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Women singloud and proud

Hakka poet and musician Lo Si-rong has created a large body of work that breathes new life into traditional folk tunes. PHOTO: COURTESY OF TREES MUSIC AND ART

Three years ago, female artists from Mongolia, France, Iran, Indonesia and Taiwan's Atayal tribe (泰雅族) gathered in Taipei for Trees Music & Art's (大大樹音樂圖像) Women's Voices Festival (女歌節), an event to share women's life experiences through music and poetry.

Tomorrow at the Taipei Zhongshan Hall (台北中山堂), women's voices will be once again heard through the folk songs of Finland's most respected contemporary accordionist and composer Maria Kalaniemi and Taiwan's Hakka musician and poet Lo Si-rong (羅思容).

Kalaniemi has a 20-year professional career in folk music behind her, but her first musical training was in classical music. Her first encounter with traditional Finnish music came when she went to study at the acclaimed Sibelius Academy's then new folk music department.

Rigorous academic training aside, Kalaniemi was enlightened by the importance of improvisation and experimented with traditional sounds in order to create something new. The future folk music legend then formed the pioneering all-women ensemble Niekku with four other students in 1983, and their three albums and concerts at home and abroad have established them as the pioneers of what has become known as the New Finnish folk movement.

Performance notes What: 2007 Women's Voices Festival — Solo in My Room (2007女歌節－女歌獨白) Where: Taipei Zhongshan Hall (台北市中山堂), 98 Yenping S Rd, Taipei (台北市延平南路98號) When: Tomorrow at 7:30pm Tickets: NT$500, available through NTCH ticket outlets or at www.artsticket.com.tw

While her musical vocabulary is inspired by the singing of Kalevala poetry, shepherd music, Finnish gypsy tunes, kentele music and Finno-Swedish traditions, Kalaniemi has taken an experimental attitude toward all kinds of music and worked extensively with musicians in different fields such as jazz, big band, classical and pop.

At her Taiwan debut concert, audiences will have a taste of Kalaniemi's music at its most intimate as she presents meditative and improvisational themes from her new solo album Bellow Poetry released in 2006.

An award-winning poet and singer/songwriter from Miaoli, Lo's artistic sensibility was seeded in her upbringing in a poetic family and her music is often regarded as a variation of the lyrical eulogies on nature embedded in traditional Hakka mountain songs and literature. Taken from Hakka folk tunes and influenced by a free-flowing rhythm, the female musician has written hundreds of folk songs in Hakka, Hokkien, and Mandarin to bring a new vitality to traditional music and offers her own perceptive of love, family, nature and humanity through her lyrics composed as a wife, a mother and an independent woman.

Concertgoers can attend Kalaniemi's workshops at the Witch House (女巫店) on Sunday free of charge to get better acquainted with the Finnish folk maestro and her musical cosmos, while Lo will share her lyric poetry at the Fembooks bookstore (女書店) on May 26.

Music workshops by female musicians will be held throughout next month and vocal artist Ridina Ahmedova from the Czech Republic and Taiwan singer/songwriter Mia Hsieh (謝韻雅) from A Moving Sound are tentatively scheduled to take center stage in July. To keep up with the festival's upcoming events, visit www.treesmusic.com/festival/2007wv/2007wv.htm.

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