BETHEL – At 79, Barbara Honkala of Bethel can still pick the strings of a Finnish lap-harp, although she admits that arthritis in her hands makes it harder.

Caressing the odd-shaped wooden instrument’s 10 strings while sitting in her Finnish rocking chair made by country craftsman Robert Grover of Sumner, Honkala played a few uniquely melodic sounds that seemed to float within her log cabin on Intervale Road beside the Androscoggin River.

“It’s a very soft-sounding instrument that’s hard to hear if you have any competition, but you can strum it, pick it or chord it,” she said. Like guitars, there are electrical kanteles and acoustical ones, but she only has and plays the latter.

She learned how to play a few years ago, and is one of 10 women of Finnish heritage from Central and Western Maine who are members of the band, The Maine Kanteles.

The band’s namesake, “Kantele,” pronounced KAHN-teh-leh, is the name of the lap-harp, which has a 2000-year history rooted in the folklore of the “Kalevala,” the national epic of Finland, Sarah Cummings-Ridge, 40, of Gray, said Friday afternoon in a phone interview.

A band music teacher at SAD 51’s Greeley Middle School in Cumberland, Cummings-Ridge, who grew up in South Paris, directs the group and performs with them.

Members of the group, who range in age from 40 to 82, hail from Bethel, Otisfield, Bridgton, Gray, Lisbon Falls, Winthrop and Gardiner. Cummings-Ridge said the band, to her knowledge, is the only one of its kind on the East Coast that plays kanteles.

Some of the Kanteles’ musicians play the larger 39-stringed lap-harps, but most play either 10- or 15-stringed ones.

Although The Maine Kanteles have performed across New England, in Montreal and Finland since forming in November 2000, Sunday will mark their first appearance at the New Year’s Bethel festival. From 7 to 7:45 p.m. inside the Bethel Church of the Nazarene, they are performing Finnish folklore tunes, American arrangements like “Shenandoah” and the Quaker song, “Simple Gifts,” Christmas hymns, jigs, waltzes and polkas.

“We’re really happy to have been invited. A year ago, things were slow for us, but now we’re booked through May,” Cummings-Ridge said.