An American...in Tallinn

Gene Kelley eat your heart out. For those of you that get the reference, congratualtions. For those of you that do not...I have nothing left to say to you, except "carry on" and "perhaps you should see more musicals". Even though there are no small Estonian children breaking into song and choreographed dance, like in Grande Paris, the Estonians would like you to believe there were. Estonians are feircely proud of their musical traditions, which is why I am here. That, and hoping that I too can have dream-like halucinations about trampy female dancers while I do bell kicks and tap routines (still following the reference hopefully).

*At this time I would like to apologize to any readers as well a my junior high grammar and spelling teachers, Mr. Tucci and Mrs. Albrecht respectivaley, for suffering my atrocious spelling mistakes and misuse of punctuation. If this does not bother you enough to push the back-arrow button on your browser, or type in a new URL, then read on, and thank you.

I graduated from Northwestern University, June 2005, spent a long summer traveling the states with family, packed up my two bags (totalling almost 60kilos---major fines) and moved halfway around the world to the small nation of Estonia. At little bit of background and explanation:

For some reason you are allowed to be nosey and presumptious when dealing with seniors in college. At no other time in someones life can people evasivley peruse your business like this time. Everybody wants to know your life history, plan, and dreams. Unfortunatley for these busibodys, very rarely do 21 year olds have much to say about any of these. Nevertheless, I carefully crafted a response to rattle off in case of ambush: "I don't know". Realizing this was not the most effective response, as well as a poor testament to my folks' parenting and my own education and social upbringing, I decided to go with, "I applied for this grant thing, but I won't know until May. So I am hoping for that". For some reason, this worked.

And lucky for me, I got the grant thing and here I am in Tallinn, Estonia for the next nine months (I have been here one month already). My official reason for being here is to conduct research into Estonian music education and observe how this education helps promote the Estonian choral tradition. The unofficial reason that I am here is because now when someone asks me, "What are you doing when you get back?", people ask this because they are masochistic, or simply interested, I answer, "I don't know". Yes, I am soulsearching, but back to the Estonians. Turns out, nearly 1/3 of the country sings in a choir, they have huge song festivals every year, and attribute part of their independce to their "Sing Revolution" of the 1980's. In this "revolution" nearly 300,000 people (understand that there are currently about 1.4million in estonia-60-70f which are ethnic Estonians) gathered at the Tallinn song festival grounds for a major singing extravaganza. It worked, they are no longer under the thumb of Russia. These are the facts that drew me here.

Currently, I am taking two classes at the Estonian Academy of Music, Eesti Muusikaakadeemia: Estonian I, and Estonian Music and Culture. I am also singing in the Tallinna Kamerkoor, also know as the Tallinn Chamber Choir, and finding other ways to conduct my research.

*Though I have always been bad at keeping a journal, I will try to stick to this blog-thing. I will post my developments and observation here about Estonia, music, and me (sounds like a nice book title). And for my friend Trudee who I know will read this today and hopefully be a faithful reader as I will be to her blog (smile): "I want to learn to cook, to laugh, and I want to Tap dance".