Finnish folk music is taking the world by storm. Young musicians have turned it into an important commodity in cultural exports.
Värttinä, JPP, Maria Kalaniemi & Aldargaz, Tallari, Troka, Wimme, Loituma, Pinnin pojat and many others have succeeded in combining the originality and richness of the Finnish tradition with a new creative vein.
The tradition, thousands of years old, is alive in a number of ways: the music-making of ordinary people remains at its core, yet it can also be studied at the Sibelius Academy, the only university-level music education institution in Finland.
Over the past decades, contemporary Finnish folk music has enjoyed two great revivals. In the 1970s, folk music became all the rage in Finland with the emergence of performers and festivals in the media. A culture that had been given up for dead had come back to stay.
Konsta Jylhä and other musicians steeped in the tradition were celebrated models for the re-introduction of folk music as a leisure pursuit. From the mid-1980s onwards, new models emerged, and folk music found itself competing with rock music for the attention of young musicians.