How Old Is It?

The age of the kantele itself is apparently a matter for debate and is somewhat tied up with national pride issues. Historians have put it anywhere from 3,000 to 1,000 years old, but I have yet to see the basis for these claims. It seems to rest on the age of the kantele being the same as "rune singing," but how does one date the practice of rune singing, then?

One site claims that the oldest extant kantele dates from the 17th century. We should recall, however, that the earliest iconographic evidence of a triangular harp with forepillar in Europe is found in the Utrect Psalter of the 9th century, while the earliest surviving instruments date from the 14th century. Kantele-like instruments from elsewhere in the Baltic region have been found dating from the 11th to 14th centuries. It does not seem absurd to consider the kantele a period instrument, even if it is not absolutely documentable.

Playing the Kantele

A tutorial offers instruction in playing the 5-string kantele. These methods come from Antti Rantonen (1877-1961), one of a few traditional players of the 5-string kantele in postwar Finland. (Based on the above website, he seems to me to occupy the same place that Denis Hempson does for wire-strung harpers.)

It combines a "block and strum" chord technique that will be familiar to anyone having read the Priest-Dormans' page with the plucking of individual melody notes. The wire strings ring long enough that this is an effective technique. The left hand appears to do all of the blocking and plucking, while the right strums. Slight delays in damping produce ornament notes.

This is somewhat at odds with the information provided by the Finnish Music Information Center, which gives playing technique as the dominant hand playing melody, and the other accompanying. With only five strings, one wonders how this was accomplished, and Anne Heymann's Coupled Hands for Harpers jumps to mind. There is a published study of songs and techniques collected in the early 20th century out there, but it is in Finnish.

Lessons for the Lyre

I have personally found that the blocking hand, since it is also performing the necessary duty of holding the instrument up and stabilizing it, is rather less nimble than it would be if I could pluck at the strings from the front. This may be more of a comment on my technique (or lack thereof) than anything else. However, it also fits the Priest-Dormans' hypothesis that the lyre would have been plucked only rarely, with the resulting notes used as rare ornaments. I am also unsure if the sustain offered by the lyre's gut strings would allow the kantele methods of "strum and pluck" to work effectively.

If they do, perhaps the way to go about it would be to block with the left hand, strum with the right, and then pluck out melody notes with the right until it was time to strum another chord - or perhaps interval. Many of the "how to play kantele" sites focus on producing modern chords (i.e., the folk favorites I-IV-V) which is extremely unlikely to be even close to period practice. On the other hand, a three-note chord on a five-string instrument means only blocking two strings, which is certainly easier than blocking three strings to get a two-note interval. On the six-stringed lyre, four strings must be blocked to get a simple interval, and then the fingers rapidly removed (or moved around) to allow for melodic plucking. Not impossible, but certainly challenging.

No matter how simple and easy a pentatonic tuning for the lyre would be, and no matter how lovely Benjamin Bagby makes it sound, it seems more and more clear that a diatonic tuning is the most likely.

If nothing else, the kantele community can offer lyre players music on five strings. These Kalevala tunes may or may not be of great antiquity - but I have not yet found an older living tradition of epic poems accompanied by a small number of strings which we might use to inform our performance of the Anglo-Saxon corpus.

Future Work