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).