It's again the 10th of the month and time for the "Inspired by" creation! But what is Inspired by? Every month awesome Marsha and I choose a subject to be inspired by. It can be for example an idea (link), a product (link), a person (link) or a book (link). Or anything! Then we make something inspired by that theme or a piece of art and share it with you and each other on the 10th of the month. You can browse the past "Inspired By" posts from here (link).
The March is written in the dawn of the independence of Finland when the national flame and urge to rule the own country was strong. The Jägers were men smuggled to Germany to be trained in military forces to help Finland gain independence. At that time Finland was a part of Russia and Finnish men were not trained in military so the thought was that without this we wouldn't have had a change against the huge power next to us. The lyrics of the piece are written by a Jäger and they were smuggled to Sibelius to write the music to them. Nowadays the march is used by many military segments in Finland and it's also always the first song to be heard during the President's Independence Day Reception when the veterans enter the ball, leading everybody.
This march is something that most of Finnish people know and goes along side our national anthem "Our Land" and Finlandia. It's one of those songs that spark a memory or feeling right away. So even though I first thought to fight it and use another song, I then felt that I needed to follow the topic so much as to actually take the first song that sparked an idea or memory than to listen on and choose another piece.
This song means different things to me. As I know the background history and like many of the Finnish families, I had two veterans as my grandfathers, the song is connected to the army, the war and independence. It's also connected to military tattoos we attended with the school when I was little. The march also makes me think about another patriotic song of the same era and thus leading my thoughts to a theater piece I was lucky enough to be part of making. And yet one image, or memory popped to my head - a memory of this previous project (link) I did for Mixed Media Place.
Putting those all together, I created a journal page, like a re-make of the previous page but with different colors and different picture. The man, soldier, in the picture is actually a relative - my grandfather's brother. And if I haven't got it totally wrong, we was killed during the war and strive for independence. My father is named after him.
As it was Independence Day and the piece of music was so patriotic, I wanted to use mostly blue and white in the project. There's white gesso and blue watercolor in the background. There's also text stamped here and there, to mimic the letters the soldier's sent home from the front. The book pages represent newspapers and the ribbon in the left side of the photo is arranged like the details of the uniform. The "X" goes both for ten and "unknown". Ten as next year, 2017 is ten times ten Finland's birthday, we celebrate the centennial of Finland. "Unknown" as one of the traditions of the Finnish Independence Day is a movie called "The Unknown Soldier" after the novel by Väinö Linna of the same name, which is about the Continuation War.
So there you have it! A loooot of text and quite a lot of information as well. Hopefully you managed to read it all! Thank you for visiting and thank you so much if you read the whole story! Now it's time to visit Marsha! Here's the link to Marsha's post about the same topic (link)! Ta ta for now!
This Inspired by is inspired by something which is inspired by something... A Russian nesting doll of inspiration that is! Let me share the story. As you may have noticed Marsha and me use very varying sources for these posts. We want diversity, want to be inspired by the use of different senses even. So this time we wanted something connected with music.
As "music" is too vast of a topic, we needed to define it somehow. This was hard as we didn't want to use just one song but allow more variation but still be able to get a grip of the topic a bit more easily. It was hard before Marsha thought about Marit Barentsen. She organizes each year a TOP 2000 blog party inspired by the top 2000 song list put together by Radio 2 listeners in the Netherlands. So we chose to go with the radio! The first song to trigger a memory would be the song to be used in the creation.
So you see the nesting dolls? Inspiration drawn from a song from the radio, a thought of which was inspired by Marit Barentsen's TOP 2000 blog party which again is inspired by the list the Radio 2 makes.
I decided early on that when "choosing" the song, I would tune in the Finnish Classical radio. Why? Because I didn't want to be lead by the lyrics but the music. As the classical radio plays more instrumental music than those with words (like opera), I thought this would be an ideal solution.
But what happened? Well, normally I try to do my monthly project way before hand. But I changed my job some time ago and worked two jobs for a moment, like the "in between" phase, so I'm behind my usual schedule. So when I thought to do the creation for this topic happened be the Finnish Independence Day, December 6th. What this meant was the radio full of Finnish music, which was fantastic, but the first song that heard happened to be the Jäger March by Jean Sibelius. And how ever I wanted to be inspired just by music, the notes, not the lyrics, it was the known lyrics that got my mind soaring.
Underneath you can see and hear the song. It's from another time, from a different era and the translation is lacking some subtleties of the original words as well as it's hard to understand the nationalism behind the lyrics without further information of the time period, Finnish history and folklore.
The March is written in the dawn of the independence of Finland when the national flame and urge to rule the own country was strong. The Jägers were men smuggled to Germany to be trained in military forces to help Finland gain independence. At that time Finland was a part of Russia and Finnish men were not trained in military so the thought was that without this we wouldn't have had a change against the huge power next to us. The lyrics of the piece are written by a Jäger and they were smuggled to Sibelius to write the music to them. Nowadays the march is used by many military segments in Finland and it's also always the first song to be heard during the President's Independence Day Reception when the veterans enter the ball, leading everybody.
This march is something that most of Finnish people know and goes along side our national anthem "Our Land" and Finlandia. It's one of those songs that spark a memory or feeling right away. So even though I first thought to fight it and use another song, I then felt that I needed to follow the topic so much as to actually take the first song that sparked an idea or memory than to listen on and choose another piece.
This song means different things to me. As I know the background history and like many of the Finnish families, I had two veterans as my grandfathers, the song is connected to the army, the war and independence. It's also connected to military tattoos we attended with the school when I was little. The march also makes me think about another patriotic song of the same era and thus leading my thoughts to a theater piece I was lucky enough to be part of making. And yet one image, or memory popped to my head - a memory of this previous project (link) I did for Mixed Media Place.
Putting those all together, I created a journal page, like a re-make of the previous page but with different colors and different picture. The man, soldier, in the picture is actually a relative - my grandfather's brother. And if I haven't got it totally wrong, we was killed during the war and strive for independence. My father is named after him.
As it was Independence Day and the piece of music was so patriotic, I wanted to use mostly blue and white in the project. There's white gesso and blue watercolor in the background. There's also text stamped here and there, to mimic the letters the soldier's sent home from the front. The book pages represent newspapers and the ribbon in the left side of the photo is arranged like the details of the uniform. The "X" goes both for ten and "unknown". Ten as next year, 2017 is ten times ten Finland's birthday, we celebrate the centennial of Finland. "Unknown" as one of the traditions of the Finnish Independence Day is a movie called "The Unknown Soldier" after the novel by Väinö Linna of the same name, which is about the Continuation War.
So there you have it! A loooot of text and quite a lot of information as well. Hopefully you managed to read it all! Thank you for visiting and thank you so much if you read the whole story! Now it's time to visit Marsha! Here's the link to Marsha's post about the same topic (link)! Ta ta for now!
Materials: Prima Marketing, Ranger
2 comments:
Wow! I don't know what I love more about this page: the details, the blue on kraft and the real photo or the story behind it. I love that you got to record such an important part of your family's history. Music is a powerful thing. You never know what it might stir up!
beautiful an inspired inspiring inspiration !
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