Bear Awakener by Tuomas Rounakari

The Bears in Helsinki Korkeasaari Zoo awoke well over a month earlier than usual on 5th of February 2016. It had been an alarmingly warm winter but it did not quite feel like an adequate explanation. The very same day, we had our premier of a Bear Feast performance in another part of town. It included a Khanty Bear Awakening Song that we had been practising the whole week intensely.

Had the bears reacted to our call? How thin is the line between possible and impossible? How deep is our dream?

My passion towards the music of Khanty and Mansi was awakened in the turn of millennium. I felt in their music a connection with my own hunter gatherer ancestors, music that is intertwined with nature and deeply connected with the land. That family relation shows up in many places; structures of language, fishing methods and hunting gear, cosmology, a 5-stringed musical instrument and one of the oldest myths we have in Finland - The Bear Origin Myth.

As a violinist, the most natural way to study this connection was to play and re-arranged vocal songs into violin tunes. After doing that for over ten years, I managed to buy newly built Khanty and Mansi instruments in Khanty-Mansiysk in 2009. Among them a ning-juh played on this record.

A late evening in May, Khanty-Mansiysk, we sat by the fire with a friendly group including a Mansi musician Emil Kospolov. He tested the new instruments and that was my first lesson on how to play them. Later that night, exchanging songs and playing to each other, I picked up my violin and started playing my arrangements of the Khanty Bear Feast songs. I also wanted direct feedback on my creative take on their traditional music. Had I understood it? Kospolov stated that my versions had so much originality that they were almost new compositions, but nevertheless they included all the essential elements of the tradition. It’s hard to say which one of us was more touched by this evening - a musical meeting bending centuries of distance.

Returning to Khanty-Mansiysk in Oct 2014, I interviewed a master singer Maria Kuzminitchna Voldina about the origin of musical characteristics in Khanty folk songs. She brought along a bag full of sticks, twigs, stones, bark and so on. For the next hour she picked them up and stroked things together with slight differences. Slowly the subtle differences grew to significant ones as my listening went deeper and deeper. Then she explained that this type of listening was a vital part of the musical upbringing of Khanty children. In a broader perspective, their survival was based on instantly understanding the difference between an insignificant snap of a pine tree reacting to a dropping temperature and the most significant yet similar sound created by an animal on the south-side of that same pine tree. For Voldina, the oldest layer of melodies were nature's movement in a musical form. Movement that never repeated itself exactly the same.

On this album I have focused on that kind of natural movement. It happens outside of keeping the tempo and staying in tune. I chose to use raw-gut strings on violin to get my fingers on something less technological and more alive. All songs in this album are traditional, but this music is how I respond to the spirit of these songs in my own personal way. Without the guidance and encouragement from Emil Kospolov and Maria Voldina I never would have come this far.

Violinist, composer and ethnomusicologist from Kokkola, Finland.

rounakari.com