Guest lecture: Kaustinen fiddle playing and its journey with intangible cultural heritage

UNESCO Chair on Applied Studies of Intangible Cultural Heritage invites you to

Image

Abstract:

Kaustinen fiddle playing and its journey with ICH and the 2003 Convention

Finnish musical phenomenon Kaustinen fiddle playing and related practices and expressions was inscribed to the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) of Humanity in the year 2021. Kaustinen is a small municipality in Western Finland (population about 4100). This presentation will briefly introduce the Finnish Folk Music Institute and its role as an accredited NGO to the 2003 UNESCO Convention, Kaustinen fiddle playing and my own research project. At the end of the presentation, the focus will be on a forthcoming article by me and Heidi Henriikka Mäkelä on representations of the rural in the audiovisual material of Kaustinen fiddle playing.

Historically, the emphasis on rurality in fiddle playing has long roots: for example, the construction of the Finnish welfare state and the rapid urbanisation of society in the late 1960s pitted the countryside against the city. In the cultural politics of the time, folk music was seen as belonging to the 'nostalgic' countryside, while art music was more closely associated with the big cities. Using Laurajane Smith's (2006, 2021) concept of authorised heritage discourse, we consider how definitions of folk music and its local and political connections to the countryside continue to circulate in material-discursive social practices. We also examine how the institutional and historical discourses related to rural folk music and Kaustinen fiddling are reconstructed at the grassroots level among practitioners.