Kuldar Sink's Maarjamaa Missa (1989) as a Reflection of Estonia’s Spiritual Culture

• In Event: Social and Cultural Impacts of Baltic Music

Abstract

In the 1960s, following forty years of state atheism, many Soviet citizens became attracted to religion and spirituality, as they searched for alternatives to the communist ideology and longed to reconnect with cultural traditions of the past. This exploration inspired literary, film, visual and musical works addressing sacred topics. My presentation discusses one aspect of this cultural phenomenon in music that was particular to Estonia. In Tallinn, most composers were uninterested in religious topics until the late 1980s, and the famous composer Arvo Pärt, who began incorporating spiritual ideas in his music in the late 1960s, was an exception. I will focus on choral work Maarjamaa Missa (1989) by Pärt’s contemporary Kuldar Sink (1942-1995). Even though Sink’s father was a priest and his mother – a composer of sacred music, Sink, like many of his colleagues, became interested in religion only in the late 1980s. Drawing from music analysis and reviews of the first performances of the piece in 1989 and 1990, I will suggest an interpretation of its particularly Estonian features that help understand cultural milieu in Estonia at that time. Engaging with three strands of Christianity and local pre-Christian tradition, Maarjamaa Missa represents the diversity of religious beliefs particular to Estonia, a practice that music scholar Jeffers Engelhardt calls a “tenacious ecumenicity of Christian musics.” The reception of the work suggests that the listeners interpreted religious freedom as symbolic of Estonian resistance to the Soviet regime.

Short Bio

Oksana Nesterenko is a musicologist specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, with a focus on Eastern Europe, religion, spirituality and postcolonial studies. She earned a PhD in Music History and Theory at Stony Brook University in 2021. Her forthcoming book, A Forbidden Fruit? Sacred Music in the USSR before its Fall, explores music composed in Kyiv, Moscow, Tallinn and Yerevan. Her writing has been published in Perspectives of New Music, Yale Journal of Music & Religion, Musicology Now and the Jordan Center blog. She hosts a contemporary music podcast Extended Techniques and teaches at Union College (New Jersey).

Author

• Oksana Nesterenko, Union College, NJ