ABSTRACT
Contemporary Finnish music life is widely known for its high standards. Finland's unique national character and cultural history was often manifest in research that was oriented towards folk music. This musicological paradigm lasted well after Finland finally gained independence in 1917; prior to World War II, all Finnish musicologists devoted a considerable part of their research activities to the study of folk music. When looking at music history, there is always a danger of thinking, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, that musicians and audiences were 'overwhelmingly preoccupied with nationhood and the sense of citizenship it provided', as Dana Gooley formulates the historiographical dilemma. One of the basic axioms in Gooley's take on cosmopolitanism is that the local and the international – scholarship, art, literature, and so on – mutually exclusive but rather complement each other as paradigms of intellectual work. The existence of something intended as a 'national' signifier requires a more global context.
