Listening with the Heart
Dear President Joost, ladies and gentlemen,
It is a great honour to accept the Goethe Medal on behalf of my father. He asked me to convey his heartfelt gratitude for this recognition.
When our family left Soviet Estonia in 1980, we first arrived in Vienna. There, Alfred Schlee of Universal Edition had done something very simple but consequential: he had listened closely to my father’s music and put his trust in what he heard. This was long before my father’s international reputation was established. It was through Universal Edition that my father first found his way into German-speaking cultural life. Soon afterwards, a fellowship from the DAAD brought our family to Berlin. The DAAD went far beyond the terms of a fellowship: it gave our family a home, surrounded us with care, and gave my father the footing from which a new chapter of his creative life could begin. Looking back on those first years, my father said: “We had not arrived among strangers.”
Here he found creative freedom to continue his work. But German culture not only surrounded him; it also found its way into his music. He has spoken of how German-language texts shaped both him and his work – from the poetry of Clemens Brentano to sacred texts in German. Words are fundamental to his way of composing. As he has said: “The words write my music.”
And yet there is a paradox. While the words may determine the structure, rhythm and smallest details of the music, they reach us translated into another language – the language of music. What the text carries can reach us through music across boundaries of language and religious context.
And this brings us to listening itself – to the art of listening directly to the music.
Among those who listened was Manfred Eicher. He and my father developed a close creative bond – one in which Eicher’s particular way of hearing the music shaped the recordings they made together for ECM Records. Through these recordings, the music found its way beyond the concert hall and into people’s homes around the world.
My father once described the tintinnabuli sound as “a neutral surface where even a blade of grass acquires the status of a flower.” What reaches us through music may be just as simple as it is difficult to explain: peace, an abundance of love, a sense of unity in being together. For my father, words – and particularly the words of sacred texts – are often the source from which the music begins. But once those words have become music, what they carry can reach us without their literal meaning – and without passing through the intellect. Do we always have to understand in order to receive? Or can receiving come first, and understanding follow?
And here, perhaps, the two sides of music meet. My father has described a shift that can happen while composing: “If you shift your attention from the head to the heart when composing, a new centre of command is formed, upon a new foundation, based on a new logic. This lasts for only a moment but is amazing.”
More than forty years ago, our family arrived in the German-speaking world and discovered that we had not arrived among strangers. People and institutions here gave my father trust and freedom – and gave his music the space to spread its wings.
Perhaps listening with the heart is also a way of receiving: first the music, and then, sometimes, understanding.
Today, in Weimar, I have the privilege of receiving the Goethe Medal on his behalf. For this recognition – and for all that was received along the way – we are deeply grateful.
Thank you.