Posted by History is odd on February 27, 2004 at 20:34:00:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Foreigners allowed in London Orchestras? posted by Ola on February 27, 2004 at 06:15:39:
The closest relative to the Finnish language is Estonian, which is not that odd. The next closest relative is Hungarian. But they are not that close, that they can understand each other.
The Finnish language clearly origins from somewhere far out to the east. Why do the Finns then collaborate with the countries speaking languages founded on the same "oldnordiske" roots?
The Finns have been occupied by the Swedes and by the Russians. Apparently the Swedes were the kinder occupants, which pulled the Finns' cultural interest to the west, while they had to accommodate the big bear to the east during the cold war era.
All Scandinavians at some level of education can read each others languages to some degree. Sadly the phonetics are not that kind.
Scania is the southern part of Sweden. People there easily can understand Danish, but we cannot understand them. If we meet a Swedish speaking person, which we can understand, then that person very likely will be from Finland, where there is a Swedish speaking minority, and where Swedish is an official language taught in the schools. But the Finns cannot understand spoken Danish, whereas they have no problems reading our papers.
At some time I briefly studied "oldnordisk", which made it possible for me to read Faroese right from the beginning of my stay there as a leader of a music school. The lady delivering my post could not speak Danish, but she could understand it, so we spoke each our own language in our dialogues. A quite common pattern up there, also heard within mixed marriages.
Our leading literature critic once maintained, that the best and most cunning readers of Danish literature were the schoolteachers on Iceland.
The greatest thread on this inter-Nordic communication is English. But we share fate with the Roman languages. One of the pioneers in saving their inter-communication is a Dane.
He shocked an auditorium of Spaniards by addressing them in Portuguese, which Spaniards claim, that they cannot understand. But they could understand him. Why? Because he spoke the "old-fashioned" Portuguese, which is spoken in Brazil. Like some cunning people say, that the USAnians speak Elizabethean English.
I could go on, but there is a music content to this: there used to be immense numbers of locally based music styles and interpretations. When I was young boy I could with no hesitation tell if an orchestra was Swedish, British, or French just from the horn playing.
The Swedish hornplayers started all notes being flat, raised the pitch through a crescendo, then made a decrescendo and ended flat. The British played with a very dry and narrow, but very exactly pitched sound. The French played with a very wide vibrato. If such wide vibrato was combined with a thin sound, the orchestra was Russian. If combined with a fat sound, then the orchestra was Bohemian. If the sound was just fat, then it was one of the German orchestras, which played everything possible on the Bb side of their double horns like the BPO.
If a marching band is heavy in BBb tubas, which play very short dry notes with no decay, then it is German. If the tuba sound is fatter, due to a prominent Eb tuba component, and with some decay, then the band is British.
If a band is playing selections with silly modulations between the sections and has fat majorettes trying to dance the attention away from hopelessly out of tune clarinets, then it is a US high school band touring the streets of small European towns.
Does this sound prejudicial? Of course, but it is based on aural experiences trough a lifetime, even it they may be outdated by now.
There also have been other experiences: a US high school band visited my college in 1968. Great field show followed by a great indoors concert. An 18 or 19 years old girl did the 1st movement of the Haydn concerto. Technically very impressive, but she cut off the last note in every phrase, so I was left cold. Their lead baritone was very good. I talked to him afterwards and tried his very playable 3 piston front bell non-Conn-nor-King instrument. When I expressed my admiration of his playing, he told, that he would stop playing after high school, as he only did the band thing for the grades. I was shaken in my fundaments.
Klaus