Back to work, finally!

There has been a long pause in the work of this project, as you’ve all noticed. Thus, I’m happy to announce that the project is still alive and kicking.

At this point we have to admit that the time we reserved for going through all the reels, listening to them, compiling nice set of CD’s and publishing them was a bit too short. Actually, a lot.

Last year we got a grant from the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation for finishing up the project, and that’s just what we are about to do right now.

While the project has been sleeping, we (Pekko and Lari) have been concentrating in other aspects of life, universe and everything. Pekko has been touring the world as a musician, and Lari just seriously begun to work on his research.

As we’ve told earlier, the material for the first 2 CD’s has been selected. We are still in the process for writing the commentaries for the first one, which should be published this year depending on the record company Aito Records.

Publishing archival recordings seems to be a tough job, compared to composing and making your own record, for example. The legislation is quite strict, the people involved in the original recordings are hard to track down, not to mention all their relatives.

As the first CD will demonstrate the variety of material found in the AK-collection, it has some special requirements concerning the commentaries. In the first part of the planned series we have to introduce the collection, Erkki Ala-Könni and his work, musical styles, instruments, instrumentalists, singers, genres and so on. The next parts will be easier, as they will concentrate of more specific themes.

In any case, we are happily back to work. Now I’m back to draft publishing contracts we will make with the heirs of the performers..

Participating in a symposium in Finland 27.-29.3.

If you happen to be in our neck of the woods next week, be sure to attend THE 12TH NATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON MUSIC RESEARCH at the University of Tampere, Finland, 27-29 March, 2008.

We have prepared a poster introducing our project and you can actually listen through the first CD of our series there. You don’t have to participate in the conference to see our poster, of course, you can just pop in the main university building (Päärakennus) and check it out!

We’ll be hanging out in there too at times to answer your questions, detailed schedule will follow shortly. See you in the symposium!

p.s. If you happen to be interested, Lari will give a presentation on some Nepal-related stuff in the symposium on Friday, you are welcome there too.

Happy New Year!

We’d like to use this opportunity to wish you all happy year 2008!

This year will bring the fruits of our work in public, as the first CD is almost ready to be published. We hope that we will be able to continue our work also in the future, as we have plans for the next 6 publications of the series. Giving your contact information for us in our web pages will make sure that you are among the first ones to know about the publishing dates and pre-ordering information when they are available.

As we have been quite busy with other work the past few months, no new info has been added here in the diary. However, I guarantee that we will keep you posted on the project when the publishing dates get closer.

Very warm new year greetings from Finland!

Slowly but definately

We are getting there. Last few months Pekko has been writing the commentaries and liner notes for the first CD to be published. Other work takes some time off our hands (check out for example Pekko’s debut solo album at www.pekkokappi.com) but we are anyhow advancing in our project. The first two CDs will without doubt be released during the next year (2008).

It seems that we underestimated the time necessary to get the publishing rights – although we knew it was going to be an effort. Still we are just taking the first steps on this very important matter.

Be patient people, some new stuff will be available in our web site in the near future.

1500th folk music enthusiast in the blog!

Thank you all! Our statistics clearly show that there are still people interested on our project. Although the phase of the project is now writing the commentaries and hunting the publishing rights (not the most exiting job in the world), we still try to open up in here: if anything interesting happens, you’ll be the first to hear about it!

Remember to check out the sound examples at the main site.

SOUNDS now available!

We are glad to announce that you can finally find some audio samples from the coming releases on our main site, Sounds page (http://www.aitorecords.com/alakonni/sounds.html).

We hope you like it. Remember to click the “i” icon for some details of the song.

Finally, our report from America!

ARSC 2007, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

We left from Finland for the annual ARSC Conference in Milwaukee while the rest of the Finland was celebrating the First of May. Our plan was to spend couple of days in Chicago before the conference and take an advantage of this quite rare occasion – meet fellow ethnomusicologists and visit archival institutes in the Windy City.

The first evening and night in Chicago

Greetings from ICTM World Conference!

July was a busy month for Pekko. Finnish festival summer is exceptional for a local musician, as most of the gigs during the whole year are squeezed in few months of active touring, teaching and having fun all over Finland (and Finland is relatively big a country).

Therefore, Lari started travelling a bit earlier towards Vienna and ICTM World Conference (via Switzerland to

Project diary, week 33

Back from the summer break

The Masters of Finnish Folk Music -project is back from the holidays. When June and July were exceptionally rainy in Finland, August seams to break the all-time records in hot weather.

All on all after eight months of digging the archives the summer break really hit the spot and we are now rolling our sleeves again with renewed energy and delight. A brief summary what we have accomplished so far:

1) The performances for the first two releases are now selected: total 46 + 34 songs. The content of first CD has been approved by the steering group while the content for the second CD is still under discussion. We have also played excerpts from the future releases in our lectures in Finland, Austria and USA. The feedback has been

Congratulations Eija!

A historical moment took place at the Folklife archives earlier this week. The amanuensis Eija Kukkurainen  - who has been working at the archive since 1973 and also listening and indexing the AK-collection from the reel #1 onwards – was happy to announce that she had finally listened and indexed the very last reel (#5347) at the AK-collection! So, Eija is now the only person in the world that has listened the every single reel in AK-collection since Erkki Ala-Könni.

The staff celebrated the special moment by drinking coffee and eating the delicious cake that Eija had prepared.

 Onnea!