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Last week, Estonia’s 2023 Eurovision star Alika Milova performed a concert of folk songs alongside fellow musician Arno Tamm. Alika told ETV show “Ringvaade” that what attracts her to folk music is that it allows her to tell her own story in a way that is directly connected to who she really is.
“In my childhood, there was Ukrainian folk song that my grandmother sang, and I chose it [to perform] at the concert. I [also] asked my Ukrainian aunt for one of the songs. I told her I needed a fun song,” said Alika.
Alika told ERR that her Ukrainian aunt said there are not too many fun songs in the Ukrainian folk canon, due to the country and its people’s difficult history. “I like to sing ballads and there are quite a lot of them among Ukrainian folk songs. I’ve always thought that the best singers in Ukraine have very big chest voices. My timbre also changes when I sing Ukrainian folk songs and that’s something I noticed as a child,” said Alika.
The concert also featured folk songs performed in Estonian, and Alika was joined on stage by Arno Tamm, who is well-known himself as a musician from the bands Paabel and Tintura.
“We are both exploring where our roots are. Alika and I also found some common roots. My great grandfather is from Vaivara (Ida-Viru County), where Alika lives now,” said Tamm.
Alika has also visited the National Archives of Estonian National in Tartu, where she discovered that some of her relatives may also have been Votians – a Finnic ethnic group native to historical Ingria, the part of modern-day northwestern Russia that is roughly southwest of St, Petersburg and east of the Estonian border-town of Narva.
“Because my mother’s father was from there and lived in the same area in Russia as the Votians and their mother tongue was Estonian. But I wasn’t really able to verify that information,” Alika said.
Alika Milova and Arno Tamm during rehearsals. Source: ERR
The archive of Ukrainian folk music on the Internet is bottomless, and so Alika has also become very familiar with plenty of songs from her late grandmother’s homeland.
“I’ve been looking through this archive for several years. My head exploded at how it could be possible for such a goldmine to have been created,” said Tamm.
“There are two things that fascinate me about folk music. The first is that it forces me to look inside myself and the second is that it’s so inspiring and that this archive material is really bottomless,” Tamm explained.
“What draws me to folk music is that I get to tell my story through music, which is basically what I’m doing and what I’m going to do for the rest of my life, but there’s a direct connection to who I am,” Alika said.
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