From Manchuria to the tradition village: on the construction of place via pelimanni music

Abstract

Introduction

There are no traces of the mid-Finnish village ‘Perikylä’ on existing maps. It features only in the ‘old folks’ memories', says the retired bus-driver, Matti Tulijoki, who wrote a melancholic waltz in memory of his native five-farm village, ‘in a weak moment’. He called the waltz ‘Memories of Perikylä’, and I have chosen it for analysis from the repertoire of the amateur musical group Virtain pelimannit, in which Mr Tulijoki is an accordion player and a pelimanni. Pelimanni is a term that has been used in Finland for centuries to denote a musician who plays a folk instrument. It is also used for the players who, from the start of the Finnish folk music movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, joined the groups that were being formed all over the country, carrying the name of each municipality. This paper uses the case study, Music and Identity at Grassroots Level (Järviluoma 1997), in which I analysed the ways in which one such amateur music ensemble creates and maintains different sides of its identity. The group comes from Virrat, a country town of 9,000 people in central Finland. One of the central themes of the case study was place, and I will draw upon the study here to examine how ‘place’ is present in both the players' music and their speech about music.