Music and Northern Forest Cultures

orests were sacred in northern European ancient belief. Trees, in particular, were cosmologically significant, as in other contexts, including the peepal and banyan providing welfare for diverse life forms in Vedic tradition, or the tree, in Biblical tradition, as a source of knowledge. Traditional Finno-Ugric (e.g., Finnish, Karelian, and Sámi) views are that the tree supports the world because of its life-giving properties, provides a means of communicating across the worlds of the living and the dead, and represents the cosmos: the Milky Way. These views are linked with musical practices which, taken as a whole, can be located within a cultural domain this article identifies as northern forest cultures. By considering examples ranging from the works of Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) to contemporary folk and popular music, this article contributes to an understanding of the importance of the forest in Finno-Ugric musical practices, particularly in relation to contemporary global challenges, including climate change and environmental pressures. In one example, traditional singers in Archangel Karelia addressed the forest as a personified agent through song, incantation, and epic narration using poetic language and a trochaic tetrameter (known as the Kalevala meter) to sing songs about the forest’s birth and the methods for exploiting its resources. Singers conveyed complex relationships between humans and trees through forest imagery representing human cultural experiences within a subsistence landscape and describing hunting and human kinship, which were connected in metaphoric terms. Singers used hunting metaphors to express the unification of kin groups in traditional wedding songs. In turn, human marriage served as a model in the imagery of ritual hunting songs. To ensure a successful hunt, the hunter would sing for the forest maidens—the daughters of the forest’s ruler Tapio. This was a gendered mode of musical communication that enhanced the hunter’s masculinity. The forest, seen as a reciprocating agent, would sing and dance

forestry due to policy making and market issues. 12 While timber has been one of the cornerstones of the economy, the problem of its unsustainable exploitation has been greatly reduced on at least three levels.
First, forestry is governed by three major legal acts to prohibit forest destruction, the first dating from 1886. 13 Secondly, old growth forests, especially in southern Finland have been protected as nature reserves under the Nature Conservation Act, which was prepared in conjunction with the Forest Act (first enacted in 1886). 14 Thirdly, sites in forest areas such as the Old Church at Petäjävesi (an example of timber construction in central Finland) have been included in the UNESCO World Heritage list. The state plays an important role in ecological sustainability through legal processes and international conventions.

Language, Kalevala, and Finnish Nationalism
Cultural survival was a significant concern in nineteenth-century Finnish nationalism, and political and cultural activists discussed it in terms of language maintenance; a discourse providing a model for subsequent Finno-Ugric language movements (e.g., Karelian and Sámi). The Finno-Ugric language family includes Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, Livvi, Livonian, and the Sámi languages, as well as others spoken around the Gulf of Finland and in Russia. Finno-Ugric and Samoyed languages constitute the Uralic language family. Some Uralic languages have few remaining speakers and are considered endangered. 15 They are distinct from neighboring Scandinavian and Russian languages. Finland has around 5.4 million inhabitants and it is home to some of the smallest Finno-Ugric language groups such as Inari Sámi and Skolt Sámi, each with around 300 speakers (as discussed elsewhere). 16 Since this article's focus is on Finnish and Karelian examples, it is worth noting that Finland and Karelia are not discrete conceptual formulations for they are connected in both geo-political and ecological landscapes, as well as through shared Finno-Ugric cultural, if not always political, histories. Karelia is a region within Finland, as well as a larger territory that has been contested, ceded to, and shared with Russia.
Nineteenth-century Finland saw the nationalist promotion of the Finnish language in governmental and literary contexts. While Swedish was the language of administration (a legacy of six hundred years of Swedish rule), the political philosopher, Johan Vilhem Snellman (1806-1881) urged readers of the Swedish language newspaper, Saima, during the early 1840s, to promote the Finnish 12 Palo and Lehto, Private or Socialistic Forestry? 4-6. 13  The turn to Finnish as a language of literature and government offered one route to sustaining the musical traditions of northern forest cultures. The epic hero, singer, and maker of the kantele, Väinämoinen expresses this link between music, forest, and survival in the last lines of the second runo (poem, song text) in the Kalevala, in an utterance that the birch tree would be a perch for the cuckoo. He was to discover the historical aspects of the Kalevala. 22 His sons Kaarle Krohn (1863-1933) and Ilmari Krohn (1867-1960) further developed his research approach, which became known as the geographichistorical or "Finnish" method. 23 By the early twentieth century, Finnish music researchers were motivated to search for common roots amongst neighboring Finno-Ugric people. Thus, Armas Launis In his first major work, the Kullervo Symphony (1892), Sibelius set over 200 lines from the Kalevala, and followed the principles of setting stressed and unstressed syllables, characteristic of the Finnish language, in lines such as "Kullervo Kalervon poika" ("Kullervo, the son of Kalervo"). In his last major work, Tapiola, Sibelius highlighted the cultural importance of the forest.

Sibelius's Tapiola within Northern Forest Cultures
Tapiola is one of the most well-known examples of forest imagery in musical works, especially because Tapiola is the dwelling place of the forest god Tapio (who appears in the Kalevala). Sibelius attached these explanatory lines to the beginning of the score:  26 Goss notes that Sibelius's effects include two versions of this poem. One emphasizes the "deep and dreamy" rather than "brooding" forests, and their "enchanting wood-nymphs" rather than "mischievous sprites." Cf. Goss, Sibelius: A Composer's Life, 425. 27 Sibelius did not make any substantial revisions to the work once he had sent it to Breitkopf & Härtel, the publishers, but was anxious about having given up the possibility of revising it. Cf. Tawaststjerna Punainen Viiva ("The Red Line," 1978), 32 it was also a "refuge," which remained a life-long creative stimulant for both Sibelius and Aalto. 33 Sibelius retreated from the social distractions of Helsinki by moving to his home, Ainola, in the Finnish forest in 1904, where he claimed that he found creative inspiration. Sibelius's interests in forest culture extended to the practices of folk singers: to their creative flexibility and continual adjustments of runic fragments that allowed "a whole to grow from parts" and that exemplified musical processes in Tapiola 37 Interestingly, albeit tangentially, in order to develop this interpretation, Grimley frames Tapiola as "Immanent Critique" in dialogue with the critical theorist, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno's synthesis of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's (1770-1831) dialectical approach and Karl Marx's (1818-1883) arguments on economic progression. Indeed, Hegel's ideas about a critique that cannot be justified from the perspective of the form of knowledge that is being criticized, such that forms of knowledge should be investigated on the basis of their own presuppositions 37 can be seen as implicitly informing Grimley's subsequent turn to an ethnographically derived conceptualization presented by the anthropologist Tim Ingold, who worked in a Finno-Ugric context and developed phenomenological perspectives based on field testimonies. especially creating a pedal to "fuse all the different and sometimes incompatible groups of sounds" and to obtain an effect of "continuation of sonority when passing from one group of colours to another." 38 This technique is striking in the beginning of Tapiola. 39 Recent studies of compositional sketches have enriched these understandings of growth, structure, and sonority by focusing on Sibelius's assembly of a variety of ideas, formulated over years, in which the creative process was one of determining which ideas belonged together, and in which order. 40 It is increasingly possible to re-conceptualize the ecological dimensions of Sibelius's compositions now that music scholars are abandoning discourses about his national versus universal relevance.
Moreover, moving away from an idealized image of the composer in an exotic northern landscape encourages thinking about Sibelius's work as "a nascent form of acoustic ecology" instead. 41 From this perspective, Tapiola can be interpreted as a work that speaks to climate change, as a kind of "acoustic testimony for our current environmental concerns," 42 thereby complementing analyses of other Finnish music examples, 43 as well as developing musicology's ecological turn, which challenges assumptions about "the work" to look afresh at musical meaning. 44 A reception history marked by questions about nature in Sibelius's musical imagination has prompted recent ecological readings of works such as Tapiola. In this respect, Adorno's short essay "Glosse über Sibelius," 45 first published in 1938, has received significant musicological attention. Adorno wrote about Sibelius's works as "the configuration of the banal and absurd," and he claimed that the composer's relationship with nature would be "only inwardly." 46 Adorno saw Sibelius's retreat into the Finnish forest as a way in which the composer hid himself from the critical gaze of his Austro-German teachers, 47 and thus he failed to recognize the importance of the natural environment from childhood onwards in Sibelius's musical thought. The scholar of Russian literature and music Philip Ross Bullock suggested that Adorno was "affronted by the lack of British interest in Mahler's music," and that his essay resulted from his experience of British musical life rather than from "German avant-garde hostility to Sibelius as a figure of reactionary nationalism." 48 The musicologist Max Paddison further explores Adorno's critique and outlines three ways of considering questions about the relationship between music and nature. Firstly, music is seen as a representation of nature, secondly, as embodying nature thereby prompting ontological questions about music, and thirdly, as dealing with meanings and feelings ascribed to nature. In relation to the first of these, he suggests that Sibelius's Tapiola could be seen as combining such as "forest folk," continue to draw attention to human-forest relationships. Forest folk musicians use sampled sounds or imitate bird sounds by whistling as part of a nature-inspired sonic palette, and attract media attention as creating "a highly inventive and unique musical world." 57 Web music videos depict musicians walking through the winter forest. 58 One of the most well-known contemporary folk groups exploring Kalevala-type songs is Värttinä.
Former lead singer Sari Kaasinen explained that the group began learning music in traditional Karelian contexts: "I am from a farm, we had cattle, cows-and I have lived, so to speak with them; it has been that sort of country life where all these traditional things have been a very strong part of life." 59 Another former member, the instrumentalist Kari Reiman described the group's runo (kalevalaic song) repertoire as consisting of epic stories about gods and heroes, lyrical songs about human feelings, and magical spells. symbolism in traditional songs, notably in the title track to the album Oi Dai, 60 in which allegiance is expressed by a bride to her "own land, fir-trees and pine-trees." 61 Värttinä's repertoire encompasses related Finno-Ugric songs by Setu, Mari, and Ingrian people, examples of which can be heard on albums such as Oi Dai 62 and Seleniko. 63 The group has incorporated joik (a traditional Sámi vocal genre) in songs like 'laulutyttö,' 64 'outona omilla mailla,' 65 and 'Manattu.' 66 A characteristic of runo performance is the interplay between the stress in words and musical meters. On the DVD Värttinä, Archive, Live (2006), two group members-the singer Mari Kaasinen and the violinist Kari Reiman-discuss the importance of singing in Finnish to preserve its linguistic rhythmic characteristics. As Reiman notes, most of the traditional runos are in 5/4 or 4/4, but in many songs, when the singer is fitting words to a melody, the rhythms become very complicated and uneven. The first line might have 11 beats, but the next line 9, 10 or 13. We like those uneven rhythms and ever since Oi Dai's 'Viikon vaivane' (in 28/8) there's always been something in that style on our albums. 67 Linguistic considerations likewise shape Karelian lament, which is included in Värttinä's repertoire, and which is also a genre going through a recent revival process. Part of the linguistic complexity of Karelian lament lies in its ritual aspects; in its conveying of the conceptual traces of the sacred forest as "a sociomorphic world structured as a self-portrait of the human community." 68 Laments performed in wedding contexts traditionally depicted in-laws as bears of the forest, highlighting them as "foreign." 69 In contemporary lament, the use of ritual language continues a "dialogical mode of communication" in which personification of the forest links human and animal agency, enabling "the concept of a common language and verbal communication with the forest." 70 The world beyond the living is evoked in funeral laments. The ethnomusicologist Elizabeth Nineteenth-century representations of Karelia as a region of cultural riches have given way to a twenty-first century regional emphasis on the wood industry. 79 Regional culture is emphasized, nevertheless, in the music of the Karelian folk rock singer Santtu Karhu and the members of his band Talvisovat. One of their recording labels is named Nuori Karjala ("Young Karelia")-an obvious play on the politics of "Nuori Suomi" ("Young Finland"). Karhu and the members of his band Talvisovat were major activists promoting Karelian language transmission and released recordings in 1990 and 1991.
In the early 1990s, Karhu expressed his wish to continue using the endangered language Livvi (spoken in Aunus Karelia, and regarded as a Karelian dialect, as well as a distinct language). His formal education had been in Russian and he only spoke Livvi at home with one of his grandmothers. His mother spoke Russian, not Livvi. Karhu thought about the preservation of Karelian culture and language in comparative terms by reflecting on the cultures and languages of other related peoples, especially those who had been drawn into the Soviet Union, such as Estonians. Livvi is the language of some Kalevala meter songs, and Karhu stressed its importance and beauty, as well as his hopes that it would be in general use again in the future. 80 Karelian language transmission continued into the twenty-first century through the medium of popular music because Perestroika offered new cross border travel possibilities and gave musicians new musical models, according to the musicologist Pekka Suutari. Thus, Karelian rock musicians had turned, initially, to Karelian languages as a form of protest within the Soviet Union, following the example set by Estonian rock musicians. This musical protest was important for language maintenance. As Suutari claims, Karhu's audience is "still relatively small in Russian Karelia, but his influence is huge for those young people who would like to see the Karelian language reappear as a vital medium in the community." 81 In a press interview given in 2003, Karhu expressed his pride in singing in a suppressed, forgotten, and degraded language. 82 On the Internet, examples uploaded to YouTube for an international web audience include Karhu's reworking of early twentieth-century ethnographic materials, most brilliantly in Karjalazes diskotiekas, which is a rescoring of a film extract of a wedding in Suojärvi. 83 Karhu replaces the soundtrack by the composer and ethnographer Armas Launis (a researcher of Karelian and Sámi music, and also a student of Sibelius) with extracts from his own recording. 84  It has offered a further perspective on disciplinary concerns about resilience, which have been expressed in different ways, including cultural survival, preservation, cultural grey-out, revival, the transmission of tradition, or musical change, all of which have given way today to a pronounced discourse on sustainability. Musical practices are assessed in terms of their continuing vitality and viability in the present day, 86 and they are incorporated into discourses on intangible cultural heritage. In some recent cases, ethnographers believed they were documenting disappearing musical traditions. This has been the case in Finno-Ugric research contexts, especially around the turn of the twentieth century. Yet, it is almost impossible for an ethnographer, who is situated in a particular temporal frame, to predict cultural futures, even while assessing contemporary cultural vitality. 87 The approach to cultural survival in this article, therefore, has departed from assessments of vitality to highlighting traditional conceptual connections between music and ecology, and how these have been framed by specific political, scholarly, and artistic concerns with sustainability.
Nevertheless, referencing the musical in relation to the ecological (specifically conceptualizing cultural continuity in terms of sustainability and resilience) has a concrete basis when viewed from the perspectives of how ecologies shape cultural practices. In the northern regions of Europe, polar warming, for example, is beginning to affect musical thought, and a critique of the dangers to a fragile ecology is expressed via creative activism. Musical responses to changing sonic environments generate wider public attention to ecological crises. 88 The discussion in this article has gone beyond determinist models of northern forests by emphasizing that forest cultures in Finno-Ugric contexts have had political dimensions in projects of nationalism, regionalism, and language maintenance. Sámi indigenous politics provide important and related perspectives on cultural survival and ecological thought, too, as discussed elsewhere. 89 The examples discussed in this article have led to thinking holistically about common ecological, linguistic, and cultural Finno-Ugric heritages despite different kinds of identity politics. This is a fundamental point. When it comes to thinking about fragile ecologies, a global view is needed, not a regional or a national one.
The larger questions therefore concern the future of forests in the global context, and they extend to thinking about the survival of different kinds of forest cultures, through which human knowledge about forests is transmitted. In an optimistic vein, the Finno-Ugric examples in this article provide evidence of cultural resilience, which, together with climate stability, is a key concern in thinking about contemporary ecological sustainability. Traditional Finno-Ugric cultural thinking emphasizes kinship relationship between humans and forests. This perspective is reiterated in contemporary scientific approaches to forests. Nadkarni writes that we have a clear affinity . . . for trees. Although we are not of the same family, trees and humans are in a sense married into each other's families, with all the challenges, responsibilities, and benefits that come from being so linked. From the first glimmers of humanity's dawn, we have evolved with trees. 90 This affinity is so strong that trees provide the metaphors for thinking about various kinds of human relationships and communication media: tree imagery is a conceptual tool in abstract modes of thinking about human language evolution and linguistic proximity. 91 88 Ramnarine, "Acoustemology, Indigeneity and Joik in Valkeapää's Symphonic Activism"; Ramnarine, "Sonic Images of the Sacred in Sámi Cinema." 89 Discussed, for example, in Ramnarine, "Sonic Images of the Sacred in Sámi Cinema"; as well as in Ramnarine, "Musical Creativity and the Politics of Utterance." 90 Nadkarni, Between Earth and Sky, 11. 91 Nadkarni, Between Earth and Sky, 57.