Browsing by Author "Tool, Aare"

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Heli Reimann. Tallinn ‘67 Jazz Festival. Myths and Memories. New York: Routledge, 2022, 194 lk.
(Eesti Muusika- ja Teatriakadeemia, 2022) Tool, Aare; Siitan, Toomas, koostaja; Arvo Pärdi Keskus; Kõrver, Kristina
Mart Jaanson. Eesti muusika 100 aastat. Tallinn 2018
(Eesti Muusika- ja Teatriakadeemia, 2018) Tool, Aare; Kõlar, Anu, koostaja
Neo-Mythologism in the Music of Arvo Pärt, Veljo Tormis, and Bronius Kutavičius
(Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, 2021) Tool, Aare
The music of Arvo Pärt, Veljo Tormis, and Bronius Kutavičius written since the 1970s has previously been accommodated under various descriptive terms, such as “holy”, “magical”, or “Baltic” minimalism, to mention just a few examples. This article aims to outline some of the common features between the ethnographic/ritual creative practices of Tormis and Kutavičius on the one hand, and Pärt’s music on the other, drawing on the concept of neo-mythologism—a term for the trends in 20th-century music (Adamenko 2007) characterized by a preoccupation with repetition, symmetry, binary oppositions, and special (visual) symbols (mythologems). Neo-mythologism is a threefold phenomenon, which encompasses topics (literary allusions), musical structure, and presentation/reception. Therefore, it is important to observe neo-mythologism also in the visual representations of music, such as theatrical and video productions (Adam’s Passion by Arvo Pärt and Robert Wilson, 2015). Carl Jung’s notions of the “collective unconscious” and “archetypes”, with an emphasis on the intuitive and elusive, had a considerable impact on the Estonian cultural scene in the late 1960s and 1970s, and served as a driving force of the innovative literary and theatrical movements in that period. Neo-mythologism can be proposed as a general term for the various ethnographic, religious, and ritual phenomena of creativity in the Baltic countries in the 1970s and 1980s.
Theodor W. Adorno raadioteooria: tõlgenduskatse Eesti vaatenurgast 1920. ja 1930. aastatel
(Eesti Muusika- ja Teatriakadeemia, 2023) Tool, Aare; Raju, Marju, koostaja
In the 1920s and 1930s radio receivers were advertised as the most wonderful invention of the century, making music and news from all over Europe easily accessible to everyone. What radio broadcasting brought to the musical scene was supposedly a perfect bond between technological innovation and the democratization of culture. According to Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), however, these idyllic perspectives had their aesthetic and political drawbacks. Although Adorno’s essays on radio broadcasting (Current of Music, 2009) were written in 1938–1941 with American radio stations in mind, the motivation behind his radio scepticism can also be explained from an Estonian point of view. An analysis of radio listening and public reception in Estonia, with the focus on the years immediately following the beginning of regular radio broadcasts in Tallinn on 18th December 1926, reveals a considerable degree of similarity in the ideology surrounding radio broadcasts in their early days in Estonia and the US. While Adorno’s remarks about the “standardisation” of radio broadcasts were not fully pertinent in the more varied and fragmented European context, the main problem he posed remains highly relevant: what is the intellectual and political price one has to pay for music to be easily accessible on the air?