From the archives: Immigrant musics and multiculturalism

Since 1986, a gamelan orchestra has been playing Central Javanese traditional music with traditional Indonesian gongs in Helsinki. The orchestra’s instruments include metallophones, kettle gongs, drums, a xylophone, a zither, and a spike fiddle. The orchestra usually practises once a week in rooms of the Indonesian embassy. Since the beginning, the orchestra has been led by the Finnish musician Reijo Lainela. Most of the other players are also Finns, although there are always a few Indonesian musicians too.

The ensemble is called “Gamelan Hanuman” and is a good example of multiculturalism in Finland today. It performs repertoire of a musical culture from a different part of the world and functions as a kind of bridge between Indonesia and Finland.

Such ensembles are however not only a Finnish innovation; they are internationally in vogue, and there are several dozen of them in the United States and in several European countries too. Interest in the world's different musics is partly due to globalisation, in other words, the fact that one can nowadays travel anywhere in the world, that the media is continually feeding us information about other cultures, and that music stores today sell traditional music from all countries. On the other hand, multiculturalism is the result of almost all countries nowadays having significant numbers of immigrants, making remote cultures a part of the daily life of ordinary people too.

Immigrants

Immigration has become a conspicuous phenomenon in Europe since the Second World War. The reasons include contacts with former colonies, the need for foreign workers due to labour shortage, and refugees.

Compared to many other European countries, there have so far been very few immigrants in Finland. This is the result of the country's remote location and its strict immigration policy. Only since Finland joined the European Union has the number of immigrants begun to increase. According to the statistics of the Finnish population registry, about 86,000 foreign nationals lived in Finland at the end of 1998, which is less than two percent of the population.

About 37,000 immigrants, i.e. 40 %, live in the capital region. If one adds Finnish citizens born abroad (for example Ingrians and the children of Finns who moved back from Sweden), there are almost 51,000 foreigners in Helsinki and environs. This number also includes hundreds of Vietnamese, Somalis, Moroccans, Chinese, Indians, and Poles that have received Finnish citizenship. Immigrants in the Helsinki region represent about 160 different nationalities, so there are people from almost all corners of the world.

As immigration has increased, Finnish music teachers in schools and conservatories have had to come to grips with the same kind of problems as their French and British colleagues already decades earlier. One such problem is the question of whether it makes sense to teach the national music of one’s own culture – folk songs, for example – to students who come from a completely alien culture.

Multicultural music education

In reaction to these problems and at the instigation of the Sibelius Academy, a three-year multicultural music education project was organised for 13 to 15-year-olds in a Helsinki suburban school (Pukinmäki) in 1995. The school was chosen because it had students of many different nationalities, including Somalis, Bosnians, Russians, Turks, and Vietnamese. Teaching was in the form of various theme weeks about, for example, Irish, Senegalese, Cuban, and Indonesian music. Since Finnish music teachers often find it difficult to teach the music of foreign cultures, musicians from the respective countries were employed as teachers.

The director of the project, Ulla Pohjannoro, explains that it was also necessary to abandon the traditional aesthetic conceptions of art music and to replace them with the ideals of multiculturalism. The objective was to teach the students not only music but also tolerance and the ability to understand cultural diversity – in other words, multiculturalism.

Another manifestation of multiculturalism in Finland is a Trinidadian steel pan orchestra that has existed since 1991 in Karjaa, a town about 100 kilometres southwest of Helsinki. The ensemble’s name is the Steel Pan Lovers, and its leader is Ari Viitanen, a native of Karjaa. It has participated in international competitions, and it won third prize at the first European steel band festival in Paris in 2000.

Viitanen, himself a music teacher, also uses his art in his teaching. He does not give traditional music lessons; instead, he teaches the school's students to play in a steel pan orchestra. The pupils learn to play by ear, and they play the pieces by heart – and they have been very satisfied. According to their own words, playing in the band has also aroused their interest in Trinidad and in West-Indian culture.

Immigrant music

So do immigrants have their own kinds of music? Some indications of this can be found in a list maintained by the Global Music Centre, a state-funded cultural organisation in the Helsinki area. For years already, the organisation has maintained a database of professional and semi-professional ethnic music ensembles. At the moment, about 70 groups are listed, which gives an idea of the extent of these musical pursuits.

In some ensembles, all the players are immigrants, but in many, there are both immigrant and Finnish musicians. The large number of mixed ensembles is probably due to the small size of the various immigrant groups, which prevents the formation of subcultures in Finland representative of the respective original culture. This can also be seen in the structure of Helsinki, where there is no Chinese or Indian quarter typical of larger cities elsewhere.

In Finland, many different kinds of music from various cultures are also performed by groups of interested amateurs. An Internet search reveals that in Finland there is, for example, an Oriental dance magazine called “Afsana”, a flamenco school named “Blue Flamenco”, an Irish dance and music society by the name of “Irtamus”, a samba school in Ostrobothnia called “Samba El Gambo”, and a Finnish-Tongan dance group. These all reflect the interest of ordinary Finns in foreign musical cultures and in multiculturalism.

However, immigrant grass-roots-level activities in the proper sense of the word remain somewhat of a mystery. The music of immigrants was the subject of a pilot study conducted by the Musicology Department at the University of Helsinki. In this, about ten immigrant ensembles in the Helsinki area were studied in greater detail. The results revealed that all the ensembles studied were very different and that the backgrounds and motives of the players also varied greatly.

Peoples and cultures meet

In the 1970s in his native Senegal, the electric guitar player Badu Ndjai helped found the ensemble Étoile de Dakar, which has since become famous. The ensemble’s soloist Youssou N’Dour is today a great world music star. In Senegal, the guitarist Ndjai met the Finnish musicians Sakari Kukko and Hasse Walli, who were exploring the sources of African music. Due to various coincidences, Ndjai later ended up in Europe and finally in Finland, where he has settled down and has played with numerous Finnish musicians. When Badu Ndjai performed together with the musicians of the chamber orchestra Avanti in 2001, this constituted a meeting of Europe and Africa, of bourgeois European art and primitive African tribal culture, of acoustic and electronic music, and also of hand-crafted stringed instruments and the industrially produced electric guitar. True multiculturalism!

In fact, very many immigrant musicians in Finland play some sort of fusion music that is either world music or pop. One such example is the Somali-born singer Nimo Abid; his ensembles “Juba Band” and “Waaberi Stars” combine traditional Somali music with African music. This also brings with it internationality and contacts with other Somali colonies in Europe, and Nimo Abid has performed in other Scandinavian countries, in the Netherlands, and in Britain. This is of course multiculturalism, but it brings with it globality – neither music nor performers any longer know national boundaries; instead, everything happens in a more or less global context.

Homesickness and identity

As mentioned above, in addition to professional musicians in the proper sense, there are also immigrants in Finland for whom music is only a hobby. Quite a few immigrant ensembles were, in fact, founded out of homesickness or to strengthen the members' own sense of identity. Due to the small number of immigrants in Finland, there are also Finnish musicians in most of these ensembles.

In this way, these ensembles on the one hand strengthen the native players' cultural identity, but they simultaneously function as training centres for Finnish musicians and help promote cultural understanding. They transfer the idea of multiculturalism to Finns through hands-on practical experience.

Nevertheless, the various immigrant musics in Finland have a number of recognisable characteristics, which may of course appear in other kinds of music too. These include:

• Immigrant musics are at bottom so-called roots music, in other words, various national, ethnic, and linguistic characteristics as well as ones of origin and authenticity are clearly present. The immigrant musics are characterised, for example, by their Africanness, Turkishness, or Spanishness and by their genuineness.
• In immigrant musics, different signs of traditionalism are visible and these can be 1 represented by various things such as foreign lyrics, old-fashioned subjects, instru-1 ments felt to be ethnic or original, performer clothing that points to a certain people or time period, or some signs of traditionalism in the music itself, for example in sound or rhythms. The connection with tradition gives additional value to immigrant music. Fusion music is close to pop music but is also considered immigrant music if it is characterised by traditionalism.

• Immigrant musics are local, and they have neither national nor global circulation. If they achieve the latter, they easily become world music.
• Immigrant musics are marginal music in the sense that they have a very narrow audience base. This is of course especially true in Finland with its small numbers of immigrants.

Musical worlds

For musicians, the musical world is only one of many “worlds”, and the role of professional or amateur musician is only one role among many. In addition, it is very typical for the present age that a person lives in not only one musical culture and instead simultaneously lives in several different musical worlds. Where in the past there was a clear separation between classical and popular music audiences, these are now often mixed. Music and musicology students study art music and go to art music concerts, but they also listen to rock music in their free time and go to clubs where pop music is played. One gets the impression that they feel living in two diametrically opposed musical worlds is completely natural.

Perhaps multiculturalism nowadays should indeed be thought of as a term that means tolerance between different musical cultures. In this way, there is no longer any clear boundary between “our own music” and “their music” nor between “art” and “popular” and “folk” music. This sort of tolerance then also leads to various forms of fusion of musical cultures, which can in fact be observed everywhere today.

Erkki Pekkilä was professor of ethnomusicology and Finnish folk music at the University of Helsinki at the time of this writing.

Featured photo: Indonesian Embassy

Translation: Ekhart Georgi