Free Finnish Concert

Yesterday Travalon and I went to a free concert hosted by my department. The band was from Finland; one guy played the guitar and sang some, the woman played the violin and sang some, and the lead singer also had mad skillz on the harmonica, almost sounding like an accordion on some songs. Both he and the guitarist also played the ukulele on a few songs. Now if you don’t associate the ukulele with Finland, you are not alone – I never knew they used it in folk songs, but this was a folk band. Maybe it was actually a Finnish folk instrument that just looked and sounded like a ukulele, or maybe they just like the sound of the ukulele and incorporated it into their band, because the whole premise of this concert was that tradition is living and changing all the time. The concert was to celebrate the upcoming publication (by the press where I used to work) of a book of folk songs in Finnish but collected in this country, with SINGABLE translations into English by a couple of faculty members in our department. Indeed, on one song they handed out the words in both language and had us sing along. Travalon and I sang with great gusto. Before the concert he had said he wasn’t too interested because he doesn’t like Scandinavian music, but this music was so lively that it won him over to some extent. I’m not saying he’s going to run out and buy this band’s latest CD or anything, but we both had a good time. That’s the fun thing about living in a college town – sometimes you get to go to free concerts and sing in Finnish!

Speaking of concerts, there will be an early music one (not free) by one of the local ensembles, and the harpsichord player came to our department to put flyers into our mailboxes, since they will be doing a German composer's (Telemann) pieces during this upcoming concert, so he thought our faculty and grad students might be interested. He saw me and said, "I know you!" and even remembered that I used to work with his wife. I told him Tiffy and I already had the concert on our calendars, but Travalon won't be there. He likes classic rock, not Baroque music. The world would be far more boring if we all loved the same things, although I will admit that I would not understand anyone loving that weird twelve-tone modern music or Ornette Coleman. Is that really "music" or just a bunch of sounds?

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