Teeme Muusikat

Raimo Kangro
12" x 9"
oil on canvas board, 2012

Teeme Muusikat (Let's Make Music) is also the title of a page on the blog Toys and Techniques written by Ben. Teeme Muusikat is a series of Estonian folk music records, made largely made for and by children for the purpose of classroom instruction, containing both traditional and composed music. If I understand Ben's logic right the song Laul juurviljadest is from a Teeme Muusikat record by the Estonian composer Raimo Kangro. Wonderful music! Ben's comment (in parenthesis) "the yelping on one of the R. Kangro tracks sounds a bit like a parallel universe Lizzy Mercier Descloux". I love Lizzy and I have a large Baltic collection myself consisting mostly of Latvian records that I would love to expand. I would certainly pick up any of the Teeme Muusikat series if I'd come across it.

About the Raimo Kangro painting:

It's so late in the game trying to get all 100 paintings done so every painting surface is fair game these days. It only seemed appropriate to paint Kangro's portrait on top of a portrait of a 14-year old student that I painted for the purpose of instruction but never finished. It was my intention to paint Kangro in one transparent layer so the girl that was already on the surface would still be visible. It' didn't quite work out that way and it hurt me to obscure the girl, but it had to be done. There is only a very faint hint of the previous portrait on the board that probably only I can recognize. Yet the girl painting has not been in vain, it clearly maintained a function even if her face disappeared.