Sydänmaat - Album cover texts
Sydänmaa (Fin. "heart-land")
remote forest region, hinterland, wilderness, deep backwoods
"Also mehtä or syvänmaa; an internal landscape and the meeting point of generations" (Pauliina)
Across the decades, the Saarijärvi kantele has become the instrument of my heart. It has accompanied me through many life phases and also claimed its place as a crucial tool in my research: I have used the kantele to investigate artistic practices in folk music and methods of improvisation-based composition. Improvisation is at the core of my work, and the music lives and shifts according to my emotional states.
While creating the music for Heartland, I have further expanded my palette of kantele timbres. I often play by finger-picking, but I also utilize various other equipment and string preparations. I experience my kantele as an inexhaustible source of new, exciting melodies and musical discoveries.
My composing is strongly influenced by experiences in nature, especially forests, which to me represent safety and peace. Sorrow is also present: will coming generations have the chance to encounter untouched nature, and form a relationship with it, as I was allowed to do throughout my life? I process this worry, as well as other tumults in my life, by settling into my own special mental space together with the kantele. The forest is also tangibly present on this album: the kanteles and playing sticks are made of wood. The idea of a "heartland" refers both to the wilderness and to the people closest to me. Many musicians from bygone generations have affected my music, as have both my living and late contemporary musician friends.
1. Swirling (composition: Pauliina)
In composing this piece, multifaceted colors and layers flowed into the music — swirls and cycles, where life moves along on many levels. As I play, I'm able to process feelings that the conscious mind is not always even able to reach.
2. Primordial forest (composition: Pauliina)
Forests have been deeply meaningful places to me since childhood, and it is only in adulthood that I've managed to comprehend how strongly my connection to nature has been allowed to develop. I often feel a need to go into the woods, and I'm able to traverse them in my imagination, too. The mental landscape of this composition is rooted in ancient, primeval forests, even though the piece is an ode to all kinds of forests and their living residents.
3. Pilvilampaan uniravia / Cloud-sheep trot in dreams (composition: traditional/Pauliina)
Antti Rantonen (1877–1961) from Haapavesi, Northern Ostrobothnia played the melody "Lampaan ravia" (Fin. a sheep's trot) onto archive tapes with his 5-string kantele in 1936. In my version, the sheep are cloud-creatures who roam a world of dreams. An important element of this piece was the sonority that two different types of 5-string kanteles created together. The soundscape is imbued with both the clearness of the steel-stringed instrument and the softness of brass strings.
4. Birth of the kantele (composition: Pauliina/traditional)
The inspiration for this composition came from old runosong lyrics. The origin poem (Fin. "syntyruno") was recorded in 1906 in the region of Suistamo, Karelia, near where my father grew up in Salmi, and the singer of the poem is unknown. The song speaks of a kantele being born from the knee-bones of a reindeer, the shoulderblades of a blue elk, the scales of a brown salmon, and the jawbone of a pike. The kantele's strings are said to be made of the hair of the old maid of the holy glade, or even the underworld. The melody I play throughout the piece on the kantele's bass strings is related to a runosong-melody played by Iivana Mišukka in Suistamo in 1916.
5. Kesäsade / Summer rain (composition: Pauliina)
The still atmosphere of a rainy summer day. The droplets fall on various surfaces: leaves of trees, blades of grass, rocks and water. The intensity of the rain changes from a light shower to a full-blown downpour, before subsiding again. The air is full of moisture and the scent of petrichor.
6. Green moon ripatska (composition: traditional/Pauliina)
7. Once upon a frosty January night, looking toward the eastern sky, I noticed an enormous full moon that was tinged with green. At the same moment in my mind the first notes of Peša Patronen's ripatska melody from 1916 started to ring. Observing the green moon enticed me to return to these themes, familiar to my fingers since my youth, and the piece gradually grew to include many new hues.
Havina / Murmuring (composition: Pauliina)
Under the leaves of a great big tree, listening to its murmuring, there is a refuge of peace.