Tallinn, Estonia: A conversation with Jakob (b. 1998)
Jakob and I meet on a park bench during an unseasonably warm June.
His English is fluent and comes naturally — like that of nearly all young Estonians I’ve met — but he sometimes pauses to ask me clarifying questions about prepositions. “Do I say in an island or on an island?” “In the street or on the street?”
I play the bassoon. My parents are musicians, and they helped me choose it when I was young. There were two reasons: I wasn’t very good at my school subjects, and it is easy to get a job when you play the bassoon. Sure, I might have been very good at math or science if I spent a lot of time on it, but remembering things like that did not come easy to me.
For some instruments, it’s very hard to get a job. Like pianists or string instruments — you can spend ten or twelve hours a day and still have a very hard time finding auditions. Not for bassoon. There aren’t that many bassoon players in the world.
I also play the piano. Playing the piano is good to practice the fundamentals, like chromatic scales. You can play a lot more musical lines on the piano — in the bassoon, there is just one. But with the piano, you can tell many stories.
When I was sixteen or seventeen years old, I had a lot of anxieties about being attractive and popular and finding a girlfriend. That was maybe 80% of my worries. The other 20% was music. Maybe it’s not the most predictable combination for a teenager — worrying about girls and bassoon music — but that was my life.
I attended a secondary school that also taught music, so it was really important to be a rockstar. About five years ago I appeared on a show that’s kind of like American Idol. The format is like American Idol, but for young classical musicians. Maybe 100,000 people watch it, so one in ten Estonians. It might be as popular as American Idol is in the United States, actually.¹ So many Estonians know music and are interested in it.
I studied for a year in Germany, and am now a student at the Sibelius Academy in Finland. I also have a job at the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, so I’m trying to do both.
It’s incredible, being a musician here. You can’t believe the recognition that musicians get in Western Europe. There was a bass singer from Saaremaa who got a job at the Vienna State Opera. When he came back, he said that he would get stopped on the streets everywhere — people recognized him. He was so famous. It was for this reason he bought a house in the quiet countryside, far away from the city.
When I walk around the streets in Western Europe with my case, people stop me and ask — is that an instrument? What do you play? and they are amazed.
I consider myself to be conservative. That’s not to say I don’t think that people should be mistreated or don’t deserve to be treated equally. Here, it means that people should be able to say what they want, without judgment or anything being prohibited.
It’s important to be nice to people, to be kind to others. Scientists say that there is nothing after death, but if there is something out there, then I cannot imagine it would be harmful for us to be nice out there. I believe in a God — maybe not the version that’s in the Bible — and it’s important for me to do good by Him.
Estonians are a little different from Americans. For people that haven’t been traumatized by other countries, it’s hard to understand. Here, we don’t have any sayings like shoot for the stars or you can do anything. We are realists. We want to get the job done.
We are an IT country. There are always startups and new businesses here in Tallinn. People are immigrating here for work. Other countries see us as Eastern European, which basically means “Russian.” But we’re trying to become better, more Scandinavian. And I think we’re getting there.
Footnotes
¹ In terms of percentage of the national population, Klassikatähed actually receives more viewership. The 2021 season finale of American Idol received roughly 2% viewership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Idol#Reception
This is part of a conversation series centered around the country of Estonia. Click here to read the introduction.
