails away, and then
revives as he recallscontemporary moves to preserve this heritage before it slips away entirely:
'But there is in Latvia a folk ensemble that is
half-Latvian, half-Livonian. And we have these
Finno-Ugric days here, when all the FinnoUgric peoples come, and they sing the same
melodies as I have used in the first piece in
LivonianHeritage:

This common heritage of Finnish and Estonian

folk literature has allowed Tormis also to treat
materialthat may be more familiarfrom Finnish
sources: 'Undarmoi and Kalivoi', for example,
the tenth song in Tormis's IzhorianEpic, relates
the same tale of slaughter and revenge as Aulis
Sallinen's opera Kullero (1986-88), though in
two-and-a-half hours' less time. Tormis laughs.
'That may be, yes. For example, I've written for
the Hilliard Ensemble a piece called [in English]
Kullervo'sMessage2"and a piece for the King's
Singers on Finnish historical material'.
Tormis's mention of these two British vocal
groups suggests that now, as his fame spreads
and his music is at last becoming familiar to
audiences outside the Baltic republics, he must
be getting commissions from far further afield.
'Yes, but I have very little energy.' He taps his
chest: he had a heart attack eight years ago. So
he is taking things easy? 'We are living in a
house in the country, outside of Tallinn. Tallinn
is a very difficult town, psychologically'. Didn't
the lifting of the Soviet yoke nonetheless bring
a surge of adrenalinto music-making in Estonia?
'The first period was very difficult. We had lost
all our wester public and had very little contact
with the west. But they have come now: Warer
and Fazer Edition, ECM too. We had before a
window through Finland - and our window to
Europe was Finnish TV!' FazerEdition, indeed,
has become Tormis's main publisher and they
are slowly catching up with his enormous output. For Tormis himself it is a mixed blessing: 'I
am busy correcting proofs for Fazer, all the time.
I am working as an editor!'2'
I am obligedto SirjeNormetforhelp with translationdur-

ingthisinterview.

Tsitsor-linkist,titsor-linkist,
ni um aaigailzo nuuzo,
tsitsor, tsltsor'.19

Composed in 1979-80.
ForgottenPeoples comprises Livonian Heritage(1970), Votic
WeddingSongs (1971), IzhorianEpic (1975), IngrianEvenings
(1979), VepsianPaths (1983), and KarelianDestiny 1989. All
six cycles were recorded in 1992 by Tonu Kaljuste and the
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir on a ECM New
Series double-album (434 275-2) - the first recording of
Tormis's music to be issued in the West (reviewed in Tempo
lxx). ECM has just released a new Tormis anthology performed by the same forces: Litany to Thunder(465 223-2).
'
Tsitsor-birds, tsitsor-birds,
Now it's time to wake,
tsitsor, tsitsor'.
The opening lines of 'Waking the Birds', the first song in
Tormis's cycle LivonianHeritage.

"'Recorded by them in A Hilliard Songbook:New Musicfor

Voices(ECM New Series 453 259-2); The Hilliard Ensemble
has also recorded Tormis's Estonian Lullaby on the ECM
New Series album Mnemosyne(465 122-2).
21Tormis's modesty is such that, when I spoke to him in
November 1999, he didn't at first mention the forthcoming
premiere, within a month, of Sunnisonad('The Birthright'),
for mezzo soprano and tenor soloists, three choirs and
orchestra, a 35-40 minute cantatawritten earlier in the year.

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