Sexist attitudes pushed Tuulikki Bartosik to Finland

Musician, accordionist, composer and producer Tuulikki Bartosik said she left Estonia after being told that women could not perform on stage and should become teachers. She recalled her career and childhood in an interview with ERR’s cultural programme “Delta”.

Bartosik, who recently turned 50, said she was marking 30 years since the start of her musical career rather than focusing on the milestone birthday.

“I’m certainly not tense because of it. But it is very nice to look back,” said Bartosik, whose childhood was spent in Lasnamäe.

Her parents moved from the countryside to Tallinn, where the family stayed, although she spent her summers in Võrumaa. “I never really adapted to Tallinn, but Lasnamäe gave me a very good education in life and a relatively perfect command of Russian, which has helped me in life to this day,” she said.

Although Bartosik is best known as an accordionist, she describes herself as a multi-instrumentalist.

“I don’t have an accordion attached to me. I haven’t even touched it for three months now, for example, but it is the instrument I started with under interesting circumstances. I have to say that in some ways it saved me,” she said.

At the time, the accordion was considered unusual. “Normal” children played the violin and piano instead, Bartosik recalled. The instrument gave her freedom because she could perform at school events sooner than children learning violin or recorder, whose tone took longer to develop.

“I could immediately get something out of it. I was constantly able to get out of school and go perform here and there. It also spoiled me a little, as if I were special. In reality, it was pure chance,” she said. Bartosik’s father is also a musician.

She rejected the idea that the accordion was an uncool instrument for girls in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “When ‘Lambada’ came out, I was the coolest of all. I didn’t feel uncool. In my family, only cool women played the accordion,” she said.

Bartosik said she had wanted to sing more. She attended a specialised music class and sang in a choir, while also practising solo singing as she wrote what she considered pop hits on the piano.

She recalled creating her first recordings with a small-key Yamaha synthesiser bought from a department store in Germany. “I played the piano, sang and put a beat on the synthesiser. Somehow I recorded it onto one cassette and the second part onto another cassette,” she said.

Bartosik said she did not find her youth in Lasnamäe particularly difficult. She learned phrases to ward off bullies, attended school and the Otsa music school, and was frequently travelling.

She began travelling for music and earning money from it at an early age, at about 16. She played a great deal of Scottish music, quickly read sheet music and performed in pubs and a Scottish club, for which she was paid well at the time.

After secondary school, Bartosik went to Finland. “I didn’t want to stay here because I was constantly told that a woman couldn’t get on stage and that I would become a teacher. The whole talk was so stupid. I didn’t want that career,” she said.

She said she had lacked role models, but was fortunate to find Henn Rebane as a teacher relatively early. Rebane organised accordion festivals where men played very quickly, an approach that did not particularly appeal to her. Bartosik said that while she was not completely blocked, her ambitions did not interest anyone else at the time.