Years ago, I bought a copy of My Kantele Is My Teacher by Lani Thompson. The kantele is a traditional Finnish instrument with five strings. (More modern models can have ten or more.) I had been looking into potential commonalities between kanteles and lyres, and I fooled around a bit with the tunes included in the book. I was still mostly plucking the strings at that point, and it sounded nice but not compelling.
Well, I picked it back up for fun last night. Using the block-and-strum method of playing with a drone on tonic, the tunes seem to take on a deeper life. They sound really, really good.
The lyrics, alas, are in untranslated Finnish. Maybe I'll see if I can find some translations on the 'Net, or else use the music as a basis for my own lyrics... although I'd like to know what kind of songs these are before I go writing. Also, the tunes are all given as "traditional," and that includes everything from the ones collected from rune singers or that use lyrics from the Kalevala, down to the waltzes and the polkas. So... some more documentation would be nice.
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