EFN Newsletter June 2026 #43
- EFN editor
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
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WELCOME AND SUMMARY
Welcome to the new edition of this communication and outreach initiative of the EFN. Feel free to forward it to your friends and colleagues. Receiving this newsletter is open to anyone for free, here. Read to the end to find out how to submit content for future editions.
This is what you'll find below:
🔹News from EFN:
▫️2026 EFN Conference: registration now open!
▫️European Folk Day 2026: 4th edition
🔸New member: Lineatrad
🔹News from the members:
▫️Ceilidhs for All – breaking down barriers to dance, by Laura Joint (Wren Music media). ▫️Folkest 2026, by Lorenza Somogyi Bianchi (Responsabile Ufficio Stampa & PR)
🔸Our next featured artist is the Ukrainian multi-instrumentalist, singer and cultural activist Taras Kompanichenko
✍️ Do you want to participate? At the end of the newsletter you will find how you can contribute to future editions, whether you are an EFN member or not. And of course EFN is always looking for new members and at the end of this newsletter there is a note about how and why to join, with links to the membership pages of the website and the application form.
News from EFN
🔸2026 EFN Conference: registration now open!
Almeria (Spain), 13 & 14 November 2026
The conference programme will feature expert speakers and panels, working groups, breakout discussions and traditional music performances.
Click here for CONFERENCE REGISTRATION – there is a special discount price for EFN Members.
The first hotel that we recommend – which is very close to the venue - is the Costasol Hotel.
EFN will announce more information on hotels and travel in the next few days. EFN recommends that conference delegates should arrive on Thursday 12 November and depart on Sunday 15.
Almeria airport has some direct and transfer flights – but the main airport to consider is Malaga. We will announce travel possibilities from the airport in a few weeks’ time. Long-distance train services to Almeria can be booked from Madrid and Barcelona. Watch out for information on hotels and conference programming coming very soon and the EFN Members Googlemail, the EFN website and regular mailings.
The conference will be hosted by EFN Member Fundación Indaliana para la Música y las Artes (Clasijazz), whose venue offers facilities for plenary sessions, breakout groups, catering and performances.
🔸European Folk Day 2026: 4th edition
The fourth European Folk Day will take place on Wednesday, 23rd September 2026. The website will soon be ready again for you to register your events. We will send updates as soon as there is any news.
In 2025 there were been 157 events registered on the website, extending beyond European borders. Now, in this meantime, you can start thinking about which events you are organising around 23 September that you would like to align with the concept of the European Folk Day.
EFN WELCOMES A NEW MEMBER
By EFN editors
🔸Lineatrad, from Italy
The EFN welcomes one more member from Italy. This is how Loris Böhm, the director of Lineatrad, they introduced themselves in the membership form: "We are an innovative media outlet specifically dedicated to folk music and related genres. Our members, including myself, work entirely on a non-profit basis, driven by pure passion. We believe in pure and sincere journalism, where field experience is more valuable than external certification."
And they answer to the question of what you and/or your organisation think you can give to the European Folk Network as a member and what you think will be the benefits of membership, he explained that:
"We offer promotion on our channels to all EFN members who request it, through a flip-through e-magazine published biweekly. The benefit for us is increased synergies to provide our readers, who are passionate about folk music, and all those involved in the field, with more news."
Learn more about them on their website.
News from the members
🔹Ceilidhs for All – breaking down barriers to dance
Adapted from the text by Laura Joint (Wren Music media)
UK traditional music organisation Wren Music (over 40 years’ experience delivering community music) have launched a ‘Ceilidhs for All’ toolkit – a free resource that lists the adaptations that have been shown to work well in helping to make ceilidhs as inclusive as possible. The toolkit is for anyone interested in hosting a ceilidh – promoters, callers, musicians and dancers. It’s being updated constantly, as Wren learn more at every ceilidh they host.
The toolkit will soon be available to download from their website but can be obtained now as a pdf document by contacting Wren Music direct (info@wrenmusic.co.uk).
The project won funding from Arts Council England National Lottery Projects, with outreach work supported by The Clare Milne Trust. With that support, Wren Music moved forward on two fronts:
First, they recruited a support team of people with lived experience of being in a minority within a protected characteristic, to offer guidance on the sorts of things needed to be done to remove barriers.
Second, they created the Wren Music Ceilidh Band, choosing musicians who each embody the ideas of inclusivity through their own lived experience.
Learn more on their website.
🔹Folkest 2026
By Lorenza Somogyi Bianchi (Responsabile Ufficio Stampa & PR)
The International Folk Music Festival born from the rubble of the 1976 Friuli earthquake — returns from 11 June to 21 July for its 48th edition. Spanning towns and villages across the region, the festival celebrates the power of music as a force of cultural rebirth, from its roots in oral tradition to its embrace of sounds from around the world.
This year's guests include Scarlet Rivera, Lou Dalfin, New Trolls, Peppe Voltarelli, Omar Pedrini, Nomadi, Vincenzo Zitello and Angelo Branduardi (in the picture).
The heart of the festival beats in San Daniele del Friuli (3–5 July), where the Premio Alberto Cesa, UpBeat European showcases and music spilling into every corner of the town make Folkest what it has always been: a curious, open, border-crossing celebration of the world.
Learn more on their website.
The war in Ukraine continues with no clear peace agreement in sight. Russia is still attacking Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, while Ukraine is increasingly targeting Russian logistics, energy facilities and supply routes, including in occupied Crimea. Beyond the military front, the war continues to shape daily life, cultural work and the ability of Ukrainian artists, journalists, producers and festivals to keep creating, travelling and maintaining international connections. From the European Folk Network, we remain committed to giving visibility to Ukrainian cultural professionals and to expressing our solidarity with them, as well as with colleagues in any country whose voices are silenced or constrained by tyrannical governments. |
Featured Artist: Taras Kompanichenko
By Araceli Tzigane
Picture by Стоялов Максим Викторович - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons.
Our featured artist this month is Taras Kompanichenko. We chose him because his work gives powerful expression to one of Ukraine’s most symbolically charged musical traditions.
According to Duma.com.ua, "Kobzar tradition is a unique phenomenon of Ukrainian culture, which originated in ancient times and spread throughout the regions inhabited by Ukrainians. It is an oral tradition of blind itinerant singers who accompanied their singing with playing the kobza, bandura, or lira."
Kompanichenko is a Ukrainian kobzar, bandurist, lirnyk (player of a kind of Ukrainian hurdy-gurdy), singer, composer, cultural activist and specialist in the performance of medieval and Baroque music of Ukraine.
His path into Ukrainian musical heritage is also rooted in his own family history: he comes from a family of deported Cossacks from the Arkhangelsk region, and after the family settled in Ukraine, they embraced Ukrainian culture. His father gave him a bandura as his first musical instrument, and Kompanichenko grew up mostly in Kyiv’s Akademgorodok district, attending one of the few Ukrainian-language schools in the city and studying bandura at music school.
“Hey, I Once Had a Horse” (Гей, була в мене коняка) is a Ukrainian song associated with the Cossack imagination. Its text evokes a lost world of horse, sword, rifle and love, gradually replaced by images of land, labour, solitude and endurance. Rather than simple heroic nostalgia, the song carries a sense of loss and transformation. The text is by the Ukrainian poet Yakiv Shchoholiv. The song is based on his poem “Hrechkosii”, first published in 1860, and later entered popular circulation as a folk song.
As leader of Khoreia Kozatska, he has brought these materials into concert practice, recording and public cultural life, connecting ancient Ukrainian sources with present-day listening; the ensemble is well known in Ukraine and has also toured internationally, including for instance, in Poland, Switzerland and Germany. The band was a laureate of the 2023 Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine in the Musical Arts nomination.
This video is from December 2023, almost 2 years since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army. Here you see Kompanichenko playing the Ukrainian lira at the Poltava Regional Universal Scientific Library.
The kobzar and bandura heritage is not only a sound world, but also a carrier of memory, language, spirituality, resistance and cultural continuity. At a time when Ukrainian culture is inseparable from daily resilience, his music helps us listen to Ukraine through a living tradition.
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