Karelia

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.

Cut off a piece of willow, construct a whistle and blow through it – this is as close as it gets to a perfect combination of the roles of musician and instrument maker. Although this kind of playing has not always been considered as music, folk wind instruments have gradually taken their place among contemporary folk music instruments.

The nature of folk music has always included the shameless borrowing of refreshing material from elsewhere – right now Baltic Finnish influences are rising to the top in Finland.

Have the legendary Värttinä produced their best ever album after over 30 years together? Viena, their thirteenth studio album, marks a return to their roots which grew out of the excitement of visits back to Karelia to hear, and be inspired by the last surviving runo singers.

There has been little research in Finland into Karelian culture on the Russian side of the border during the Soviet era. From the 1920s to the 1950s we get a fragmented picture on the whole of cultural policy in the Soviet Union. Ever the victim of ideological change, Karelian culture was sometimes something that enriched a multicultural state, sometimes something to be denounced as unorthodox.

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.

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.

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

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.