Viileri

The kantele is at a historical stage in its development. Never before has it been used for such a wide range of music. The instrument is ancient; its age is estimated at 2000 years. It bears a record of how Finnish culture has lived and changed over the ages. On the time scale of the history of the kantele, the decline of the shamanistic culture and the emergence of fiddler music (e.g. polskas, polkas and waltzes) is a very recent phenomenon. Our century has recast the kantele in a number of shapes and sizes and created new music for it - the tradition lives on.

This disc contains ancient shamanistic music, newer fiddler music and popular music. The instruments used are the 15-string kantele (tracks 7 and 8), the related kokles from Latvia (9) and the Finnish concert kantele (1 - 6, 10, 11). Kantele player Timo Väänänen (b. 1970) studied at the Folk Music Department of the Sibelius Academy; this disc is his final thesis for his degree. Väänänen was appointed Finland Festivals Young Artist of the Year in 1997. He has performed in Finland and abroad. He is a member of the Loituma and A tre ensembles and can also be heard playing on the discs Sonata for Kantele (Finlandia Records / Innovator Series 1995), Loituma (1995), Snow Kantele (Finlandia Records / Innovator Series 1997) and Loituma Kuutamolla (1998).

The first four tracks on the disc are fiddler music, a rather recent stratum in Finnish folk music. It was taken up on the kantele in the 19th century and is still played along with other genres of music. Kirkonkellot (Church bells) and the pieces for the smaller kantele evoke the most ancient stratum of Finnish folk music. Improvisation, variation, trance and dance were essential features of the ancient music culture, a tradition that was all but lost before finally being recorded for posterity. Kirkonkellot is a tune taken down from Karelian kantele player Antero Vornanen and adapted here through the use of a different scale and a new arrangement.

Related instruments are represented by Russian gusli music in Kerenski, although here it is played on a Finnish concert kantele, and by the Latvian kokles in Laulu (Song). The world outside the domain of the kantele (Finland, the Baltic States and northwestern Russia) is represented by La Cuquita and Viileri (Wheels), both of which Väänänen has picked up from recordings; he studied Viileri with a folk player and learned La Cuquita by ear directly from a recording.

The disc contains CD-ROM data that can be read on a computer. The multimedia section has further information on the pieces and the instrument in nine languages (Finnish, English, German, French, Japanese, Esperanto, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian).