When I asked a Hungarian musician to describe the Viljandi Folk Music Festival, which we both were attending, he said that it is very different from both the festivals he has been to in Europe. In Eastern Europe, the concepts of "folklore" and "traditional music" seem to be, if not completely then at least partly, united, setting aside phenomena such as "folk rock" and "world music". In Estonia, the music performed at the festival in Viljandi seems to represent all three qualities and when it comes to the audience dress code, the national customs have no, or at least only a minor, role to play. Instead one can recognize mainstream and sub-cultural outfits and symbols.

In Estonia, the period since the beginning of the 1990s has been full of changes and developments in both traditional music itself and the ideological network without which no music can survive. Comparing today's young traditional musicians with the traditional music makers active during the period of Soviet rule, we easily find major and quite important and interesting differences. While role models of the former period primarily represented a collective (the Estonian people in a Soviet Union context or a folklore/folk dance/folk music group), today's role model musician primarily represents his or her own personality or a band/music project. In many of the published photos of ordinary folklore performances from the 70s, the members of the collectives are mostly dressed in identical or at least very similar folk costumes and instead of having one kannel (Estonian harp) player on stage, there are ten. This means that the chance of being personal and acting individually, of improvising and responding to the very moment, has been excluded or minimised.

The trends of emphasising personality and locality can be noticed also outside the traditional music field. While the first period of regained independent statehood contained a network or chain of individuals' projects dealing with local history, reunitement of families, development of sacred traditions, foundation of new traditional music courses, establishments of new approaches to traditional music and dance etc., the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2lst century can be characterised as a period when new ideas and activities have been taken for granted and the newly founded surviving traditions have become more rooted in both grass roots and higher levels.

One way of creating a model of the variations in authenticity is to use the image of a flaming candle. If the material candle stands for the traditions seen as handed-down texts - tunes, dance steps, songs, games etc - the flame stands for personal charisma, engagement and creative spirit. While discussing this somewhat theoretical image with an Estonian traditional musician, she said that one must combine the two. Can you imagine yourself sitting and staring at an unlit candle? Or enjoying a flame without a candle, which in this case must be an uncontrolled fire?! In the case of music, a "candle" approach stands for "exactness" in the revival of historical folklore. In order to save a tradition, conservation has become a trustworthy method. On the other hand, a "flame" approach lets the musician create performances that for him of her respond to contemporary settings and the tunes and the songs find both new meanings and new musical expressions to include in a performance. What feels right and works well, must be right.

Coming back to the early 1990s, when the Department of Traditional Music was founded at the Culture College in Viljandi, one could say that the founders and initiators saw the former folklore collectives as candle keepers. As nothing is completely bad or good, no active folklore collectives are, or were, considered to be bad, not even by the Viljandi reformists. Some worked very hard and well on the preserving and reviving of traditions, songs, tunes and dances they had found in different archives. The initiators of the traditional music department needed something more - there still was a lack of personal touch, as they defined it. Too much candle and too little flame.

In the case of the newly-opened department of traditional music, the balance became the opposite. In a time of national and cultural independent movements in Estonia, many young people felt attracted to traditional music, applied to enter the course at the college and started off with little or no earlier experience and little preparation. They got lit without knowing where they had their candles. The first years were a great struggle to create an ideological, methodological and aesthetic base for both the new college course and the new approach to traditional music. In practice this meant that students had to get used to learning music by listening, playing tunes by heart, adding improvisational colours and creating a personal style.

Somehow, the creation process of the traditional music course is very much an outcome of the Soviet system. The common evaluation of this course, with its poorly qualified students during this period, is that traditional music pedagogues and tutors were needed. In the late 1980s, many folk dance groups and traditional music ensembles were founded as a reaction to the general mentality of the period, which was dominated by the breakdown of the Soviet system and national movements. Cruel voices say that many put on folk customs and danced some folk dances just to get abroad to Western Europe to buy stuff, to see the world. No matter what their motives were, their knowledge of and skills in traditional music, singing and dance were still seen as a problem by those considered the folklore elite and, for this reason, a great process, which in the end led to the opening of the college course, got started.

Put in a slightly different light, the new educational branch of traditional music was built from the top down rather then being an outcome of a grass roots movement. Instead, as an outcome of the course that has now been educating traditional music students for more than a decade, many movement-like activities and groupings have occurred in many different areas in Estonia as many of the graduates indeed have managed to spread both the music and the ideas of the Viljandi school in their circles and summer courses for different age groups. Lately, the graduates, active as both ordinary and traditional music teachers, have worked on a common curriculum for traditional music, which is meant to be used by music schools at a primary level. Recently, some of the students in the department have become well prepared for higher education in the field of traditional music as they had started playing folk music with Viljandi graduates at a young age. This means that, coming back to the image of the flaming candle, a new generation of musicians has appeared in Estonia, for whom the basic parts of the image are taken for granted and who can concentrate on their own music and teaching in more detailed ways at higher education levels. In other words, the cycle of education, which leads through primary and secondary levels all the way to higher and more complicated levels, has been completed, and the new question is where such a wheel might lead us.

Coming back to the notion of the Hungarian guest saying that the festival isn't really similar to other traditional music festivals in Eastern Europe, the answer to why this is the case might well be found in the circle of its initiators. Firstly, the first year students all took part in the creation of a curriculum for traditional music and such processes tend to teach students that nothing ever can be taken for granted. A curriculum is there to be improved and festivals are there to be organised. Secondly, the young organisers had good opportunities to visit other festivals before they created their own; they could compare the models of festivals in Finland, Sweden and Belgium and come up with their own models, rather than copies, based on other organisers' experiences rather than on the festivals themselves. Thirdly, admitting that the Viljandi festival instead follows the tradition of rock festivals, such as Roskilde in Denmark, could give us a hint of how the festival could mobilise its audience. At the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, there was a rock festival, Rock Summer, in Tallinn, which became a bridge to the Western world for a generation of Estonians. This festival helped people to get used to new ways of meeting around music, and, when Rock Summer was discontinued, Viljandi became an alternative for quite a large number of people who had got used to attending festivals. On a more theoretical level, one could also say that the Viljandi festival followed post-modern logic. While the folklore festivals in earlier decades in many ways were modern, having one program and one stage, where every visitor was suppose to consume the same product, the Viljandi Festival offered the audience different concerts and activities, often in different places at the same time, making the festival even more suitable for slightly different target groups, and permitting combinations of historical and contemporary traditional music from Estonia and elsewhere in both traditional and experimental soundscapes.

You are warmly welcome to try the Viljandi mixture yourself next summer. The festival is always held at the end of July!

Further information from www.folk.ee

Sofia Joons (1972), musician, music sociologist, and lecturer at the Estonian Institute of Humanities.