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Written in fRoots issue 364, Oct 2013

JUURI & JUURI
Fiddlers / Quiet Rapture
Ääniä AANIA 23 A/B (2013)

A double album by Finns Emilia Lajunen and Eero Grundström, who have been playing together for a decade alongside other projects such as Grundström in Sväng and both in Spontaani Vire.
     One disc, Hiljainen Haltioituminen – Quiet Rapture, is duet arrangements by Lajunen on fiddle or nyckelharpa and Grundström on harmonium or harmonica of material from two books of folk music collector A. O. Väisänen’s early 20th century field-transcriptions from solo players of kantele (in this case mostly not the iconic five-string version, but larger with 10 to 30 strings), three string jouhikko (bowed lyre), and shepherd’s flutes or animal horns.
     They dig deep into the possibilities of the material, which isn’t so much tunes with beginning, middle and end but slices of the music-making of particular solo musicians playing to amuse themselves and perhaps those around them. The disc peaks with a gorgeous, serenity-inducing nine-minute interpretation of an Ingrian lullaby in which they also borrow harmonically from Shostakovich.
     While the music on Quiet Rapture has its original instrumentation and roots in an archaic layer of European musical culture, the other disc deals with material with much shorter history: the Finnish manifestations of dance musical forms that spread across Europe over the last two or three centuries, developing instrumental styles where they took root. The tunes on Pelimannit - Fiddlers come mostly from the repertoires of now-deceased 20th century fiddlers, plus a sung wedding hymn, a “pitch-black suicidal” song learnt from Finnish Roma singer Hilja Grönfors and a Swedish wedding polska by Väsen’s Olov Johansson with Roger Tallroth’s guitar accompaniment reworked for harmonium.
     Their arranging and playing is very fine indeed. Their mission statement on the booklet notes, though, is a tad contentious. “To counterbalance the usual pop-ified folk, we wanted to go to the roots of the tunes to find the power in them. We can’t jump into the boots of a fiddler from a century ago, but we can resist making an arrangement even before playing out the original music.” OK, fine, but they add “We recorded this album in a way that the cover could say ‘No pop music added’”.
     “The usual pop-ified folk”? Hard to discern substantial or all-pervading evidence of current mainstream pop on the Finnish folk scene; and they themselves jokingly acknowledge in the note to a Viljami Niittykoski tune, “We have upper crust people hiding under our folksy appearance. This bourgeois tinge nevertheless won’t stop us from using some Hammond tone clusters”. Have cake, will also eat?
     Good cake, though.

www.aania.fi


© 2013 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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