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Written in fRoots issue 223/224, 2002


MARTTI POKELA
Tuulikumpu
Kansanmusiikki-instituutti KICD 71 (2001)

It’s difficult to over-state Martti Pokela’s importance in current Finnish roots music, as not only the country’s best known kantele player but as researcher, composer, professor, quirky, humorous innovator, and motivator for the setting up of Sibelius Academy’s Folk Music Department.
      Born in Haapavesi 1924, during the 1950s and 1960s he became a nationally famous performer of folk music, often in company with his wife Marjatta. Today he’s still creating music and moving among the new world of Finnish music he was key to creating, but has ceased performing in public. In 2001 he was given a high national award, and there appeared this CD, the first in a series of collections of his recorded work, gathered by Hannu Saha, kantele player, director of the Folk Music Institute and one of the prime bearers of Pokela’s legacy. Tuulikumpu is volume one, covering the recordings made in those first two decades.
      In the first nine tracks are recordings he made playing historic kanteles in the collection of the Finnish National Museum. What’s particularly interesting about all these old kanteles, including a 20-string owned by Elias Lönnrot, the writer of the Kalevala, is their deep, thick-string, bell-like resonance compared to modern kanteles, even allowing for the fact that some perhaps can no longer take high tension. A Vepsian 7-string, in particular, sounds like the recording is played back at half speed, with low, chiming harmonics. The occasional intruding sound of a Helsinki tram rumbling past outside serves to accentuate the passage of time and change since they were made and last played.
      The second section comprises folk dance tunes - march, waltz and polkka - played on bigger, box-type diatonic kanteles with 32 or 36 strings. Then follow two series of pieces made as the recorded soundtracks for two ballets, involving various kanteles, birch-bark shepherd’s whistle and interjected voices, giggling, scratchy or, in the case of Pylylypyppy, in the nature of Finnish mouth-music.
      Pokela’s work, and indeed the nature of the kantele tradition itself except perhaps when playing dance music, pays great attention to the absolute sound coming from the instrument. In these ballet scores the sound engineer’s was an important role, and even back then there was enhancement of real sounds with subtle effects which still don’t sound gauche today.
      Eyes glinting elfin amusement and the imminence of the unexpected, cultural guerrilla Martti Pokela has forged a path between the old ways of making and hearing music and the avant-gardism, minimalism and modern dance of the art-gallery world, and it’s a widening lane down which he and today’s creators, Finnish and sometimes from overseas too, continue to skip.


© 2001 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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