FMQ 3/1995

Finland has taken the potato from Peru — potato in Finnish is peruna, by the way — and the tango from Argentina. Both these South American imports are cultivated in these northern latitudes perhaps even more devotedly than in their countries of origin. Pekka Gronow reports on the way in which the tango has taken root in Finland and stubbornly survived even the arrival of Elvis and The Beatles.

Finnish composers got together to form a society immediately after the war, in 1945. The following is a resume of the history of the first half decade of the Society of Finnish Composers, written in 1995 by Erkki Salmenhaara (1941–2002), at the time Associate Professor of Music at the University of Helsinki.