Finnishness

The first ever Kantele Day was celebrated in Finland on Saturday 16 September 2023. The celebrations – including a flash mob, concerts and gala – were organised by the Kantele Association, a community for amateur and professional kantele players and anyone else interested in the instrument. What is the status of the kantele in today’s Finland?

Over the decades, music has been an important element in the shaping of the identity of Finland’s Swedish-speaking population. Yet this minority has never had a uniform culture and still does not; today, discussion focuses increasingly on the variations of Finland-Swedish culture and its constant state of flux.

Independent Finland is 100 years old and has a classical music scene that is diverse, pluralist and multicultural. A century ago, the situation was very different: just as the nation was heavily polarised after the bitter Civil War, musical life was similarly divided. It is not too much of a simplification to identify two musical camps: official national neo-Romanticism and “left-wing” modernism.

"The Kalevala myth was a genuine source of inspiration for the fledgling Finnish nation in search of an identity. But has it been such a thing any more, really, since the Second World War?," asks Kimmo Hakola in his Kalevala day column.

Is it OK for a Finn of the majority population to put on a fake Sámi costume bought in a joke shop and perform a Sámi yoik? Or to put on a feather headdress and dance a Native American dance? Where do we draw the line between cultural interaction and cultural appropriation?

"It is mind-boggling to think just how much Finland and Finnish music have changed over the past 30 years."

Composer and academician Joonas Kokkonen (1921–1996) examined in 1990 Sibelius's often ambivalent position – on the one hand the object of exaggerated hero worship, on the other the victim of violent criticism as a "local celebrity".

"The 'Finnish element' - if indeed it even exists in the empirical sense - is no unique property; it is the sum of numerous factors each weighted in a different way", writes Mikko Heiniö in his analytical article in FMQ 2/1992.