Baltic Reflections

I enjoy writing about trips/journeys/adventures I’ve been on, so was wondering how to reflect on a recent trip to the Baltics, cramming in as many references (tenuous and otherwise) to musical life as possible, to make posting it here make sense. This is my (non-chronological) attempt.

This year I started a new job as Session Coordinator at a choir for those living with or alongside dementia. It takes place every other Saturday, giving me a 2 week gap to fit a trip away into. Being picked up form the end of term concert to which I’d taken my luggage to, I would return in the early hours of the day of the first session of the next term, exactly 2 weeks later. 2 rehearsals of the choir I’m in myself would have to be foregone, despite all the work there was to do for our (at the time upcoming but now complete) final tour.

A road trip playlist played in the van on the way to an airport adjacent forward base. A trip playlist had been curated during the planning process, but was  as yet unplayed to save for the real thing.

Birdsong was a big part of the musical and sound world of the trip. In Vilnius, croaking hooded crows coveted city street sandwiches and ice-creams. A few days later, cycling on the more rural Curonian Spit, huge skeins of common cranes honked overhead. Gulls soundtracked idyllic hours on the beach. A percussive woodpecker of a variety not found at home in the UK was tricky to spot in the woodland canopy. The breathtaking beating wings of a white-tailed eagle that I disturbed upon emerging from the wooded path to the shores of the lagoon.

Towns along the spit had waterfront and forest sculpture trails, containing doppelgangers of my guitarist and violinist friends to whom pictures were duly dispatched via Whatsapp. A real violinist, elderly and out of tune but wonderfully authentic, played folk tunes on a fiddle at the summit of a very hot hike up a sand dune overlooking Kaliningrad.

Björks avant garde score for the film ‘Dancer in the Dark’, enjoyed with pizza and beers in a brutal old Soviet-era prison turned open-air cinema/gig venue, needs to be heard to be believed. One night after dinner, the sound of heavy rock and large crowds drew the ear round a corner to be greeted by a free city centre gig, complete with festival-style stage.

A giant wooden sound catcher that you sat in to have the sounds of the forest funnelled into your face was amazing- creaking branches, rustling leaves, buzzing insects amplified in an extraordinary way.

A very long but very cheap coach ride through Latvia allowed me to work in person on a commission from my former university music department friend in Estonia. A casual folk session with a friend of his, accompanied by Baltic fish soup and whiskey, necessitated the attempted hooking up of an old midi-keyboard to a laptop. The lag and my inferior aural tune playing skills didn’t detract from the joy of making music with friends old and new.

Unfamiliar languages and natural sounds, as well as noises that exist outside of everyday life like those of airports and ferries, soon gave way to the familiarity of home. Writing this now is the first time I’ve listened to the playlist again since the trip, the memories of beaches and birds and special times that it soundtracked almost too painful now to invoke. I guess that’s how you know it was a great trip though, when you know that the sounds and sights and everything else will stay with you, even when they’re not there anymore.