Amanda Kauranne

I’m Amanda Kauranne, a folk musician and music journalist. At the Saari Residence, I will immerse myself in laments from Suistamo, a former Finnish municipality in Karelia ceded to Russia in World War II. My grandmother was born there, and the Suistamo community has become important to me.

For some reason, I am drawn to singing laments. For me, laments are about sharing emotions through music and lyrics, conveying love, and caring for the community. Singing laments makes me feel part of the chain of generations that lived before me.

The language of laments used in Suistamo is based on the spoken language, but in a way, its metaphorical expressions and poetic form are a language of their own within the Karelian language. During my residency, I will begin my exploration of this extremely endangered language of laments originating in Suistamo. I dream of some day being able to sing a lament spontaneously, drawing from the Suistamo tradition. For me, this work is about re-learning my family’s long-lost heritage, a personal reclaiming of lamenting and, on a larger scale, the decolonisation of the Karelian culture.
With the support of the Kalevala Society, I did some archival work relating to this subject at the Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature Society and the University of Tampere. I will bring the fruits of this work with me to the Saari Residence.

In addition to listening to and transcribing recordings at Saari, I will study and learn from various lament singers’ aesthetics in combining lyrics and melody by imitating their recorded laments. To learn the Suistamo language of laments, I will study a wide range of written material and sing the laments recorded in the archives, using both my own and traditional melodies from Suistamo. I will write down the metaphors used in the lyrics and compile a kind of glossary of Suistamo laments. Based on these, I will also draft my own lyrics.

In addition to using traditional melodies, I will create my own compositions and will probably also compose songs from some lament lyrics, creating worry songs.

I will also consider the physicality of lamenting and mourning in my work and extend my interpretation of laments towards a kind of language of movement or a stage set. There are touching descriptions in the archives of situations involving laments that I would like to somehow recreate. But the most important thing about my residency is the opportunity to immerse myself in the ritualistic, poetic language of laments.