A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2024, 3: Download.
Since 1994 anti-genderism has emerged as a new participant in the discourse on sex education. One of the biggest targets of anti-genderism is public schools, where it is claimed that pupils are being indoctrinated with “gender theory”. Anti-genderism obstructs the implementation of sex education in various countries in Europe. Anti-genderist rhetoric and its interface with sex education has been analyzed up till now either as a right-wing or as a Russian propaganda narrative, only sporadically mentioning their common traits. Applying deductive content analysis, this research examined how sex education is utilized by anti-genderism. Sex education is portrayed as a frontline discipline that holds immense power to either distort or protect “traditional values” and sovereignty. Parents are depicted as powerless against sex education. Insights about approaching sex education and radical positions related to it are addressed in the discussion section.
This essay reflects on the issues of the past, memory practices, decolonisation, and reconciliation, as discussed during the 2024 CBEES Summer School. The author applies these reflections to think of her own research on LGBTQ+ Ukrainians’ wartime embodied relationalities, and how the discussed issues might manifest for her studied group. She further reflects on importance of positionality in discussions on postwar memory.
This essay explores the intersection of personal reflection and Ukraine’s collective journey towards reconciliation amid the ongoing war with Russia. Set against the peaceful backdrop of a CBEES Summer School, the author delves into the challenges of memory construction, highlighting Ukraine’s historical complexities and the importance of inclusive memorialization in shaping a unified postwar identity. The essay draws comparisons with Eastern Europe’s post-communist memory work, emphasizing reconciliation and social cohesion.
Margareta Tillberg has died, at the age of 63 years. Margareta Tillberg had a great commitment to what she did, and she still would have had a lot to give of her knowledge.
August 24, 2023, Helsinki Music Centre, Finland. In the concert hall, the last sounds of the orchestra gradually fade away, and only the fragile, almost unheard echoes of music linger through several minutes of silence. Then — long standing ovations. At the same time, how-ever, many of the audience members in the full house of 1 600 seats are openly crying. The audience had just heard HUSH (2023), a concerto for trumpet and orchestra, the last work of the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. She had passed away at the age of 70 only a couple of weeks before this performance The essay is based on several interviews with the composer, and on reviews of her works that I have made while working as a music journalist and critic between 1997 and 2003. After my transition to an academic career in musicology, I continued working with Saariaho’s music but in the scientific context. In 2008, I wrote my doctoral thesis on her first opera, L’amour de loin (Love from Afar, 2000). Since then, I have continued to explore Saariaho’s music, and above anything else focused on her operas; for instance, I have written the program book texts of her works for the Finnish National Opera. That is why this essay, after introducing Saariaho’s early years and development towards a full career as an opera composer, concentrates on her operatic works.
History is not fixed and unchanging, and the way we think about the concept of nation can affect the way we talk about the past. This also applies to the history of music. Let me give you an example. In volume 2 of his seminal book on music history, The Oxford History of Western Music, the late Richard Taruskin talks about the circle of fifths, a diagram that helps you visually organize Western music theory’s 12 chromatic pitches for learning purposes. He mentions that the circle of fifths first appeared in a Russian music theory book published in Moscow in 1679, decades before Western music theorists began to talk about it. However, the book itself was not originally Russian, but was translated from Polish. Moreover, the author was a Ukrainian clergyman and singing teacher who was born in Kyiv, at that time part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth with Krakow as its capital. When Taruskin published his book in 2004, the background for the first appearance of the circle of fifths was just an interesting anecdote referring to the ethnic and linguistic diversity of Eastern Europe in the 17th century. But how can — or should — one speak of it after February 24, 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine? How do you even pronounce the name of the Ukrainian cleric? Nikolai Diletsky, following the Russian form as published in the first edition, or Mykola Diletsky, in the Ukrainian form, as he was born in Kyiv and is considered part of Ukrainian music history?
Olli-Pekka Martikainen is the Secretery General of the Association of Finnish Music Schools, an umbrella organization that includes 97 schools. He has a doctorate in music and he previously worked as the vice dean of the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki. Apart from leadership in higher music education Martikainen has worked as an orchestral and chamber musician and as a teacher at the Sibelius Academy. Martikainen holds the first artistic Doctoral degree in the field of percussion music in Finland. Ann Werner asked him questions about higher music education in the Baltic region with her own research on nation and gender in higher music education as background.
Music and Performing Arts is one of the fields Georgia can pride itself on internationally. While the country is in transition as it officially embarks on its long path to European Union membership, this study explores the process of Europeanization of higher music education in Georgia. Authors analyze how higher music educational institutions employ European projects for organizational change at a grassroots level and to what extent and in what way supranational and national policy instruments influence the outcome at the local – institutional level. This study categorizes Georgia’s higher music education sector into three major stages since the country regained independence in 1991 and uses structural, institutional, and organizational approaches for analysis of collected data. The findings suggest that significant challenges remain despite emerging European support in the cultural area and active cooperation between major stakeholders in the sector and their European counterparts.
This article describes and analyzes assessment approaches in three conservatories and thus contributes to the study of how values are distributed and negotiated within higher education specialized in classical music in the Baltic Sea region and Central Europe. The relation between assessment and learning could be viewed from different perspectives. Assessment of learning can be seen as a checkpoint regarding whether specific knowledge has been internalized, assessment for learning implies that the chosen assessment method encourages the learning process, while assessment as learning can be seen as intertwined with and dominating the learning process. In this article we clarify possibilities for transformative assessment, as well as the risk for assessment as learning. What counts as important knowledge varies between and within the perspectives. To generate material to enable analysis of assessment approaches in the Baltic Sea region and Central Europe, 23 students and 22 professors/leaders within three conservatories were interviewed. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed through content analysis by the two researchers individually and collaboratively. The results show three different approaches, namely the competition approach, the portfolio approach, and the response-based approach.
Towards the end of the 19th century, Ingrian Finns became aware of their own national identity and culture. These ideas were maintained by the Kolppana Teacher and Churchwarden Seminary, which was founded in 1863. At the turn of the twentieth century, national thinking also began to emerge from the deep ranks of Ingrian-Finnish people, partly because Ingrian-born teachers and churchwardens educated in Kolppana formed a new, schooled intelligentsia. Music played a central role in the national process, and the Kolppana graduates taught religious and patriotic repertoire. The new intelligentsia comprised only men because the Kolppana Seminary was not open to women. The Ingrian Finns strove to preserve their own language, Lutheran religion, and national customs. Even though they recognized Finland as their spiritual homeland, the Ingrian-Finnish national spirit was marked by a clear “Ingrianism”.
Countries in the Baltics and Central and Eastern Europe have been called home by some of the great composers of music history, and the region hosts some of the world’s most prestigious higher classical music education institutions. Despite this fact, Liisamaija Hautsalo states in her essay, the last of this section, that the Finnish-born composer Kaija Saariaho was perceived as being from “a faraway periphery” when she moved in the classical music circles of France, Germany and the US. In a scholarly context I was recently told that (post-communist) Central and Eastern European institutions are not representative of European higher classical music education. The person making this statement obviously assumed that European higher classical music education happens in the UK, or maybe in Germany and Austria. While I did not agree, this feedback speaks volumes about how classical music and higher classical music education is constructed as belonging to Western Europe in international academic debate today. In this special section the authors wish to problematize the role of nation and gender in higher classical music education, and the classical music contexts this education operates in, by focusing on the Baltic and Central and Eastern European region. By doing so we put the assumed Western European identity of classical music and higher classical music education in question.
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.
Intersectionality via zoom
By Yulia Gradskova on 18 September, 2024
I decided to teach free of charge a short online course on gender, intersectionality and Soviet history for students of the Russian Free University5 (Rossiiskii Svobodni Universitet). Since April 2023, the NGO-driven university has the status of an undesirable organization in Russia. More than 80 people registered for my course; however, from the beginning there was a lot of uncertainty on both sides due to fear that students could be accused by the Russian authorities of collaboration with an “undesirable organization”. In order not to be detected while participating in the online course, many students did not use their real names; some never spoke, merely writing down some comments. Indeed, the university introduced a new security protocol that allowed the students not to disclose their identity to other course participants if they did not want to.
Category: Commentaries, Features