"Estonian music is our national treasure. The Estonian Music Information Center (EMIC) gathers and presents information about the Estonian composers and performers and builds a bridge between music and the world. I felt the call to work at EMIC to help create this bridge in our rapidly changing world to be even more visible, firm and wider," said Saale Kareda.
Saale Kareda. Photo: Private collection
Saale Kareda is a musicologist, journalist, translator and editor, a member of the Estonian Musicological Society (since 1992) and the Estonian Composers' Union (since 2006). She studied at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, the Goethe Institute in Bremen, the Technical University of Berlin, the University of Vienna and the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts.
Since the 1990s, she has been working as a music critic and essayist (magazine Teater.Muusika.Kino, Sirp, magazine Muusika and other publications). She held a DAAD scholarship in Berlin in 1999/2000 and a Herder-Preis scholarship in Vienna in 2000/2001. From 1993–1999 she worked as a music editor of the magazine Teater.Muusika.Kino, from 2001–2007 as a consultant for the music publishing house Universal Edition in Vienna, and from 2005–2012 as a cultural attaché of the Embassy of Estonia in Vienna.
Since 2012, Kareda has been back in Estonia and worked mainly as a freelancer, but was also a lecturer in sound aesthetics at Tallinn University from 2012–2018. She has been a member of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir's artistic board since 2013. In 2015/2016, she organised conferences on Creating a New Society. As a musicologist, she has been focused mainly on the research of Arvo Pärt's work in the 1990s–2000s, and since 2012 on the research of contemporary Estonian music.