Helena Tulve
“Of utmost importance to me is the extending of musical boundaries. By this I mean the extension of timbral, formal and stylistic borders as well as the opening-up of music’s geographical boundaries. The latter has greatly advanced the former.”
Helena Tulve, one of the most distinctive new voices to emerge in Estonian music in recent years, was born in Tartu in 1972. She studied composition at the Tallinn High School of Music and from 1989 to 1992 at the Estonian Academy of Music under Erkki-Sven Tüür (whose only composition pupil she remains to date). She continued her education in Jacques Charpentier’s composition class at the National Regional Conservatoire in Paris, from which she graduated in 1994 with first prize. From 1993 to 1996 she studied Gregorian chant at the Paris Conservatoire.
Tulve’s compositions – most of them for chamber groups – contain a wide range of influences, including [...]
“Of utmost importance to me is the extending of musical boundaries. By this I mean the extension of timbral, formal and stylistic borders as well as the opening-up of music’s geographical boundaries. The latter has greatly advanced the former.”
Helena Tulve, one of the most distinctive new voices to emerge in Estonian music in recent years, was born in Tartu in 1972. She studied composition at the Tallinn High School of Music and from 1989 to 1992 at the Estonian Academy of Music under Erkki-Sven Tüür (whose only composition pupil she remains to date). She continued her education in Jacques Charpentier’s composition class at the National Regional Conservatoire in Paris, from which she graduated in 1994 with first prize. From 1993 to 1996 she studied Gregorian chant at the Paris Conservatoire.
Tulve’s compositions – most of them for chamber groups – contain a wide range of influences, including French spectral music, Gregorian chant, IRCAM experimentalism and oriental music. As the Estonian Music Information Centre website puts it: “Her elaborate and rationally constructed works achieve exquisite expressiveness and emotional tension. [They] attest to the richness and variety of her musical experiences and interests”.
Tulve’s first recording for ECM’s New Series was Lijnen (2008). The album begins with her 1998 composition, à travers, and progresses through more recent works, including Lijnen, in which Arianna Savall sings the words of Belgian poet Roland Jooris, Öö ('Night') with the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet, and nec ros, nec pluvia with the Silesian String Quartet. In the Guardian Andrew Clements praised this album as “music of real personality and expressive depth”.
Six years later Arboles lloran por lluvia (Trees cry for rain) deepened listeners’ insight into Tulve’s unique sound-world. Here the composer explores the raw fabric of sound and the nature of timbre in both analytical and instinctive ways, in compositions that are unmistakably her own, yet also inclusive – here incorporating aspects of Gregorian chant, melody from Yemenite Jewish tradition, and texts from Sufi, Sephardic and Christian mystic poetry.
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