Songs of the Finnish Migration


Book Description

Songs of the Finnish Migration presents music and lyrics for more than eighty Finnish-language immigrant songs, alongside singable English translations and detailed notes on migration history and music in the New World. These songs provide a vivid and imaginative portrayal of momentous migration that forever changed Finnish and Finnish American society.




Culture Work


Book Description

The work folklorists do on the ground and in communities can make a concrete difference in quality of life. While the field is not immune to extractive, racist, colonial, heteronormative, and misogynistic practices, it can counter and combat these same forces in society. Culture Work presents case studies of public-oriented work that define the Wisconsin Idea of folklore in all its complexities, challenges, and potentialities. Thematically arranged chapters represent interconnected aspects of culture work, from amplifying local voices to galvanizing community from within to reflecting on how we might use folklore to build the world we want to live in.




Made in Finland


Book Description

Made in Finland: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, culture, and musicology of twentieth and twenty-first century popular music in Finland. The volume consists of essays by leading scholars in the field, and covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of popular music in Finland. Each essay provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance. The book is organized into five thematic sections: Emerging Foundations of Popular Music in Finland; Environments, Borderlines, Minorities; Transnationalisms; Sounds from the Underground; and Redefining Finnishness.




Deep River


Book Description

Three Finnish siblings head for the logging fields of nineteenth-century America in the New York Times–bestselling author’s “commanding historical epic” (Washington Post). Born into a farm family, the three Koski siblings—Ilmari, Matti, and Aino—are raised to maintain their grit and resiliency in the face of hardship. This lesson in sisu takes on special meaning when their father is arrested by imperial Russian authorities, never to be seen again. Lured by the prospects of the Homestead Act, Ilmari and Matti set sail for America, while young Aino, feeling betrayed and adrift after her Marxist cell is exposed, follows soon after. The brothers establish themselves among a logging community in southern Washington, not far from the Columbia River. In this New World, they each find themselves—Ilmari as the family’s spiritual rock; Matti as a fearless logger and entrepreneur; and Aino as a fiercely independent woman and union activist who is willing to make any sacrifice for the cause that sustains her. Layered with fascinating historical detail, this novel bears witness to the stump-ridden fields that the loggers—and the first waves of modernity—leave behind. At its heart, Deep River explores the place of the individual, and of the immigrant, in an America still in the process of defining its own identity.




Czech Songs in Texas


Book Description

On any weekend in Texas, Czech polka music enlivens dance halls and drinking establishments as well as outdoor church picnics and festivals. The songs heard at these venues are the living music of an ethnic community created by immigrants who started arriving in Central Texas in the mid-nineteenth century from what is now the Czech Republic. Today, the members of this community speak English but their songs are still sung in Czech. Czech Songs in Texas includes sixty-one songs, mostly polkas and waltzes. The songs themselves are beloved heirlooms ranging from ceremonial music with origins in Moravian wedding traditions to exuberant polkas celebrating the pleasures of life. For each song, the book provides music notation and Czech lyrics with English translation. An essay explores the song’s European roots, its American evolution, and the meaning of its lyrics and lists notable performances and recordings. In addition to the songs and essays, Frances Barton provides a chapter on the role of music in the Texas Czech ethnic community, and John K. Novak surveys Czech folk and popular music in its European home. The book both documents a specific musical inheritance and serves as a handbook for learning about a culture through its songs. As folklorist and polka historian James P. Leary writes in his foreword, “Barton and Novak take us on a poetic, historical, and ethnographic excursion deep into a community’s expressive heartland. Their Czech Songs in Texas just might be the finest extant annotated anthology of any American immigrant/ethnic group's regional song tradition.”




Ilmatar's Inspirations


Book Description

Ilmatar gave birth to the bard who sang the Finnish landscape into being in the Kalevala (the Finnish national epic). In Ilmatar's Inspirations, Tina K. Ramnarine explores creative processes and the critical role that music has played in Finnish nationalism by focusing on Finnish "new folk music" in the shifting spaces between the national imagination and the global marketplace. Through extensive interviews and observations of performances, Ramnarine reveals how new folk musicians think and talk about past and present folk music practices, the role of folk music in the representation of national identity, and the interactions of Finnish folk musicians with performers from around the globe. She focuses especially on two internationally successful groups—JPP, a group that plays fiddle dance music, and Värttinä, an ensemble that highlights women's vocal traditions. Analyzing the multilayered processes—musical, institutional, political, and commercial—that have shaped and are shaped by new folk music in Finland, Ramnarine gives us an entirely new understanding of the connections between music, place, and identity.




The Kalevala


Book Description

The national folk epic of Finland is here presented in an English translation that is both scholarly and eminently readable. To avoid the imprecision and metrical monotony of earlier verse translations, Francis Magoun has used prose, printed line for line as in the original so that repetitions, parallelisms, and variations are readily apparent. The lyrical passages and poetic images, the wry humor, the tall-tale extravagance, and the homely realism of the Kalevala come through with extraordinary effectiveness.




Folklore Methodology


Book Description

Kaarle Krohn's Folklore Methodology was the first systematic attempt to state a method of studying folkloristic materials. For centuries scholars had collected folkloristic texts and had commented on them, but they had not tried to formulate a method of investigating folklore. Folklore Methodology became the handbook for the great Finnish School of folklore research. It provided for its students a guide to the geographical research of traditional materials, a radical departure from the literary scholarship that had dominated folklore studies. Krohn's book explores the causes and modes of folklore diffusion, development, and destruction; it outlines the influences that cause change in folklore; it provides valuable insights into the nature of folklore; and, finally, it develops geographic methods for analyzing, classifying, and reconstructing individual items from the folk repertoire. While many developments have taken place since Krohn first published his guide, important new concepts of folklore research sprang from his efforts. For this reason, Folklore Methodology is mandatory reading for every serious student of folklore.




The Kalevala


Book Description

This prose translation of Finland's national folk epic vividly recounts the folkways of Kaeol-Finnish peasant life.




Ole Hendricks and His Tunebook


Book Description

Ole Hendricks was an immigrant both representative and exceptional—a true artistic talent who nevertheless lived a familiar immigrant experience. By day, he was a farmer. But at night, his fiddle lit up dance halls, bringing together all manner of neighbors in rural Minnesota. Each tune in his repertoire of waltzes, reels, polkas, quadrilles, and more were copied neatly into his commonplace book. Such tunebooks, popular during the nineteenth century, rarely survive and are often overlooked by folk scholars in favor of commercially produced recordings, published sheet music, or oral tradition. Based on extensive historical and genealogical research, Amy Shaw presents a grounded picture of a musician, his family, and his community in the Upper Midwest, revealing much about music and dance in the area. This notable contribution to regional music and folklore includes more than one hundred of Ole's dance tunes, transcribed into modern musical notation for the first time. Ole Hendricks and His Tunebook will be valuable to readers and scholars interested in ethnomusicology and the Norwegian American immigrant experience.