It has been a long-standing goal of mine to see the Northern Lights, and now I have seen them! I had been monitoring websites that predict the probability of seeing them (www.softservenews.com), and our location in Tobo is far enough north to make it possible. We had been out several nights to try to see them, without success. But there was a big geomagnetic activity storm the night of March 17, 2015 and we were successful. It took two tries. We were out around 10 PM and climbed the scaffolding on the mansion, but saw nothing.

But later, after I was in bed, Christina knocked on my door and said to come look.  In pyjamas and slippers and a coat I went out and they were incredible, covering the entire sky including overhead, and shimmering and moving and glowing. I wasn’t able to walk away from the lamps around the building, but the Northern Lights were bright enough to be visible anyway. It was really lovely to see them with Christina, and share the excitement with other friends as they returned from viewing them later that night. Here are a few photos that do not do them justice:

We are learning to improvise in several of our classes. In Ditte’s class she chooses one or more chords and a pattern and we improvise within those boundaries, all together. For example, we identify a key (e.g. F major) and the tonic, dominant and subdominant chords in the key (F major, C major and B-flat major), and decide when we change chords, then try it. It has been a very easy introduction to what seemed scary and impossible. We have done this multiple times now and are gradually increasing the complexity.

In Niklas Roswall’s class in music arrangement we took turns improvising individually on a chord progression, with the rest of the class playing the basic chords as accompaniment. In turn we tried schottis, waltz, and polska rhythms — several different patterns within the Swedish folk music genre. We progressed from 2 bars each to much longer. It feels dangerous because there is no time to plan, and you launch into your solo improvisation not knowing what you are just about to do. Like leaping off a cliff into the unknown. This was way out of my comfort zone, but unbelievably enough, it worked!

 

 

 

 

 

 

We had a goodbye party for Ola this week, who is retiring from his job as fix-it man at the Eric Sahlström Institute. We will surely miss him. We had an amazing fika with three tårtas (cakes with whipped cream).

 

 

 

 

 

 

This week in addition to a day each with two of our regular teachers, Ditte Andersson and Olov Johansson, we had three visitor days. Kjell-Erik Eriksson taught us fiddle tunes, Magnus Gustafsson came back and spent another day educating us about folk music and dance history, and Torbjörn Näsbom taught us nyckelharpa techniques and tunes. So it was a wonderful and very full week.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Magnus Gustafsson is a remarkable teacher/professor. This week he talked to both dance and music classes together about dance history, different kinds of dances and a chronology over time. As he has done before, he spoke the entire day without notes in Swedish with translations into English on request.

Some tidbits of information:

1. Group couple dancing was established in Europe in the 1700’s and was named “contra dance” or country dance (contradans) by the French. The term contra dance does not come from opposing lines of men and women. It used (uses) 2/4 or 4/4 time. In 1760 the French dance masters inserted a turn in 3/8 rhythm so that couples could change position when the dance started over. The partners turned clockwise as a couple, stopping on every beat, and this move was called “vals”.
2. For the 1800 New Year’s Eve Party, the Parisian dance masters created a new dance for the new century in 3/8 or 3/4 time and called it “vals” or waltz. It was revolutionary (!) because couples danced just as couples, not as a group, and turned clockwise as a couple while going around the periphery of the room counter-clockwise.

 

I took a week off and went to the Telemark Winter Experience (TWE). We at the ESI had week 8 off for the winter sports holiday (sportlov), but I needed week 9 for the Telemark camp. Since I have always wanted to go to this camp, and am so close by here in Sweden (next door to Norway) I decided to take week 9 and go. I am really glad I did; I had a fabulous time. I got better acquainted with old friends and made new ones as well.

This camp has occurred for a number of years, previously organised by Karin Brennesvik, but now by Tom and Anita Løvli every other year or so. It takes place at the Skjervedalen Fjellstue up in the mountains in the Telemark valley, and combines cross-country skiing right out the door and up and down the mountain with dance instruction and parties in the Telemark and Numedal traditions. We had 12 people from the Unites States and Sweden and Norway, plus our teachers and many visiting Norwegian fiddlers and dancers. We were very happy to be joined by Karin Brennesvik, and one night by her daughter Arnhild. We had delicious food prepared for us, and a happy low-key atmosphere to choose together what our schedule would be, and choose individually how much we would participate. We had fabulous weather, with fresh new snow every day or night while we were there, plus some brilliant sunshine. Anita gave us some much-needed (for me) cross-country ski lessons and we skied every day, including to and from breakfast.

After 5 days on the mountain, we went down to Kongsberg for the annual winter market and kappleik. We entered our group (of 7 couple s including some Norwegian ringers) in the group-dance competition and won second place, with a new CD for each of us as a prize! We were second out of two groups, but had a good score. Loretta won several prizes for her outstanding hardingfele playing, and Tom and Barb Kringstad won for a lovely Valdresspringar couple dance.

 

I never expected to play Norwegian Halling tunes on (Swedish) nyckelharpa. I had noticed lydia’s transcription of one or more Halling tunes in the Trip to Tobo tune book, but I figured those were for fiddle. But Mia Marin and Olov Johansson are teaching us Halling tunes. It is very cool.

Halling (hallingdans) is a folk dance from Norway that is done to fast music (95-106 beats per minute) in 2/4 or 6/8 time. It is a lausdans (loose dance) done individually, not in couples, by young men but more recently also by women. It is very athletic and often done competitively by the participants. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halling_(dance) and  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wq6If8MsFQ for examples.

We met with Andreas and played a Halling tune for the dance class. The dancers have been learning Halling moves from Andreas since the early fall. I would love to learn these as well, but when the musicians participate in the dance classes, that is not what they are doing. As we had done before with slängpolska, we had an interesting time working on dancer-musician communication for this dance. The musicians need to be skilled players to help lift the dancers and provide the proper character for the dance moves.

Here are two images of young men/boys dancing Halling at the Kongsberg Winter Market kappleik. The dance often includes kicking a hat held high at the end of a broomstick, as illustrated in the stamp above.

Our course included an amazing two-day session with Magnus Gustavson, a Folk Music Historian. We had a very interesting and thorough presentation of many aspects of folk music history. He put Swedish folk music in the context of European music and dance development, and played recordings of various tunes and instruments as well as showing photos of some very interesting instruments.

After a gathering in Dalarna in 1906 that included a fiddler competition, a commission was established in 1908, the Folk Musik Kommissioner, including royalty, members of parliament and famous musicians, headed by Nils Andersson. They published the Svenska Låtar, intended to be one book per landscape, but certain regions such as Skåne and Dalarna had four books each. The first book was published in 1922. Nils Andersson died one week before publication of the first Svenska Låtar book.

The Kommission collected about 40,000 tunes, and noted an additional 60,000 or so in various fiddler’s books and collections. Thus they counted altogether about 100,000 Swedish instrumental folk tunes. About 8,000 of these were captured in the books. The tunes were instrumental, not songs, and collected as sheet music, not recordings. Polska tunes accounted for about 70% of the tunes.

This is an amazingly rich tradition.

We have 97 tunes in the playing course so far. This includes tunes we taught each other in the beginning to have a common repertoire, and tunes given to us as “bonus” tunes that we are not expected to know. So about 65 of these are primary tunes in the course. I have been tracking the tunes in an Excel spreadsheet (I’m a scientist!) to help make sure I don’t lose track of them or forget to practice something. I have recordings of all of them, and have transcribed some when I used them for homework in theory or arrangement, or needed to capture the bowing patterns (stråkmönster).

Photos around Reykjavik Animatronic polar bear with fish Chuck Norris Grill Chuck Norris once took a lie detector test. The machine confessed everything. The hand-knitting association of Iceland Hand-knitted Icelandic sweater, beautiful! View of the water and mountain, and Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da bar.  Our hotel was centrally located. We had a good view of the light show on the church, and could also see the water and mountains when it wasn’t too rainy and misty. I got a puffin hat! Here in the room we sometimes watched rugby and soccer matches. Tom and I met up in Iceland, a sort of midway point between Washington DC/Maryland and Sweden. We explored Reykjavik and enjoyed some time together. Light show at the Harpa concert hall. The Big Lebowski Bar The Big Lebowski Bar from across the street

One of my favourite Swedish words is stråkmönster, which means (bow)stroke pattern and is pronounced “stroke munster”. Getting the right pattern of stroking the strings with the bow is THE key element to getting the best sound with the nyckelharpa and having the right swing to the music. It is the most challenging element for me, coming as I do from a clarinet-playing background without prior bow experience. So the resemblance between the Swedish word mönster (pattern) and the English word monster is very apt. I hope this monster doesn’t eat me up. The farther I dig into this world of nyckelharpa playing, the more nuance and finesse I notice. But it is difficult to reproduce what I can now hear.

Some of this pattern involves stroking a single string with the bow, with or without changing the pitch with the keys. But there is also string crossing, sträng växling in Swedish, which adds a lot of difficulty. Each string has its own character and quirks. Then there is gungstråk or rocking stroke, also known as infinity bowing, which is essential for the best and most interesting sounding nyckelharpa. It can take place between two strings or on a single string. (This is also applicable to the violin.) It all adds up to the need for a lot of practice.