Question

While I was browsing the yuvan shankar raja page from itwofs, I came to know about the Swedish/Finnish band Hednigarna. Later on, I was looking for more finnish folk music, when I came across Varttina. (yes the same varttina, that is colloborating with rahman in LOTR).

I would encourage people to hear the music from these bands. They have sample mp3 files in their respective web pages. Also amazon has 4 free varttina tracks for free download.

Tune/Melody:
Most of the tunes seemed like Kharaharapriya. Some of the tunes were similar to vedic chanting.
For example: Tielle.mp3 (or) go here and click track 2 Lepiainnen.mp3 (or) go here and click track 8.
Here I want to point out that in sama veda the three major swaras are s,r2,g2 - as in kharaharapriya.

(Just a little digression here, I would view the swaras of yajur veda as n2,s,r1. One could have easily (using shruthi transpose) viewed this as s,r2,g2 but I (we) dont do this. Why? The answer has to do with the way we identify the 's' note. More on this topic, shruthi bedham and vivadhi swaras on a later post)

And, these two tunes seem very similar to some film songs. I cant think of the particular songs. If it strikes for somebody please tell me. Kylan.mp3 and Ottajat.mp3

Rythm:
I was abosultely astounded by the rythms because of the use of unconventional time period. For example the following song is a 51 beat /cycle song!!(13x3+12) - ikki.mp3. (or) go here and click track 4.
This, when the world is filled with 8 beat montony! Ofcourse, Carnatic exploits these curious rythm patterns in Pallavi singing.

The sounds of finnish language , especially the names, (to me) sound a lot like tamil. Consider the following names : Illmarinen, Hakkinen, Raikkonen, Makkinen and how does {Kannan, Hariharan, Subramanian} go with the group? The first name ,Illmarinen, is a an important character in 'Kalevala',
the national epic of finland, which was recently translated to tamil.

Here I will adangufy a little before hypothesizing a finn-tamil historical connection, because there is a finn Asko Parpola who has extensively researched sanskrit and tamil. Infact, he has come the closest ,deciphering the harappan script. If there was a historical connection between the languages, he would have found it definitely!

( I remember encountering a paper describing the possible relation between tamil and an european language (forgot the language) an year ago. The argument was based on a large overlap of root-words. For some reason, I cannot find it now. If somebody finds it, can you please send me the links)

Last but not least, Nokia is comming to chennai.

P.S: If you have problems listening to the mp3 links, (if you get some server error), then go the immediate parent webpage and click (or download) on the mp3 track in that page.