The Ethnomusicologist
Launis was one of the first scholars to collect and do research on folk music. He was very open-minded, passionately fond of travels which he undertook alone, eager to meet other people and to listen to them. He travelled to Lapland (1904, 1905, 1922), to Kainuu (1902), to Ingria (1903, 1906), Karelia (1902, 1905) and Estonia (1930). Everywhere, he was happy to meet local people, had long conversations with them, jotting dowwn popular melodies, also recording famous singers, hired mourners and kantele players. Launis understood the richness and vitality of sung poetry together with the importance of folklore. His numerous publications and the corpus he collected are still being recognized and used nowadays and are valuable additions to the common inheritance of the nation.
Later, he travelled and stayed in North Africa, got interest in Arabic, Berber and Bedouin music. This influence can be felt in later works, especially the operas Théodora and Jéhudith.
Read more about this topic: Armas Launis