Tiia Järg’s Dedication Speech for Veljo Tormis’s 95th Anniversary

Historical facts are primarily psychological facts, says Marc Bloch in his Apology for History. This is a familiar phrase to many, but how often we actually pause to reflect on it depends on each of us.

Veljo Tormis as a person – a man of high morals, great dignity, and precision.
Punctuality was for him something utterly elementary. Once he was supposed to come to my place on an errand, and just before the agreed time he called and said: “I will be five minutes late.” I was at home, not waiting for him out on the street corner. But that he would say I’ll be five minutes late—I won’t deny it—left a very deep impression on me.

The German saying goes: order in things means order in thoughts.
Whoever has seen copies of Veljo’s manuscripts knows exactly what I mean. His music notation was so clear and unambiguous that he almost never needed the help of a copyist—except perhaps in competitions, where his handwriting might have revealed the author.
This meticulousness in writing also meant, for the performer, the composer’s demand for strict adherence to the score.

Thinking about what Tormis accomplished, it seems to me that he never wrote just stories. Every piece carries a message.
I would like to call him a messenger.

The artist sees more clearly and farther than the ordinary person, and therefore notices the various disturbing factors approaching society and communicates them through his works. Benjamin Britten once pointed this out in a speech.
In my view, through his works Veljo Tormis did this constantly with us, the listeners. It inspires wonder and admiration—how timeless Tormis’s messages are, how deeply they resonate.

And if we ask what ensures that this message reaches us, the listeners, then I believe it is the construction of his works. The structure of a composition, as a bearer of the message across time and space, is one of the most powerful in Estonian music.

It is well known that Tormis cared deeply about achieving the precise sound image of his works. He was, so to speak, a “composer of rehearsals.” He would sit in on rehearsals until the final result satisfied him.

Our attitude toward folk song.
Recall how it has changed through the intense activity of Veljo Tormis.
A fact that had already been emphasized by Béla Bartók a couple of generations earlier, and later again by Tormis among us: that folk song—or rather, the folk tune—is not merely a theme, but an independent and complete form of art.

It is one thing to say this; it is quite another to study this art form and the conditions of its existence so thoroughly that you begin to perceive it as self-evident.

And so it repeats itself: the role of the creative individual before society remains, as a rule, unrecognized by society during his lifetime.

Photo: Klassikaraadio