Erkki-Sven Tüür

Erkki-Sven Tüür is an Estonian composer who started his musical activity in the second half of the seventies as a leader of progressive rock band In Spe, influenced by the music of King Crimson, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Mike Oldfield, Frank Zappa, Yes and Genesis. In the second half of the eighties he entered Estonian music life as a professional composer. Instrumental music makes up the main body of Tüür’s work. He is the author of eight symphonies, several instrumental concertos, a lot of chamber music and an opera. Tüür uses in his work a broad spectrum of compositional techniques. He has been interested in Gregorian chant and minimalism, linear polyphony and microtonality, twelve-tone music and sound-field technique. To describe his attempt to contrast and combine musical opposites – tonality versus atonality, regular repetitive rhythms versus irregular complex rhythms, tranquil meditativeness versus explosive theatrically – the composer has used the term “metalanguage”. The works “Zeitraum” (1992), “Architectonics VI” (1992), “Crystallisatio” (1995) and Symphony No. 3 (1997) are the most representative examples of this method. http://www.erkkisven.com/cv Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.