Tom Service was talking to a pre-pubescent male pupil at a Finnish comprehensive school on this week's Music Matters, with the boy touching on why he prefers Rautavaara to Sibelius and musing on his playing the drums in a band, singing in a choir and and playing the violin in an orchestra; quite extraordinary. It's 50 years since the death of Sibelius and the Radio 3 show marked the anniversary this weekend with an episode from Finland (their broadast from Bergen in Norway in November was so engaging that two weeks later I was there).
It's all too easy when writing about Finnish music to rely on the 'old chestnuts': eveyone in Finland is inherently musical; Sibelius wrote music that so readily captures the essence of the country; Finns enjoy the likes of Sibelius and Lordi concurrently as they could in no other contemporary culture; and new 'classical' music in the country thrives. But Service's Voxae Populii (is that the plural?) on the streets of Helsinki seemed to suggest that this isn't so much the Romantic notion of Sibelius-loving Brits, but rather, quite true. The music curriculum and educational infrastructure is extraordinarily comprehensive and democratic (though, as touched upon, it still needs to be fought for).
I don't suppose you can compare Great Britain with Finland. We have an economy which relies on immigration and a culture that has benefitted from it. As we desperately scramble to retrieve the flotsam and jetsam of 'Britishness', we need to recognise that for us, times have changed: there's no one set of cultural ideals that calls the tunes (not even that catch-all 'multi-culturalism' thing), and when looking at our behaviour as a nation in the past, that's no bad thing. But the notion of stopping Finns on the street of their capital and finding that they're mostly familiar with the works of Sibelius, that one in three takes part in musical performance of some sort and that music is so important a part of the political agenda, is nonetheless an enchanting one. If we're 'the land without music', then the Finnish are our antithesis (though most of their major instrumental and conducting talents can thankfully be heard in UK concerts). I for one hope that on a cultural and therefore sociological level, music continues to play such an important role in Finnish life, because it can enrich all of us as Europeans (and indeed as humans) if we choose to allow it to. As Tom Service discovered though, there are some who are worried it won't. As for Music Matters, the show, it's consistently brilliant these days, and you can listen again online for up to a week afterwards.
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