Official Name: Republic of Finland
Capital City: Helsinki
Population: 5,238,460 (July 2007 estimate)
Government: Republic
National Language: Finnish
Location: Northern Europe, bordering the Baltic Sea, Gulf of Bothnia, and Gulf of Finland, between Sweden and Russia.
One of the biggest bodies of work about Finnish music was carried out by Erkki Ala-Konni (1911-1996), the legendary professor of the Department of Folk Tradition (nowadays Department of Music Anthropology) at the University of Tampere. Ala-Konni collected around 8,000 recorded hours of folk tradition and took over 200,000 photographs during his forty years of work. This fieldwork was carried out at a time when folk tradition in Finland was vivid and the master musicians abounded.