Sunday, October 7, 2007

Artistic freedom

When the estonian Arvo Pärt reemerged as a composer in the 70s, albeit an underground one since his music was banned by the communists for being religious (which it certainly was), it was with new, minimalistic style. The short piece "Für Alina" which was smuggled out of Estonia made musicians perplexed. "Where is the music?". Käbi Laretei, pianist and former wife of Ingmar Bergman, described the notes as "birds on telephone wires, without any bows, tempo, no hints at all".

My guess is that most jazz musicians would have had a whole different attitude.
"No guidelines? Great!"

/O.K.

2 comments:

LS said...

So did you play the piece over and over again or was it only 10 seconds long?

O.K. said...

Oh, that's not all of it, only a quarter of it or so. The piece is about two minutes long. And I didn't play anything, Käbi did. :)