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 visit his ethnomusicologist friend Dieter Sulzer). Pekko came to Vienna only for couple of days to give the presentation and enjoy the closing ceremony before rushing back to Finland to give a concert at Kaustinen Folk Music Festival.
The conference was amazingly interesting and very well organised. It was a pleasure to see colleagues from all over the world vividly discussing about their current research and swarming to taste the (exceptionally salty) food prepared in the ICTM tent.
The most interesting titles in the conference from my (Lari’s) point of view were the ICTM/Unesco panel titled “UNESCO, ICTM and the safeguarding of living culture”, a great panel “Rethinking fieldwork” and a panel titled “Towards a social history of music theory: Modernizing discourses in cross-cultural perspective”. I saw many other panels and individual presentations too, but these really struck me as being highly interesting, informative and really pleasant to listen to. Thank you all who were part of these sessions!
Our presentation went a lot better than in Milwaukee in May. Meaning that we didn’t mess it up totally. Actually we had quite a good time behind the speakers’ table. We really admired the intensity the audience listened to our presentation and asked questions – the questions were the best part of the whole session, as it often is. We also got some new insights to our project – we really did, so thank you!
