S IS FOR SINGING
Singing is important to Estonians.
Possibly the understatement of the year. Almost every person we met belonged to a choir or their children did, or they participate in the National Song Festival which takes place every five years
at the enormous Song Festival Grounds in Tallinn.
Every town has its own song festival ground where people gather and sing to each other. The song stages are typically constructed from wood and have a distinctive deep bell-like shape to assist the projection of unamplified voices.
One of the first things I learned about Estonia was that the movement that led to the declaration of independence by the Baltic States from the USSR was known as the Singing Revolution. In an extraordinary unilateral show of defiance by the annexed countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, a chain of two million people stretching 420 miles across the three capitals, Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, linked hands and sang patriotic folk songs and Catholic hymns which had been suppressed by the Soviets.
The ability of song to transcend every kind of barrier - cultural, ideological or linguistic - is something that runs very deep here. At the Anseküla Seltsimaja in Sõrve on the island of Saaremaa, we were treated to the joyous wonders of Estonian folk singing by Mari Tammeougu and her children. It's exuberantly melodic, the rhythmical repetitions slightly trance-inducing. Later, Mari introduces us to the kannel, a kind of lap harp or Estonian zither, and she sings us all a lullaby.
Immediately, it's all any of us ever want to hear, despite not understanding a word. The sound is pure enchantment. We are completely under the spell of the song.