Kaustinen Folk Music Festival

A village and a way of playing

Kaustinen is a municipality of a few thousand people in Central Ostrobothnia, and it has a fiddle tradition of its own — a repertoire of several hundred tunes from this one area, learnt by ear rather than from paper, with the violin as the main melodic instrument though not the only one. UNESCO inscribed it on the Representative List in December 2021 as "Kaustinen fiddle playing and related practices and expressions". The file describes the music as belonging to public celebrations and ceremonies, weddings among them, and to the annual festival — and makes the point that most people in Kaustinen and the neighbouring communities count the music as part of who they are whether or not they play.

The festival

The festival began in 1968 and has run every summer since. It is the largest folk music event in the Nordic countries: the most recent edition drew 58,531 visits, sold nearly twenty-two thousand tickets, and had 5,100 musicians, singers and dancers taking part — the largest number in its history. The 2027 festival, from 12 to 18 July, is the sixtieth.

What the numbers do not show is the shape of the week. There is a main arena, the Keskipohjanmaa, and there are also yards, tents, a church, and the Pelimannitalo, the fiddlers' house; a great deal of the playing is in groups that formed for the week, and the line between performer and audience is not where it usually is.

Dates

The organisers publish the dates well ahead, and 12 to 18 July 2027 comes from them directly. That is unusual on this site — most of what we list is worked out from a calendar rule — and it is why this entry is marked as officially announced rather than calculated.