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04/07/2022 08:50 AM EDT
Welcome back to the Homegrown Plus series, in which we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both videos together in an easy-to-find blog post. We’re continuing the series with one of Finland’s favorite folk bands, Kardemimmit. The American Folklife Center was very happy to co-sponsor this concert with our friends at the Embassy of Finland. Kardemimmit is a quartet consisting of Maija Pokela, Jutta Rahmel, Anna Wegelius, and Leeni Wegelius, four women who sing and play kantele. The kantele is a zither or plucked psaltery, and is the national instrument of Finland. Kardemimmit is considered a pioneering kantele band. The singing and playing in their excellent concert video have a strong foundation in Finnish, Eastern European, and Scandinavian traditions. In our conversation, I spoke with Anna and Leeni Wegelius about Finnish traditional music, the education system in Finland and its support of music, the importance of the kantele, the history of Kardemimmit, and their surprising connection to…The Spice Girls. Enjoy the concert and the interview, plus links to some further Finnish resources you can explore, all in this blog post, published on the anniversary of the concert premiere!