Kalevala

"It will come as no surprise that Dima Slobodeniouk and his Lahti musicians give all four works committed and lively performances, and that the BIS team have captured them in vivid sound."

The phenomena grouped under the soubriquet of Finnish folk music include transnational cultural phenomena on the one hand and strong regional traditions on the other, and not nearly all of these are defined by where Finland’s political borders happened to be at any particular time.

"Perhaps the most relevant legacy of the Kalevala is in its rich and varied use of language, its grand narratives and how those narratives translate to the modern era." Ethnomusicologist Lari Aaltonen discusses the Kalevala today.

Several eras and genres are represented in the domain of Finnish traditional folk singing: ancient runo singing, roundelays or Reigenlied, and medieval ballads. Inspiration from and combinations of multiple styles have resulted in a wealth of new repertoire that reflects and comments on our own times.

Finns never fail to point out that the kantele is Finland’s national instrument. In our national epic, the Kalevala, Väinämöinen the wizard builds the first kantele from the jaw bone of a pike and charms all the people and the animals of the forest. But there are kantele-like instruments elsewhere too, and it is only recently that they have begun to be studied more thoroughly.

"The Kalevala myth was a genuine source of inspiration for the fledgling Finnish nation in search of an identity. But has it been such a thing any more, really, since the Second World War?," asks Kimmo Hakola in his Kalevala day column.

In this article Einojuhani Rautavaara describes the background to his opera Thomas, and explains certain technical aspects of the opera's musical structure. Thomas had its first performance at the Joensuu Song Festival in the summer of 1985.

The main theme of the first ever FMQ magazine in 1985 was the Kalevala. In the issue composers and researchers like Pekka Lounela, Eero Tarasti, Erkki Salmenhaara, Heikki Laitinen and Olli Kortekangas approached the epic from varying points of view. Estonian composer Veljo Tormis (1930–2017) wrote in his column how the Kalevala has influenced his work.

Runes were sung by people of all ages: children and adults, old and young, men and women. They were sung on all sorts of occasions: on working days and holidays, at play and at work, as young people got together and at dances. There were also many different ways of singing them: solo, with two people or groups alternating, together in small or large groups.

Laulu', a film directed by Selma Vilhunen, portrays the encounter of people, their life stories, joys and sorrows in the heartland of runo singing.

Musicologist and composer Erkki Salmenhaara provides an introduction to the work of the Franco-Russo-Karelian cosmopolitan who was Uuno Klami.

"The Kalevala, which has since been translated into 61 languages, has harnessed this metre into something particularly Finnish, as well as stifling it into a literary form over the course of time. Every single Finn has sat at school bored stupid while reading a book that was meant to be sung. Even so, Kalevalaic runo singing metre is still alive in our culture – it can even be found in today’s singing. At least in contemporary folk music."

“One of the greatest problems confronting Finnish culture is the relative absence of critical attitudes with any measure of influence,” says the composer Olli Kortekangas in his article from FMQ 1-2/1985.

Elias Lönnrot's Kalevala was part of a return to mythology, a desire to discover the roots of the nation's culture and history that prevailed in all the peripheral regions of Europe. In Finland the publication of the Kalevala in 1835 marked a decisive impetus towards the search for all that was inherently Finnish in practically all the arts.