As for the bass harmonica, I’d previously only heard it as part of the odd accompaniment in part of the Simon and Garfunkel song “The Boxer” (lai lai lai – thwack – lai lai lai lai lai… etc.). I finally got around to trying to figure out what on earth that instrument is!

Years ago, during a very short stint as the vocal director of a folk ensemble, I had the pleasure of preparing that first song in the video, which is called “Ergen Deda”. The rhythm of the piece is a fast 7/8 Šopska dance (from the Šop region of Bulgaria; Šopska is also a tasty salad).

These 7/8 dances are so fast that the notion of “7/8″ fails to really capture it. It’s really just a matter of “short-short-long”. In Bulgarian (and Greek and other Balkan) music all kinds of interesting combinations of “short” and “long” are used, and we’re forced to notate them with awkward 11′s and 13′s.

See if you can figure this one out:

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You can see why I love this stuff, right? If you listen to the end, it gets faster and becomes increasingly difficult to turn off.

Here’s a great trove of other examples you can hear online.

To really appreciate this music, you need to see it danced. Found this for you. If you don’t watch the whole thing, at least let it load and skip to the end. There’s always a wild finish in these presentations.

P.S. – Poking around on YouTube for Bulgarian stuff, I found this [dcs_lb_link url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC5HZ00MgkU"]travel pitch for Bulgaria[/dcs_lb_link], which despite the lady’s weird Bulgaro-Surrey accent has me contemplating summer vacation 2008.

P.P.S. – I managed to sneak a Bulgarian(ish) 7/8 into the coda of Letter To Hungary (try excerpt #2), but it’s all right; sometimes Hungarian music gets into this rhythmic territory.

This little cartoon is one of those goofy things that quickly propogate all over the world because people have too much free time. But fortunately, for me, it led to my discovery of the wonderful Finnish folk ensemble Loituma. My curiosity about the music on that silly animation quickly led me on a path through Google, Wikipedia and iTunes, resulting in a spontaneous purchase of their 1995 album Things of Beauty.

To introduce Loituma a little bit, here’s a video of a complete live performance of the song “Ievan Polkka”, which was excerpted for that cartoon. Of course, this song is a lot of fun, and the vocal arrangement and performance are masterful, but I discovered that most of Loituma’s music is much more nuanced and subtle. Many of the pieces on this recording are based on the same kind of repetition and modality that draw me to Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt, although I suspect it’s approached from a different angle.

Folk Influences
Loituma are a Sibelius Academy-trained group of four vocalists (three female and one male), accompanying themselves with kanteles (traditional Finnish zither/harp-like instrument) and occasionally violin and other instruments. While their music draws on a variety of influences, I am particularly attracted to the elements that seem to be of the Finnish folk tradition(s). There’s quite a bit of pentatony and a tendency toward rather static harmony based on pedals. However, I know nothing of Finnish musical traditions, so I approached Loituma’s Hanni Autere, who was kind enough to confirm my suspicions and to further elucidate the subject.

The [folkloric] charasteristics we have come, for example, from “kantele music tradition”. The oldest kantele music contains a lot of pentatony, and it’s often meditative with, as you noticed, a lot of rarely changing pedals and simple harmonies. As for the newer tradition in Finnish music, the scales and harmonies widen as the variety of instruments grows.

Hanni also makes an interesting point about how the musical tradition is tied to the instrumental possibilities of the kantele. I supposed this is true in a number of musical traditions where, say, you might find a lot of pedal drones in vocal music that can be tied to traditions of bagpipe or hurdy-gurdy.

There are many kind of kanteles, and nowadays they basically vary from 5 hair-stringed to 40-stringed electric ones. The style of music changes as the number of strings grows. The biggest kanteles have a pitch changing system that’s related to the concert harp system. In that sense, kantele is more like a harp but otherwise I think it’s closer to zither.

Some Highlights
Among my favorite pieces on Things of Beauty, one common element is fact that the harmonies are built upon pedals that rarely change, if ever. When they do change, it’s pure magic. My favorite example is the second track, “Kultaansa Ikäväivä (There Is My Lover)”. This is not a traditional folk song, but an original song on a traditional text, composed by Loituma member Timo Väänänen.

It begins with a very simple, pentatonic ostinato played by a single kantele. During the course of the song, additional kanteles are added, playing complementary ostinati, resulting in lovely cascading sonorities. Until about halfway through, the tonality is rigorously tied to an A pedal. Here’s a little bit of the beginning of the piece:

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By about halfway through, the harmony has become quite rich, with the adding of ostinati and the intruduction of slowly changing sustained, non-vibrato violin notes. But then, something wonderful happens: a low D is introduced, changing the pedal and thus the whole character. A minute change in the texture, and we’re in a new, deeper place.

An even better example is the all-kantele piece “Valamon Kirkonkellot”, probably the most Reich-like case. Here are some excerpts:

Getting back to pentatony, “Viimesen kerran (The Very Last Time)” is a traditional song presented by Loituma as a lovely a cappella arrangement. It’s a very simple pentatonic tune that I would swear up and down is a Hungarian folktune if it were played for me without text and out of context. This is interesting, given the distant relationship between the Hungarian and Finnish peoples.

This arrangement is exquisite in its simplicity. Fortunately, at the beginning we get to

“Kun mun kultani tulisi (Missing Him)” is another traditional folksong, arranged here for voices and kanteles. Although it’s not pentatonic, it also uses a pedal and wordless vocal accompaniment. Again, the

Things of Beauty is published in the U.S. by Northside – Nordic Roots Music.

P.S. — Isn’t the Finnish language beautiful to listen to?

• For some reason, I’ve been seeking out and enjoying all kinds of folk music, including what’s known as “folk rock”. I guess I’m craving purity. Something I never thought I’d say in a million years: I like Bob Dylan.
• I have been on a roller coaster ride surrounding the possibility of my working on a very exciting project. Details will appear in a future post if the outcome is positive.
• My ability to read Yiddish has improved, but it will now all go out the window, because suddenly I want to learn Finnish. (This is a 20-year-old pattern with me.)
• Don’t even get me started on foreign names for various rodents
• I have finished a small portion of a musical theater piece, which is the only way I can get permission to use this particular source material. As I lose hair, I gain humility.
• My recent piece Letter to Hungary has been programmed by the Mission Chamber Orchestra in San Jose for next January (details coming).
• Within a matter of a few days, all of the following items broke
  • Sunglasses
  • Shoes
  • Internet connection
  • VOIP phone service
  • Drip coffee maker. (I’m now one of those annoying, self-righteous presspot people.)
• I “failed to appear” for jury duty. (No contest; I just plain forgot.) And now I must go brave San Francisco’s miserable public transportation system and the even more miserable “Hall of Justice”, and make it right.

I say “Mexico’s Bartók” because, like Bartók, he infused his music with folkloric musical elements from his country, creating an original “Mexican” style of music. The San Francisco Chamber Orchestra treated us to two short works: a chamber version of the Orchestral work Sensamayá, and the “Duelo” movement from Homonaje a Federico Garcia Lorca.

In both works, the Stravinsky influence is more apparent to me than the folkloric influence. (I’m not that familiar with Mexican folk music.) Sensamayá is a wonderful series of polyrhythmic ostinatos underpinning layered melodic fragments. To my ear, there’s also a strong influence of Edgard Varèse in his choices of instrumental sonorities. Something about the blends of muted brass and woodwinds.

Here is some more information on Revueltas with links to some audio excerpts, including one of Sensamayá.

Also on this program was a very enjoyable piece, Altar de Neón by contemporary Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz Torres. This was one of those edge-of-your-seat pieces, also largely based on ostinatos and exciting rhythms, culminating a hair-raising percussion cadenza, making the most out of the four percussionists on the stage.

This particular song is what’s known as a “table song”, characterized by three vocal lines, mostly homophonic. In this tradition, the melodic direction of the independent vocal lines has no concern for their resulting harmonies, flying in the face of everything we learned from our counterpoint books. So, what we have is impeccable voice leading with a harmonic mixed bag: sometimes they’re swooningly gorgeous, and sometimes they clash like crazy. You never know what you’re going to get from beat to beat.

Go on, give a listen ….

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Meanwhile, in reading up on Georgian music, I came across the web site of Village Harmony , where more examples of this amazing music can be sampled.

Here’s an example called Khasanbegura: a feast of surprises for your Western-trained ears. Also, poke around on the Village Harmony site for more examples of wonderful stuff.

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Georgian Voices, by the Rustavi Choir, is perhaps one of the best known (and perhaps best) recordings of Georgian choral music. You can hear a lot more excerpts on the Amazon.com page for this recording (including another version of Mival Guriashi).

Using a folksong anthology that I’ve had since those days, I found a song that’s appropriate, both in what the text conveys and in that it bears some of the lovely intervals and modal shifts typically found in these folksongs.

Here’s the text:

Madárka, madárka
Csácsogó madárka.
Vidd el a levelem, vidd el a levelem
Szép magyar hazámba.

Ha kérdi ki küldte
Mondjad, hogy az küldte
Aki banátában, szíve fájdalmában
Meghasad a szíve.

Roughly, it says:

Dear little bird, please bring this letter to my beloved Homeland.
If she asks, tell her it is from one with a broken heart.

To me, this suggests someone in exile, living outside Hungary against his/her will. So, it’s a song about profound and painful homesickness. There are other verses with which I’m unfamiliar, and there are even other versions of the tune, so this is probably one of many possible interpretations.

The tune presents itself in various ways during the 15-minute piece. Fragments of the tune are woven into the texture of the introduction, and in the slow middle section, it gradually comes into the foreground until it is finally heard in a fairly traditional, straightforward setting. The final third of the piece is an energetic scherzo, at the end of which tune slowly emerges in augmentation from the basses and cellos, leading the piece to its final climax.

In addition to this folksong, I’m also exploring the instrumental folk band style you can hear from the many great táncház ensembles like Muzsikás or the Sebő Ensemble. The string playing in these bands is distinctive and wonderful, with their grinding basses and three-string violas playing upbeats. So, it’s fun to explore the possibilities of using these sounds in a full string orchestra.