78th release from Antonovka Records

Armas Otto Väisänen (1890-1969) was a famous Finnish ethnomusicologist and ethnographer.

In 1914, when his native Finland was still part of the Russian Empire, he traveled around Samara province and recorded music of traditional fiddlers from local Erzya Mordva villages on wax cylinders. These recordings have been preserved in the Finnish archives.

The album Erzyan Morot (“Erzyan Melodies”) presents those tunes played by modern Russian fiddlers as close to the original as possible .

The number in the brackets after each melody is its number in the collection Mordwinische Melodien (“Mordovian Melodies”, Helsinki, 1948) compiled by Väisänen.

Performers:
Sofia Balueva (tracks 1-4), recorded August 14, 2021 in St. Petersburg
Sofia Fayzrakhmanova (tracks 5-10), recorded at the same place
Tatyana Yamberdova (track 11), recorded on October 23, 2021 in the town of Velikiye Luki

The idea of ​​the project by Ksenia Goncharova and Andrey Davydov.

Source: Antonovka Records, Facebook, 25 November 2022

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Armas Otto Aapo Väisänen (9 April 1890 – 18 July 1969) was an eminent Finnish scholar of folk music, an ethnographer and ethnomusicologist.

Väisänen was born in Savonranta. In the early twentieth century he documented, in recordings and photographs, traditional Finnish music and musicians. With a scholarship from the Finno-Ugrian Society Väisänen traveled to Russia in 1914 to collect Finnish folk melodies. He made field trips to Mordovia, Ingria, Veps, Russian Karelia. His activities also marked the a new stage in the history of collecting Seto folk songs in Southern Estonia. After the first trip in 1912 he made 6 field trips to Estonia between 1912 and 1923.

A. O. Väisänen’s dissertation was presented in 1939 on Ob-Ugrian folk music in German: Untersuchungen über die Ob-ugrischen Melodien: eine vergleichende Studien nebst methodischer Einleitung.

Between 1926 and 1957 Väisänen hold the position of the head of the folk music department at the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, Finland. He was the professor of musicology at University of Helsinki from 1956 to 1959. He died in Helsinki, aged 79.

Source: Wikipedia