Liisa Matveinen is a folk musician. Her instruments are vocals and kanteles and she has performed in bands called Niekku, Tallari and Hedningarna. Matveinen has made a contribution to the creation of new folk song tradition in the Folk Music Department of the Sibelius Academy, where she has both studied and taught.

Matveinen was born in Ilomantsi, the eastern most county in Finland, where she also spent her childhood. Ilomantsi has been known for its rune singers, and Matveinen became familiar with this old singing tradition and folk music already in her early years. In her music studies Matveinen specialized in lamentation. It is a global tradition usually performed by women in funerals, weddings and other departing occasions. Owing to Greek Orthodox religion, this lament tradition maintained in Carelia and in some other marginal areas in Europe.

Matveinen heard laments for the first time at an Orthodox village festival (praasniekka) in her childhood. Nowadays the lament tradition can not be passed on from mother to daughter in the same way as in the past. Because there were only few tradition bearers alive, Matveinen had to study lamentation by listening old archive recordings and by interviewing people, who still knew the tradition.

One of the rune singers Matveinen respects very much is Mateli Kuivalatar (1771–1846). Mateli lived in Ilomantsi, and her contribution to the Kanteletar, a collection of Finnish lyric folk poems, was great. Mateli Kuivalatar´s poems were written down by the collector of the Kalevala and the Kanteletar, Elias Lönnrot and August Ahlqvist in the mid-1800´s.

Mateli lived a life of constant hardship. She gave birth to eleven children of which only six survived. Life was not easy in the house of her husband´s family, and after one of her daughters started to have epileptic seizures and became rejected by the villagers, Mateli and her family were forced to move to a little cottage far away from the village.

Liisa Matveinen has paid respect to Mateli Kuivalatar by composing some of Mateli´s poems and recording them with Tellu Virkkala. According to Matveinen, Mateli´s poems express the blues of the Finnish woman.

… I arrived at the backwoods
and foud the mistress of the Wind
a darling breeze
Koitere´s eloquent one:
Mateli from the shoal
and now I have some songs to sing
words for rhyming
roots of songs to drink
something to savour
for the rest of my days.

Liisa Matveinen: Mateli

 

Contact: liisamatveinen@yahoo.com