Folk and Baroque
A growing need for crossing boundaries has been sweeping both the baroque and the folk music scene during recent years.
A research that aims at connecting the two worlds is currently being undertaken by many performers and scholars.
History has certainly granted traditional and early music a very special relationship: in XVI-XVII century Europe it might even have been difficult to tell one from the other, so closely rooted they were in the common ground from which they then developed independently.
The study on folk music performance practice often neighbours with that on historically informed early music; the same analytical approach can be applied to the re-creation of both traditional and baroque music, providing firmer ground for musical experiments based on their crossover.
An Italo-Indian baroque viola player, with a keen interest in polskas, schottis, jigs and reels, found himself in the middle of such crossover experiments while studying and residing in Helsinki, Finland, and decided to document his attempts to merge two wor(l)ds: folk and baroque becoming FolkBaroque.
To the meeting of two worlds this website is devoted.
To where their dialogue starts and leads these pages wish to guide readers and listeners.
A Glomas Master’s Thesis
Yes, this IS a Master’s thesis.
But not just another Master’s thesis…it’s a fully developed website, an open window on the many musical landscapes that alternated during the last year of GLOMAS (Nordic Global Music Master) studies at Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland.
Glimpses of those landscapes are portrayed here as videos, audio samples, pictures, texts, scores; sketches from a journal full of questions, ideas, reflections.
Sound images of a constantly evolving scenario that reveals, at it rolls before our eyes, a common theme, a background colour, an appearing shape, a recurrent word: FolkBaroque.
But what is FolkBaroque after all?
How did it relate to the musical lives of those friends and colleagues involved in the projects on display here?
How is this work relevant to a Global Music Master’s programme? And what is Glomas anyway?
To answer these and many more questions, let’s take a look inside, shall we?
Krishna Nagaraja
FolkBaroque 