Finnish folk music: A touch of magic - A History of Finnish Folk Music

by Hannu Saha

Introduction: East, West and North
Kalevalaic music
Pelimanni music
Gramophone fever

Finnish folk instruments

The kantele
Wind instruments
The bowed lyre
The Jew's harp
The fiddle
The clarinet
The harmonium
The mouth organ
The accordion
The mandolin
The brass septet

Collection and research into folk music

Modern folk music



Among the indigenous peoples, the ancient Finns included, music was always associated with higher powers, something mysterious and magic. It was used to drive spirits away, to conjure them forth, to summon rain or whatever else was needed. The power of music was thought to extend to birth and fertility, the availability of game, fortune in war or marriage...

Mastery on an instrument can, according to ancient belief, be obtained only from an otherworld power, a spirit of the waters or rapids, a devil or demon. They alone were able to teach the art, its mysterious force and skills. One very effective type of music was the devil’s polska; anyone caught up in the dance might end up spinning to his death.
Midsummer Night was a particularly good time for acquiring this supernatural skill.


"I felt myself falling under his spell..."

Only a hundred years ago, music could represent the most intimate form of solitude. The report of the Finnish folk music scholar A.O. Väisänen of his visit to Suojärvi in Border Karelia reveals that music was, even as late as the beginning of the 20th century, still a long and meditative event: "The player's fingers stroke the strings in time with the melody, but his eyes do not follow them, gazing dreamily into the distance. While one old man at Suojärvi was playing his endless strains in the darkening cottage, I took a photo with a long exposure and was amazed that he did not once blink or in any other way pay my photographic antics the

very least attention. Little by little, as the same melody continued with constant variation, his body began to slump down on the table, his eyelids to close, till he was playing as if in his sleep. Though I listened with the curious ears of the hardened collector, I felt myself falling under his spell..."


Man at one with nature

In ancient times, music was the seamless unity of man and nature. This unity persisted in Finnish culture until very recently in, among others, the music of herders. The village herder would address his calls at both people and cattle. He would also use music to frighten away wild beasts and the loneliness of his lot. The cattle could also be called without an instrument, and the border between playing and singing was sometimes vague. In time, cattle calls became a distinctive form of singing in Finland as elsewhere, and their message was understood by humans and animals alike.



Introduction: East, West and North


Finland’s geographical location at the meeting point of East and West has been a great source of strength and richness for our culture. The influences from East and West can be seen and heard either as such or, as is usually the case, in various Finnish mixtures. Generally speaking, the oldest strata of folk culture have drawn from the East, the later ones from the West.

Finnish folk music can be roughly divided into two historical eras differing considerably from each other both in their music and culture and in their use in the community. The earlier stratum is often called the ancient Finnish period or the Kalevalaic era. It covers such genres as the singing of Kalevalaic poetry, the chain dance, the lament, and a distinctive brand of music performed on such instruments as the five-stringed kantele, the bowed harp (or crwth), and a host of folk wind instruments.

The later stratum of Finnish folk music is the period of agrarian or pelimanni music and it is clearly rooted in Western culture.


The arctic yoik

The Sami, the indigenous people of Lapland, have had a culture and music of their very own. Sami culture, the Sami way of life and economy were tied very closely to nature and natural occupations. Musically, the Sami developed a unique archaic idiom the most distinctive feature of which is a vocal genre called the yoik. Even today the yoiks of the Sami from the north still represent one of the oldest strata of the arctic way of life. The singer may choose almost anything connected with nature, either animate or inanimate, as the subject for his or her yoik: a landscape, animal or person. The use of a witch’s drum reflects the shamanistic nature of Sami music.



Kalevalaic music

The roots of Kalevalaic culture (named after the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala) stretch back at least two or three thousands years to the birth of the Kalevalaic music and poetry of the Baltic-Finnish peoples. Influences were also absorbed from the Baltic peoples. During the first millennium at the latest there emerged a type of vocal art called rune singing that flourished in Finland, Karelia, Ingria and Estonia. The rune singing of Finland and Karelia was still thriving in places in the 19th century and traces of it are to be found even today. There are, by contrast, no documents of laments being performed in Finland, unlike in Karelia and Ingria. Kalevalaic poetry took the form of either epic narrative or lyric poetry. Elias Lönnrot compiled the Kalevala from its world of myth - a work subsequently hailed as the national epic (the first version in 1835 and the second version (the one nowadays used) in 1849). Lönnrot published the Kanteletar containing lyrical poetry in 1840.

Pentatonicism and constant variation

Kalevalaic poetry was not divided into verses and consisted instead of lines and chains of line pairs. Its distinguishing feature is the metre, the trochaic tetrameter. Kalevalaic poetry has always been sung, the most common rhythms being 4/4 and 5/4. The melodies covered a very narrow range, most commonly only five or even fewer notes. The song was performed either by one singer alone or by a soloist and chorus in antiphony.

Being memorised culture, both the music and the poetry existed on the performer’s terms, and anyone had the right to create either. Both were therefore marked by variation and improvisation. Rune singing was very important right up to the turn of this century as part of the wedding ceremonies lasting many days. Weddings were the biggest of all festivals for the Finns and Karelians. They developed into a series of events in the nature of a drama in which each stage in the ceremony was accompanied by singing and lamenting.



Pelimanni music

The period of agrarian or pelimanni music (Finnish pelimanni = folk musician, from Swedish spelman) came later than the Kalevalaic. It began to make its appearance alongside the Kalevalaic tradition from the 17th and 18th centuries onwards and finally replaced it in the 19th. Pelimanni music is tonal and came to Finland from Central Europe via Scandinavia. From the 18th century onwards it began to be played more on the fiddle and clarinet, and later on various accordions. The musical revolution left its mark on everything. Even the kantele had to adapt to the new trends: it acquired more strings and its construction changed as the instrument with only a few strings hollowed out of a piece of solid wood gave way in the 19th century to models shaped like a chest with over 20 and later more than 30 strings tuned diatonically. The new music took root in Finland in the 17th century, first among the gentry, from whom the peasants adopted various

elements for use in their own music. New music was, from the 18th century onwards, also introduced by the military bands. In the 19th century the new dance music finally ousted the last of the old remaining forms.

Music was, in the agrarian community, very often part of everyday life. Singing either set the pace of the strenuous work or added a touch of refreshing humour.
Morals and manners were taught by means of narrative songs. Hymn tunes spread like folk songs in their own chorale variants. Young people raised their voices in love songs to convey their feelings to the opposite sex, and there was dancing to the accompaniment of ring game songs.


The polska and other instrumental music

The most important early manifestation of pelimanni music in Finland and Scandinavia was the polska, which had its origins in the 15th century pairs of dances popular in Central Europe. More than any other dances, the Polish polonaise and the polska of the early 18th century led a flourishing life of their own up here in the north. The polska made an impact not only as music and a dance, since it played an important part in moulding the festive and other customs. In Finland, as elsewhere, fiddle polskas represented pelimanni music at its very best. The polska also

became a major medium of vocal expression: the polska ring accompanied by singing was the leading form of group dance.

Other popular instrumental dances were the minuet in the 17th century and the quadrille, francaise, potpourri and other series of dances in the 18th. By the early 19th century at the latest Finland was welcoming first the waltz and later the other dances for couples rather than groups, such as the schottische, mazurka and polka. The 1920s saw the advent of dances of American origin at the same time as the new device for listening to music, the gramophone.

During the pelimanni era rune singing was replaced by the rhyming song or roundelay. Instead of being rich in alliteration, the songs now had end rhymes and were divided into verses, mostly of four lines with the second and fourth rhyming. From the 17th century onwards these songs spread as broadsheets and narrative ballads, and often originated in Central Europe.


The roundelay

During the pelimanni era rune singing was replaced by the rhyming song or roundelay. Instead of being rich in alliteration, the songs now had end rhymes and were divided into verses, mostly of four lines with the second and fourth rhyming. From the 17th century onwards these songs spread as broadsheets and narrative ballads, and often originated in Central Europe.



Gramophone fever


In 1928 the customs duties on Finnish records and record players were more or less halved and Finland was caught up in gramophone fever. At the same time Finnish folk music began to incorporate elements of European light music and Afro-American music.

The first recorded hits were called "jazz novelties" and they were performed by a new combination of instruments, the accordion jazz band. Drums bearing pictures of negroes’ heads, saxophones, banjos, and of course the magnificent, shiny 5-row accordion began to appear in the village halls. The players’ model was the Dallapé, the orchestra that symbolised the following decade.





Finnish folk instruments



The kantele - the Finns' national instrument


There are two poems in the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, describing the origin of the kantele. Väinämöinen, the wise old man and hero of the Kalevala, created the kantele and was second to none in the performance of music. It was he who fashioned the first kantele from the bones of a fish, the jawbone of a pike, and another from birch wood. For its strings he used the hair of either an animal’s tail or a maiden’s tresses. All tried to play the first kantele, but it remained for Väinämöinen himself to pluck the strings and cast a spell over all creation...


Where does the kantele come from?

Scholars are not agreed on the origin of the kantele, either its age or its ties with instruments in other regions. Some claim it is related to the Russian gusli, the Arabic quanun or some Baltic predecessor. The origin of the kantele has in fact been satisfactorily proved in the light of Slavic, Asian and Baltic-Finnish aetiological theories. The kantele may, according to some, be a thousand years old, whereas others, basing their theories on loan words and poetry in Kalevalaic metre, say two or three thousand years. At the moment no theory is considered incontestable. The written documents on the Finnish kantele date back only to the 16th century, and there are no precise descriptions before the 18th. Not until the 19th century did the kantele become a national symbol of Finnish culture.

Instrument of the Baltic peoples

The kantele has, beyond all doubt, nevertheless been one of the main Finnish instruments for hundreds of years. It has been and still is also widely played among the Baltic peoples, such as in Karelia (kantele), Latvia (kokle or kuokle), Lithuania (kankles) and Estonia (kannel).

Scholars have in recent years been increasingly stressing that the Russian gusli family of instruments contributed either to the birth of the kantele or to its subsequent development. There is extensive literature on the origin of the instruments in the kantele area around the Baltic and the city state of Novgorod. The eleven kanteles unearthed during excavations of the old town of Novgorod date from the 11th-14th centuries.


Construction

The oldest kanteles were hollowed out of a single piece of wood, either from underneath or from on top, in which case they were given a separate lid. The hollowed-out kanteles in most cases had five strings - just the right number to sing poetry in the Kalevalaic metre. From the 18th century onwards the big hollowed-out kanteles usually had 8-12 strings, sometimes more. The strings were made in ancient times from plaited horsehair, later from brass and metal wire. Players of the instruments with few strings would pluck them with fingers interlocking to produce an improvised, constantly varying stream of melody. By the 1950s there were only a few persons left in Finland who still knew how to play the five-stringed kantele. Then in the early 1980s the Väinämöinen kantele underwent a grand renaissance, with the result that it is nowadays widely played and is taught in schools.

The kantele is developed

When Kalevalaic music was replaced by pelimanni music a couple of centuries ago, the melodies began to cover a wider span and to be supported by an accompaniment, all in a particular key. The kantele thus had to rise to the challenge of the new music.

During the first half of the 19th century kanteles began to be made from ready-cut lengths of wood. They were larger than the older versions, and they might have more than 20 strings. The way the strings were attached also changed: whereas those of the hollowed-out kanteles were attached to wooden pegs and a rod, those of the chest kanteles were fastened to pins and metal tuning pegs.

A number of regional techniques for playing the kantele emerged in Finland, many of them astonishingly different. Many of them were also associated with their own instrument model. The best-known kantele areas are the Perho river valley in Central Ostrobothnia, Central Finland and North Ostrobothnia. It is a lesser-known fact that one of the early developers of the chest kantele was Elias Lönnrot (1802-1884), himself a kantele maker and player.

The most recent major modification to the kantele was made in the 1920s, when Paul Salminen (1887-1949) designed a 36-stringed concert kantele with a system of levers to raise and lower the pitch. As a result, the kantele was able to make its entrance into the world of serious music.


Martti Pokela and the kantele renaissance

The kantele is once again enjoying a great renaissance. All the kantele models and techniques have their own young followers. The kantele features in all genres and sub-genres of music. It is somewhat surprising that the borders between one type of music and another should nowadays be particularly vague in the case of the kantele.

Setting the finest example for others has been the Grand Old Man of the Finnish kantele, Martti Pokela. Starting out as a pelimanni steeped in the agrarian folk music tradition, Pokela has, ever since the 1950s, been deliberately giving public performances on the kantele of every possible type of music, from pelimanni tunes to popular music and from serious music right up to avant-garde.

Many have followed his example, so that Finnish kantele music has become a truly crossover genre. Whereas the improvisations of musicians felt to be representatives of folk music come close in style to modern art music, many ‘serious’ composers are searching in their written scores to achieve the same "quiet ecstasy" and sense of "time stood still" as their predecessors of centuries past.


See also: Hannu Saha: The Kantele - from Epic to Ectlecticism (FMQ 2/1998)



Wind instruments

People have been playing wind instruments ever since ancient times. Even the early Finns of the pre-Christian era already had a simple pipe with no finger holes on which they could produce natural notes. The range of old horns and whistles in Finland and Karelia is enormous, research having established at least 120 different kinds in use at various times. These instruments were made from natural materials: bone, horn, wood, birchbark or even reeds. Folk wind instruments were still being used by herders until the 20th century, both as tools and for pleasure. The village herder would use his pipe to call both people and cattle, to frighten away wild beasts and to pass the lonely hours. The herders also had a few percussion instruments designed to frighten off wild animals. The horns also had a practical use: in war, to alert people to a fire, and to call the faithful to prayer. Many of the wind instruments were popular with children in their games.

The folk instruments can be divided into three categories according to how the sound is produced. In the flutes the column of air begins to vibrate on striking against the sharp edge of an opening; in the clarinets the sound is produced by making a reed vibrate, and in the horns by making the lips vibrate.



The bowed lyre

The bowed lyre found its way to Finland from Scandinavia in the Middle Ages. It has its roots in the instruments of Central Europe (such as the Anglo-Saxon chrotta and the Welsh crwth played with a bow). It went out of use in Western Finland in the 17th century already but was still occasionally played in Savo and Karelia as recently as the early 20th century. The bowed lyre has from two to four strings made of hairs from a horse’s tail. At least one of the strings plays a drone accompanying the melody. The technique for producing the melody is interesting: the melody string is pressed with the backs of the fingers. The scholar A.O. Väisänen rescued the playing of both the hollowed-out kantele and the bowed lyre for subsequent generations. His book Kantele- ja jouhikkosävelmiä (Kantele and Bowed Lyre Tunes) published in 1928 contains the bulk of the musical samples we have today.

Although the bowed lyre has a soft, gentle sound, the tunes that have been preserved are quick, with dance-like rhythms. Like that for the hollowed-out kantele, the old music for the bowed lyre relied mainly on improvisation and constant creative variation.



The Jew's harp

The Jew's harp is one of the most common and wide-spread instruments in the world. The oldest archaeological finds go back about two thousand years to Central Europe, while the oldest Finnish records date from the late Middle Ages. Although the Jew's harp enjoyed a brief moment of glory even as an unusual art-music instrument in Germany and Austria in the 18th and 19th centuries, it has mostly been played by peasants. It tends to be associated with a life of sin, with magic and superstition. Occultists exploited its magic powers. In Finland, as elsewhere, the Jew's harp was the instrument of poor peasants, beggars, vagabonds and children.

The player presses the frame of the harp against his teeth and strikes the metal strip with his finger to make it vibrate.

The metal strip is clasped between the teeth and produces a steady drone plus its harmonics. Various sounds are formed by varying the shape of the mouth cavity and reinforced by different breathing techniques.


The fiddle

The fiddle is mentioned with growing frequency in the closing decades of the 17th century as being the instrument to accompany dancing in the coastal towns of Finland. During the following century the fiddler or pelimanni became an important master of ceremonies at, for example, country weddings in Western Finland. By contrast, the fiddle did not really become common in Savo and further east until the early 19th century. The earliest examples of pieces played by pelimanni fiddlers are to be found in a few music books dating from the early 18th century. There is then plenty of material for the next hundred years to demonstrate

how the fiddler's art developed. Polska tunes and the best players enjoyed a rise in prestige placing them on a par with art music.

The pelimanni technique often differed from that of the trained player in the use of the bow, for example, and various tunings were used. Bands consisting of two or more fiddles, or a fiddle and a clarinet were common at the biggest dances.

Towards the end of last century the accordion began to compete for favour with the violin. In Central Ostrobothnia and the lake district of South Ostrobothnia the violin might be accompanied on a harmonium and a large kantele, the latter also in the region around Saarijärvi.



The clarinet

The clarinet was commonly heard at weddings in Western Finland from the beginning of the 19th century to the 1920s. To begin with the players were borrowed from the military bands, and the instrument naturally spread first to the regions around such bands: Oulu, Vaasa, Pori, Turku, Helsinki and Hämeenlinna. The clarinet pelimanni would play either alone or with a fiddle. The instrument was popular at weddings because of its loud, shrill sound. The model with 5-8 keys, which nowadays looks rather primitive, continued to be played by

pelimannis until the 20th century. Sometimes the players made their own instruments. Most of the instruments were tuned in C, Bb or A.

Paavo Helistö describes some 200 folk clarinettists in his book Klaneetti of 1988. Some of the clarinettists in Ostrobothnia and Southwest Finland were among the best-known pelimannis in the region.



The harmonium

The harmonium patented in Paris in 1848 is a close relation of the accordion and mouth organ. The sound is produced by a current of air produced by compression or suction bellows. The pressure can be regulated by means of a wind-trunk and the volume and tone by the various registers. The harmonium quickly spread in Finland from the 1880s onwards as the instrument for schools and religious meetings. Several harmonium factories were established in Finland, but some instruments - such as the small, easily portable ones - were made at home in, for

example, Ostrobothnia. During the past three decades harmoniums have been used in pelimanni ensembles all over Finland, but earlier they were common only in Central Ostrobothnia and the lake district of South Ostrobothnia.

The mouth organ

The mouth organ, being a cheap and handy instrument, caught on in Finland at about the same time as the accordion, in the latter half of the 19th century. The first foreign mouth organ player is mentioned on a tour of Finland in 1859. Diatonic, chromatic and chord mouth organs were made for different purposes. Notes of different pitches are obtained from the same air hole by blowing or sucking - the same principle as that of a one-row accordion. The folk players used only diatonic mouth organs and one of their main functions was to accompany the melody.

Various stopping techniques with the palm of the hand were used to create a tremolo effect. The mouth organ has been used not only for intimate music making but also on countless occasions to accompany dancing in the absence of instruments with a louder sound.



The accordion

Advertisements for the accordion or 'squeeze-box' began to appear in Finland in the 1870s and the instrument soon acquired dozens of pet names according to looks, context and region. The accordion has been an instrument familiar to all from the beginning of the 20th century onwards. It has had a considerable influence on Finnish folk music, first as a competitor of the violin in its one-or two-row version and later, as the five-row version spread, instead of the violin. The best-known accordion players were among the first musical heroes on the Finnish popular music scene.

To begin with the market was dominated by German and Italian models, but from the 1930s onwards the instruments made at the Viipuri and Kouvola factories gave the polka and the waltz a distinctly Finnish flavour. The little home workshops remained competitive until the 1950s.

The accordion was for a long time looked down upon even by certain folk music scholars as a vulgar instrument corrupting the people’s taste. The one- and two-row models were admitted to folk playing competitions in the 1940s and the two-row has once again become very popular since the 1970s.



The mandolin

The mandolin is, like the fiddle, an instrument akin to the lute. The Neapolitan mandolins with a rounded belly first went on sale in music shops at the turn of the century, and by 1910 there were 15 different models in the sales catalogues. The instrument spread mainly via Helsinki and Viipuri, and there was a brisk mail-order trade. The "maniska" was the most common instrument found in the home and was played by women, too. It was usually used to accompany dancing but not alone. It gained ground from the 1930s onwards in "jazz ensembles" as the age of the Schlager dawned.

Tuned like a violin, the mandolin is usually played with a plectrum, either fiddle style to provide accompanying notes or in the manner of a banjo.



The brass septet

The brass septet is one of the main phenomena of Finland's musical heritage to have passed almost completely into oblivion. From the 1880s onwards it provided the majority of the Finns with their first opportunity to hear instrumental music from hymns to opera overtures. Various ideological associations, voluntary fire brigades, youth and workers' associations hastened to found a band of their own, and some continued playing together for over half a century. The Finnish national brass septet consisted of an Eb cornet, two Bb cornets, and alto, tenor, baritone and bass horns.

All in all some five hundred bands with a nucleus septet were founded. The best of them later virtually became regional orchestras. Most of the 1,500 members of the 250 or so bands founded in the 19th century were ordinary folk - farmers and workers. The septets were among the first folk ensembles to play from sheet music.

For 40 years brass music was mainly to be heard at dances, adding the new waltzes, polkas and schottisches even to the pelimanni repertoires. The first tangos and fox-trots were also launched by the bands.



Collection and research into folk music


Finland is one of the leading countries in the world in the collection of tradition. There are brief literary references to Finnish folk music from the 16th century onwards and descriptions from the 18th. The founding of the Finnish Literature Society in 1831 provided a major impetus for systematic collection.

The early collectors were mainly interested in Kalevalaic culture, especially folk poetry. So much Kalevalaic poetry was collected in the 19th century that the series Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot (Ancient Poems of the Finnish People) runs to 33 volumes, total 85,000 poems and 1,270,000 lines. A supplementary volume was added to the series in 1997. A similar series, titled Suomen Kansan Sävelmiä (Melodies of the Finnish People, 1893-1933) containing nearly 5,000 tunes has also been published.


Andersson, Väisänen and Ala-Könni

Three collectors and researchers stand out above all others in the 20th century. Otto Andersson (1879-1969) made wide collections and studies of musical culture, especially in the Swedish-speaking areas of Finland. Armas Otto Väisänen (1890-1969) concentrated particularly on the music of the Finno-Ugrian peoples and the Kalevalaic tradition. The greatest merit of Erkki Ala-Könni (1911-1996) as a collector and scholar was his work to rescue tradition, folk songs and pelimanni music from Western Finland for future generations.

The University of Tampere has been offering Finnish folk music research and ethnomusicology since the mid-1970s. It is also possible to study ethnomusicology at the universities of Helsinki, Turku, Jyväskylä and Joensuu. Music institutes specialising in folk and popular music have been established since the 1970s and have concentrated on folk music services, training, research and publication. The biggest are the Folk Music Institute at Kaustinen, the Finlands svenska folkmusikinstitut in Vaasa specialising in the music of Finland’s Swedish-speaking regions, and the World Music Centre in Helsinki.



Modern folk music


The first Kaustinen Folk Music Festival in 1968 can be regarded as the start of the present Finnish folk music revival. In the space of only a few years folk music became wildly fashionable in the early 1970s, with Konsta Jylhä (1910-1984) and the Kaustisen Purppuripelimannit as its figurehead.

Only few of the folk players of the 1970s still played the oldest types of pelimanni music - the polskas, polonaises and minuets, preferring the more recent schottisches, polkas, waltzes, marches and mazurkas. These were either traditional tunes or pieces composed by the players themselves in the traditional style; composition was one of the distinguishing features of the new pelimanni movement. Ensemble playing became the main mode of performance and the Kaustinen line-up with fiddles, harmonium and double bass virtually became the national norm.

Since the late 1960s the Kaustinen Folk Music Festival has been the main annual forum for Finnish folk music, presenting local, other Finnish and international repertoire performed by thousands of musicians. In 1974 the Festival was joined by the Folk Music Institute, a national information and research centre dedicated to folk music. These and the college named after Ala-Könni (a folk high school since 1994), the Tallari ensemble (founded in 1986) and the Finnish Folk Instrument Museum (1987) together make up the Folk Arts Centre (1997) widely devoted to Finnish folk art.


New folk music boom

Summer is the time when Finnish folk music really comes alive. Kaustinen has been joined by many other festivals, the biggest including Haapavesi Folk and the Rääkkylä Folk Festival. The leading folk dance event is the Pispalan Sottiisi held in Tampere.

A new boom in Finnish folk music began in around the mid-1980s. The guiding star in this revival was the Sibelius Academy, which founded a folk music department in 1983. Since then Finnish folk music has been gaining more and more attention, and not only in Finland. Such names as Värttinä, JPP, Maria Kalaniemi & Aldargaz, Tallari, Wimme, Pinnin pojat, Loituma, Troka, MeNaiset, the Helsinki Mandoliners and many others have been well to the forefront on the world music scene.



Translation © Susan Sinisalo