Anna passed this to me, and while I have a vague idea of what a meme is, I’ve never done one. These questions are very challenging and time-consuming to answer and how can I limit myself?! I’m to pass it on – who would like to pick this up?

1. TOTAL AMOUNT OF MUSIC FILES ON YOUR COMPUTER: over 800 (not 100 as I wrote before!), actually on the iTunes on my husband’s computer. We share the same tastes so he looks after downloading the music off our CD collection. We enjoy falling asleep and waking up to the music from our iPod through inMotion speakers. These come along on trips too.

2. THE LAST CD YOU BOUGHT WAS: P&#225lg&#225h, by S&#225mi singer Aune Kuuva

3. WHAT IS THE SONG YOU LAST LISTENED TO BEFORE READING THIS MESSAGE? I don’t remember, because I wasn’t listening to music just then. The last songs I fell asleep to last night were either from our very favourite Operamania collection of 5 CDs of the some of the best operatic songs by the best singers, or maybe Thomas Hampson’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, wonderful German lieder, like lullabies! We have our collection playing at random, hence I’m not sure which was playing as I drifted off to dreamland.

4. FIVE SONGS THAT YOU OFTEN LISTEN TO OR THAT MEAN A LOT TO YOU (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER):
I’m going to name the CDs rather than individual songs, though it’s hard to say which are the top 5 favourites. I’ve chosen some Finns, some Canadians and a Chinese artist.

– Three Finnish Basses (Matti Salminen, Jaakko Ryh&#228nen, Johann Tilli). I do love the bass voice that is so favoured by the Russians, and this is a tongue-in-cheek spin-off of The Three Tenors.

– Yo-Yo Ma’s The Cello Suites inspired by Bach – again the deep “voice” of the cello resonates for me.

– Kantele Meditation by Arja Kastinen. It was a gift from my husband a couple of years ago. It brings back memories of a wonderful kantele recital we heard in Finland in 2000. The kantele is an ancient Finnish and Karelian instrument.

– Loreena McKennitt’s The Mask and the Mirror (I recommended this to Anna and I see she loves it too!)

– Liona Boyd’s Miniatures for Guitar. The classical guitar is special for us, because my father built them, and our daughters play this instrument.

P.S. The piano is another favourite instrument which our daughters and I learned to play, but unfortunately our piano is silent too much these days. We have many CDs and records of piano music of the classical composers.