Tallinn Music Week 2021 Opening Night: Themes For Great Cities Tallinn live premiere

video upload by Tallinn Music Week

"Premiere of 'Themes For Great Cities: Tallinn' at Tallinn Music Week 2021 Opening Concert

In cooperation with Telia Estonia

Tallinn Creative Hub, 30 September 2021

Performed by:
Alex Maiolo
Jonas Kaarnamets
Erki Pärnoja
Jonas Bjerre"

I'm proud to say Alex Maiolo is actually a supporting member of the site. The following is some additional info he sent in:

"I just got back from Tallinn Music Week. This year I went as a performer. I pitched a concept to Helen Sildna, the director, called Themes For Great Cities, and she liked it.

I asked two Estonian artists, Erki Pärnoja, and Jonas Kaarnamets, and also Jonas Bjerre of Mew. They all said yes.

The idea was to take sounds from the city and use them not only in a concrète way, but also more behind the scenes, as instruction for pitch, tempo, and rhythm. All without the aid of computers. It was a modular project. The computer was just used for playback for the most part. A tape machine.

Originally it was supposed to be held in a beautiful old shipper's guild hall. About 250 capacity. It was moved to the opening ceremony - 750 people in Kultuurikatel. The President of Estonia was there. I admire her greatly. Not a lot of people know this, but Estonia has the most women in government of any nation. it's almost 50/50 with men but not quite.

There were some speeches and the premier of a string quartet piece. Then us.

I think we achieved our goal of making these sounds into music. You'll hear the sounds we 'harvested' from the tram, train station, tunnels, streets, cafes, the old Soviet era market, and parks, just to name a few. There are also light readings from parks and the harbor that I converted into pitch/notes that aren't so apparent. Jonas took a 10 second recording of the Russian Orthodox choir and stretched it to three minutes. The whole thing is a song cycle that somewhat follows the arc of a day. We wrote it in 10 days."

Note the video above only covers the performance. For Alex Maiolo's introduction see this video on Facebook starting one hour in.