Maria Faust Sacrum Facere: Marches Rewound & Rewritten

Liner notes by The President of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves (2006-2026)

Maria Faust, Estonian-Danish saxophonist extraordinaire re-imagines music’s most militaristic form, the march, a form first and foremost associated with armies, manly valor; too often the form is propagandistic, commemorating victories or even even celebratory and festive, such as the familiar Radetzky March. We forget, however. that for the victims of war, those who hear the beat of the drum and marching feet in their own towns and countryside, the sound of an approaching army rarely augurs well. For civilians, the innocent victims of war, the sound of marching armies means death, destruction and, as we have seen in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the most horrific of crimes – torture, extrajudicial killings and mass rape.

The tragedy of what the civilian faces in war is brought to the forefront in this record where the march, the customary musical accompaniment to war and armies, is hardly celebratory but covers a broad range of emotions – tragic, ominous, foreboding and mournful, to complement its more traditional role keeping marching soldiers in step. To this end, and appropriately for the march form, Faust’s compositions use far more percussive elements than we are used to with jazz records. Indeed, this record is above all a dialogue between a broad palette of emotions available to and expressed by Maria Faust’s magnificent playing, and the relentless, driving presence of the snare drum, ever reminding us that there is a war going on.



For too many, war is something abstract, glorified and exalted, part of the culture’s DNA, a source of national pride, true of too many empires, past and present. Others, those whose history has largely avoided war, labor the abstraction of a naïve notion of “peace”, i.e.. that we wouldn’t have to bother thinking about war if only its victims submitted, surrendered. Then all would be well and our comfortable lives wouldn’t be inconvenienced by other people’s tragedy.



And for some, war, its effects, the suffering and horror and its consequences of occupation and reprisals, the march is a part of living memory, quite real and tragic.



This is what Maria Faust makes us understand.