Iļģi, Latvia’s leading folk music group, mark their 20th anniversary this year with a series of concerts abroad. Fresh from a trip to China, six members of the collective head this month to the United States for a two-week tour of Eastern and Midwestern venues. And, a week after they return to Rīga in early October, the band heads off to Norway, said Gatis Gaujenieks, the group’s bass player.

The U.S. tour will give non-Latvian audiences a chance to hear what “world music” sounds like from the Latvian perspective. Iļģi, who emerged from the early 1980s folk revival movement, have moved far from their roots. While other folk groups have joined Iļģi in seeking out unromanticized versions of Latvian folk songs, it is Iļģi who have pushed furthest into weaving into their repertoire other cultures’ folk influences, along with the sounds of modern rock music.

Founded in 1981 by Ilga Reizniece, Iļģi has seen band members come and go. The group’s early years were focused on retrieving traditional music styles that had been suppressed for many years. The group’s efforts at times were viewed suspiciously by Soviet authorities, who considered the period’s folk revival as unwelcome nationalism.

By the mid-1990s, Iļģi were experimenting with broader musical influences and moving into their “post-folk” period. While Reizniece’s voice and fiddle-playing and Māris Muktupāvels’ handling of the kokle remain integral to the band’s signature, bass, guitar and drums now round out the sound. Group members and the Iļģi sound also at times spilled over into the rock group Jauns Mēness, fronted by Ainars Mielavs, whose UPE record label has released the last two Iļģi albums.

Latvian audiences familiar with the band’s discography should expect to hear material from the last two albums, Saules meita (1998) and Sēju vēju (2000). Some new material also might be heard in the concerts, possibly including something from “Spēlēju, dancoju,” a rock opera based on the work of Latvian poet and writer Jānis Rainis, Gaujenieks said. The rock opera—a collaboration between Lithuania’s Miraklis “visual theatre” group and Latvia’s Jaunā teātra institūts—is scheduled to be performed Sept. 14 at the Daugavgrīva fortress on the outskirts of Rīga as part of the Homo Novus theatre festival. A live Webcast of the performance also is planned.

The band doesn’t know how audiences in the United States will react to the music, Gaujenieks said. In China, he said, Iļģi were generally received positively, except in one concert where the audience seemed apathetic.

Older members of Latvian audiences, Gaujenieks admitted in a telephone interview from Rīga, may not quite like what they hear. He recalled that the last time the band was in North America, playing a concert in Toronto, the reaction of some listeners was cool.

“Yes, we have heavy pieces, but we also have many light pieces,” Gaujenieks said. “But it’s 2001, and if we have a hope of Latvian folk music becoming popular in the world, we have to keep up with what’s happening.”

Among younger listeners in Latvia, Iļģi are the most popular folk artists. It’s important, he noted, that Latvian music maintain a foothold in a time when many radio stations are more focused on broadcasting the European version of the Billboard Top 100.

It’s still too early to tell whether Iļģi will please the ear of a North American producer who might give the band a record deal, but Gaujenieks said the tour will offer the band the rare opportunity to play at a number of folk festivals including Chicago’s World Music Festival, the Detroit Festival of Arts and Lotus Fest in Bloomington, Ind. In Minneapolis, the band will be the warm-up act for a Tuvan throat-singing group performing in the city’s leading world music venue, the Cedar Cultural Centre.

The band also is scheduled to play a number of Latvian community venues, where the full concert program is expected to give way to a more participatory atmosphere, with Iļģi teaching audience members Latvian folk dances and rotaļas (games).

For Gaujenieks, the U.S. tour will be a homecoming of sorts. The bass player was a member of Akacis, a popular early 1980s Latvian-American trimda rock band. Besides playing with Iļģi, he now runs the GEM recording studio in Rīga. Also on the U.S. tour will be fellow ex-Akacis member Jānis Abens who now lives in Sweden and is one of four guitarists who play with Iļģi.

Besides Reizniece (voice and fiddle), Muktupāvels (voice, kokle, bagpipes and accordeon), Gaujenieks (voice, bass and ģīga) and Abens (guitar), the other two band members on this American tour are Mikus Čavarts (percussion) and Vilijs Strods (drums).

The tour begins Sept. 13 with a concert in the Latvian Lutheran church near Washington, D.C., and continues on to New York City; Summit, N.J.; Detroit; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Cleveland; Indianapolis; Bloomington, Ind.; Chicago; Milwaukee; Minneapolis; back to Chicago, ending Sept. 30 in Kalamazoo, Mich.

Thousands of tourists are streaming to the real Rīga this year as Latvia’s capital city celebrates its 800th anniversary. Those who can’t make the trip to Latvia might try searching for the Rīgas, or Rigas (without the diacritical mark), in their backyards.

Several places with the name of Rīga can be found in the United States, not to mention other Latvian-sounding sites such as Livonia or Baltic. And the United States isn’t alone: Similar sites can be found in Canada and Australia.

The Web offers online placename databases for several countries that can be used to find the spots.

Perhaps the best digital resource in the United States is the Geographic Names Information System, run by the U.S. Geological Survey. A search of the database for “Riga” turned up places or geographic objects in Connecticut, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, New York, North Dakota and Virginia. The database is linked to Microsoft’s TerraServer database, allowing users to see USGS topographic maps and, in many cases, aerial images of places.

The places with Rīga in their name include:

• A lake, a dam and a mountain in Litchfield County is western Connecticut. The mountain, Mount Riga, also is claimed by New York’s Dutchess County, which also has a Riga Lake.
• A populated place in Trego County in Kansas.
• A township, cemetery and a canal in Lenawee County in Michigan.
• A populated place in Ripley County in Missouri.
• A township and a school in North Dakota’s McHenry County.
• A town in Monroe County in New York.
• And a stream in Virginia’s Orange County.

But the database doesn’t reveal much if anything about the history of these places. While most of the places in North America that have names suggesting some tie to Latvia probably have little connection, a few do.

For example, Riga is a small town in the western New York’s Monroe County, southwest of Rochester. Established in 1808 in the breakup of the larger Town of Northhampton, the community historical committee on its Web site reveals nothing about why Riga was chosen as the name. Even documents such as J.H. French’s 1860 Historical and Statistical Gazetteer of New York State shed little light.

Another Riga, in southeastern Michigan’s Lenawee County, is a lightly populated spot where “For Sale” signs appear frequently. A visit to the community’s cemetery reveals that the town has been home for people of German ethnicity. The town also in 1990 was briefly considered for a low-level radioactive waste disposal facility, but was removed from a list of potential sites after it successfully sued the state of Michigan.

"Riga" placenames also are found in Canada and Australia.

Libau, a community in Canada’s province of Manitoba, does have links to Latvian history. The community, on the south end of Lake Winnipeg, is where a group of Latvian immigrants settled in the early 20th century to take up farming. Libau is the German name for the port city of Liepāja.

To the east of Manitoba’s Libau, on Lac du Bonnet, is Lettonia Bay. The community of Lac du Bonnet, southwest of the lake, was home to Latvian immigrants in the early 20th century.

According to Geomatics Canada, the province of Quebec is home to a Lac Riga and to a Lac de Riga. And in Ontario, near Sudbury, there’s a Riga Lake.

The South Australian State Gazetteer’s online version reports a homestead called Riga Downs.

Livonia is the name of the province that became part of modern Latvia. Quite a few Livonias can be found in the United States in Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York and Pennsylvania. But again, the story of why a place was named Livonia isn’t always clear. And when it is, the trail may not point back to Latvian ancestry.

For example, Livonia Township in Minnesota’s Sherburne County, northwest of the Twin Cities metropolitan area, apparently has little to do with the province. It was named instead for the wife of a judge who settled in the area in 1864, according to the Minnesota Historical Society.

The same is true for Baltic. In many cases, the naming of a place as Baltic-something probably has more to do with seafaring or with other lands that touch on the Baltic Sea.

Although it is always the kokle that first comes to mind when talking about Latvian folk instruments, it is by far not the only one. Here, a brief overview of Latvian musical instruments.

Percussion instruments

Worldwide, percussion instruments are considered the oldest instruments. Most characteristic of the Latvian percussion instruments is the trideksnis (rattle stick), a short wooden handle with small metal pieces attached in rows around one end of the handle. The player shakes the trideksnis like a rattle or hits the handle against his or her other palm, which causes the metal pieces to jingle. Large rattle sticks, called velna bungas (literally, "devil’s drum"), are about 4 feet to 5 feet long and are struck against the floor. The eglīte, or bell tree, is a small spruce tree with the top branches folded down and tied to the center stem, with all sorts of bells, trinkets and decorations attached.

Although there is virtually no archaeological evidence of drums (bungas) in Latvia, it is known from the oral tradition and from historical writings that they were used as signal instruments—to signal a wedding party’s arrival, for example—and also played to accompany dance music.

Bells (zvani) had both a musical and a practical purpose (for example, to keep track of cows) and, though sometimes made of metal, were more commonly made of wood, which was much more plentiful in Latvia. Other percussion instruments include the triangle (trijstūris), buzzer (dūcenis), washboard (robdēlis), tambourine (sietiņš or bubins), and vargans, or Jew’s harp.

Wind instruments

The simplest and oldest of the wind instruments were the whistles (svilpes), which had at most one or two sound holes. They were made of bone, horn, shells, animal teeth, bark and clay. A specialty of Latgale to this day are clay whistles in the form of horses, birds and dragons (svilpaunieki). Stabules (recorders, reeds, flutes) have several sound holes and are made of bark, reeds or bone, but most often of wood. Both svilpes and stabules were favorite playthings of shepherds.

The ganu rags (literally, "shepherds’ horn") is basically a modified stabule. It is made of wood, but with an animal horn attached to enhance the sound. This clarinet-like instrument produces sound with a single reed. Unfortunately it is not heard all that often today. The somas dūkas or dūdas (bagpipe) has been played in Latvia since about the 16th century. It was usually made of sheep’s or goat’s skin, but sometimes even of seal’s or dog’s skin. The bagpipe was and still is a popular instrument, especially for dance and wedding music.

In Latvian, a horn or trumpet made of wood or bark is called a taure, while one made of actual horn is called a rags. Both were considered shepherds’ and young men’s instruments, played to pass the time in the fields, to signal the beginning and end of work, or when lots of noise was needed, such as during wedding celebrations and certain holidays.

Stringed instruments

The stringed instruments are generally more recent. Spēles and pūšļa vijole are primitive instruments that are hardly used anymore. Spēles looks like a hunting bow that is either plucked or a second bow is pulled across the string to produce sound. The player can bend the frame to change its pitch. Pūšļa vijole (literally, "bladder fiddle") is basically a string attached to a wooden base with a blown-up animal bladder acting as a resonator between the base and string. Again, sound is produced by pulling a bow across the string.

The ģīga (trough-fiddle) has a mysterious past—no one really knows where the instrument or its name came from or how old it is. It’s assumed that it is probably related to a similar instrument that was popular in Sweden in the mid-19th century. Also called vienstīdzis or divstīdzis (one-string or two-string), the ģīga is a long, rectangular (about 2 feet to 3 feet long, and 4 inches to 6 inches wide) hollow wooden box with one or two strings attached to the top. It is played horizontally on a table or lap, or less often held vertically, and played with a bow.

And the kokle… That best known of Latvian folk instruments and idyllic symbol of Latvian folk music. Its gentle strums evoke golden memories for most older Latvians, and it is not rare to find a kokle displayed on a prominent shelf in living rooms.

Although a very old instrument, the kokle is still played a lot and holds a special place of honor among Latvians, as well as Lithuanians (kankles), Estonians (kannele) and Finns (kantele). The zither-like instrument is a whittled-out wooden box with a thin wooden cover with sounding holes, often cut in beautiful patterns. Strings are strung across the top of the box in a ray form, that is, strung almost parallel to each other, but closer together on one end, wider apart on the other end. Each string is tuned to a different note in the scale. The oldest kokles have five strings, later versions up to 17 or even 23 strings. Modern "concert" kokles span three octaves and are able to play in all keys. The kokle is usually held in the player’s lap or set on a table, but sometimes it is hung around the player’s neck. Modern concert versions of the kokle are so huge that they must be placed on a stand in front of the player. With the left hand the player silences the strings he or she does not want to hear, while the right hand strums the remaining strings, forming the appropriate chords. Players sometimes also pick separate strings to accentuate melodies. The kokle was and is still used for all sorts of music and purposes.

Modern instruments

The accordion (akordeons), button-accordion (garmoška), violin (vijole), the cītara (chord-zither or dulcimer) or cimbole (cimbalom) are some of the more modern instruments that have made their way from other cultures into Latvian folk music and have found there a very welcome home. Both the accordion and the violin are heavily used to accompany Latvian songs and dances. The cītara is a mid-19th century introduction to Latvian folk music and has taken on a very prominent role in most rural ensembles (lauku kapelas), particularly in the eastern half of the country. The cimbole—similar to the cītara, it is trapezoid in shape and is played with two wooden mallets—is most often found in the southeast corner of Latvia near Belarus and is very similar to the Belorussian national folk instrument.

Now you’ll be able to recognize and know more about what you’re hearing the next time you pull out that folk recording!