At the beginning of the twentieth century, a young twenty-something called Armas Otto Väisänen began to document through photographs and field recordings the traditional musical cultures of his native Finland and beyond. Using fragile wax cylinders which were typically capable of recording for no more than two or three minutes, this scholar of folk music or early ethnomusicologist made six visits to Estonia between 1912 and 1923, where he made collections of Seto folk songs; travelled on a scholarship from the Finno-Ugrian Society to Russia in 1914 where he gathered up Finno-Ugric melodies; and in the summers of 1916 and 1917 made the relatively short journey to the border regions of Karelia between Finland and northwestern Russia where he hoped to capture hitherto neglected kantele tunes, shepherd melodies and other laments.
Over the course of these two summers, Väisänen recorded 520 tunes including 134 on the kantele from musicians in the parishes of Suojärvi, Korpiselkä, Suistamo, Tuupovaara, Kitee and Impilahti. The 1916 trip was financed by the Finnish Literature Society, who provided him with a phonograph for his recording purposes, while the 1917 foray was financed by the Kalevala Society as Väisänen relied instead on a dictation machine called the parlograph.
Most prominent among the musicians was Teppana Jänis, who despite his failing eyesight had continued to travel around his village in Suistamo playing the kantele and telling folk tales from door to door. Jänis had gained a degree of renown for his performance at a Suistamo music festival in 1911, with Väisänen visiting him in 1916 and once more the following year.
Väisänen would record 14 and transcribe 22 of his melodies. The scholar would later become a professor of musicology at the University of Helsinki and the chairman of the Finnish Musicological Society, while Jänis made a winning appearance at the Helsinki Song Festival in 1921 (an event which brought together classical composers like Carl Nielsen and folk musicians like the Seto singer Hilana Taarka) before dying later that year at the age of 71. His bust sculpted by Alpo Sailo during the Suistamo festival continues to reside in the collection of the National Museum of Finland.
Other artists have drawn inspiration from the material collected by Väisänen. The singer, violinist and electronic musician Maarja Nuut for example used his recordings as a kind of jumping-off point as she sought to connect with her Estonian heritage, infusing her winding repetitions with pizzicato strings and steep drones. Yet the album Teppana Jänis takes a novel approach to the arts of documentation and interpretation as it sets Väisänen’s old recordings of the kantele player, still housed by the Finnish Literature Society for research purposes, within a collection of contemporary takes and reworkings of his oeuvre.
The kantele player and researcher Arja Kastinen bears the task of interpreting Jänis’s old melodies, drawing from Väisänen’s recordings and transcriptions of 1916 and 1917, while the late Taito Hoffrén contributes vocals to a couple of the tracks. The album was released by Ääniä Records and the kantele label Temps Oy in 2021 and has been picked up now by Death Is Not The End.
That kantele is a Finnish and Karelian plucked string instrument, part of a family of Baltic psaltery which also includes the Lithuanian kanklės, the Latvian kokles, the kusle which is native to the Mari who live along the Volga in central Russia and the Sámi harpu. It can play accompaniment or share the melodic line on runosong, the name for a kind of oral poetry native to the Baltic Finnic people, whose vocal range usually corresponds to that of the kantele and whose lyrics are typically sung in trochaic tetrameter with the marked use of alliteration.
Teppana Jänis therefore presents a curious blend of crackling old field recordings from the early twentieth century – sounds heard only in snatches and on the cusp of disappearing from the collective view – with crisp reconstructions that revive kantele traditions while inhabiting with all of its frames of reference a contemporary musical milieu. The kantele melodies as played by Arja Kastinen possess a folksy and at times faintly liturgical quality, somehow combining Nordic and Baltic midsummer traditions with vestal rites or bucolic Alpine airs while Jänis’s recordings chug to life like a dilapidated steam engine and are full of whistling stops, as though from a pipe organ or those old Warner Bros. and Disney cartoons where animals step out from the scenery, whir into action and begin collaborating on a rickety tune.
The album starts out with a series of short vignettes or variations on a theme, almost in the manner of the Romanian Folk Dances or Hungarian Sketches of Béla Bartók, concise in length with each tune flowing into the next though the tracks are melodically complete and narrate a scene in their own way. With the instrument held in one’s lap, the plucked strings of the kantele and their overtones ring out like church bells or carillon – sometimes calling to mind the tanpura and its use in the raga or else Robbie Basho’s distinctly Indian-inspired primitivism – while Jänis’s old music serves as an introduction or echo as it crackles to life in the manner of a transistor radio.
As the song titles suggest – from the opening ‘Vanha valssi’ and several ‘falssi’ to a ‘Hoilolan polkka’, a couple of ‘letška’ and a self-explanatory ‘Ruskoi’ – these pieces are mostly dances, referring to waltzes and polka sometimes for a specified number of pairs, ländler which originated in central Europe and other regional folk tunes.
In fact the history of the kantele stretches back at least a thousand years, but the melodies performed by Teppana Jänis and captured by Armas Otto Väisänen were almost strictly popular dances. Some of these had emanated from the east, stretching from the shores of Lake Ladoga to the town of Sortavala and the rest of border Karelia, yet in its obituary for Jänis the Finnish picture magazine Suomen Kuvalehti wrote that the pieces recorded by Väisänen were ‘mainly dance tunes, most of which can be said to have been brought over from the West’.
‘Hoilolan polkka, 3 parii’ is especially rich in jangly overtones with a cinematic interlude courtesy of Väisänen and Jänis while ‘Ruohtalazen falssi’ carries a lovely whistling sentimentality. The ninth piece ‘Vaivazen pojan laulu’ is performed by Kastinen on solo kantele and proves one of the most compelling syntheses on the record despite its brief length, as the pristine clarity of Kastinen’s playing – bright with the faintest touch of melancholy – cedes to the whimsy of Jänis’s rejoinder from the distant but still tangible past. The tenth piece reinterprets the same tune with elegant vocals from Taito Hoffrén, who sings the melody and is followed by the kantele in a kind of overlapping call-and-response. The late Hoffrén – who died in 2024 at the tender age of 50 years old – sticks around for the runosong ‘Voi minä poloine poiga’ where his voice fades in and out of the croaky Jänis’s to stirring and spellbinding effect.
As the songs on Teppana Jänis begin to stretch longer, it is ‘Maanitus eli ribatška ja tšiitžik’ which best captures the softly spoken ambitions of the project, an almost six-minute flowering which is punctuated or punctured two-thirds of the way through by a croaking phantasm of the old music, like a vision seen through a torn piece of paper or a flickering, revolving animation of the type proffered by a phenakistiscope or zoetrope.
Altogether the seventeen tracks of Teppana Jänis are a model of how to stitch together fragmentary, low fidelity or otherwise archival material with modern reconstructions of that past work. The tantalising curio breathes and sways with moist lips and the dewy lustre of fresh life. Gesturing towards the monastery, the obituary of Jänis in Suomen Kuvalehti compared his playing to the ringing of the Valamo church bells and it is to these we turn over the final two pieces, as Kastinen with her second of two arrangements expands the ‘Valamon kirkonkellot’ and its shifting and shimmering, toing and froing patchwork of plaintive plucks, steep gongs and rippling chimes.
