Love that kantele
A while ago (quite a while ago now) we were joined by a friend who came to stay with us from Hamburg, and we all toddled down the road for a couple of days of Flow Festival.
I totally loved the whole thing … actually no, I did not enjoy the only brand of beer for sale, but I enjoyed everything else, even Iggy Pop parading his sweaty, bare, 69-year-old torso around on stage.
I figure it’s not that exciting for you to read about a music festival that you didn’t get to attend, but I just have to tell you about this one thing: the kantele.
The kantele is a Finnish instrument that sounds like a twangy harp, but nicer, and it is apparently super old, prehistoric in fact. Like a surprising number of things in Finland, the kantele has ties to Asia … although I don’t know who can claim the credit for inventing the original twangy-harpish-instrument. In Finnish folklore, we are told that god-poet Väinämöinen was the originator of the Kantele. Stories differ as to whether Väinämöinen was born of the cosmic egg, or out of a duck egg laid on his god-mother’s knee, or if he floated around in his mother’s womb for 730 years, or all of the above, but however he came to be, he is consistently credited with creating the first kantele out of a pike’s jaw bone and some stallion hairs. Unfortunately he lost this beloved kantele, but luckily he was able to get creative with some birch and the hair of a willing maiden to make another one.*
And it is thanks to Väinämöinen, or perhaps someone less god-ish that history has forgotten, that I was able to enjoy listening to two kanteles featured in the music of Okra Playground. I wonder what Väinämöinen would think of their music. I loved it.
*All of which I’ve gathered from Wikipedia because there aren’t that many websites in English that discuss the kantele.
That instrument slung over the shoulders of the two ladies on the left (its hard to see on the centre lady because she has it swung around her back), that is the kantele.
