Karlholmsbruk & Jernbergs

Two sets of adventures on Sunday:

Leif was planning a trip to visit Harry (who built my nyckelharpa) on Sunday morning, and I had a couple of repair requests for Harry too, so Andrea and I joined the party for the ride up to Karlholmsbruk. We had a nice visit, of course including fika. I now have a fully functional A string — and if possible even more excitingly, I also have all of my sympathetic strings resonating happily, because Harry carved out the backs of my second row of tangents so they leave more room for their neighboring string to move freely. Yaaay! Also we had a convoluted and interesting discussion about the three top tangents that Olov had pronounced in need of replacement: turns out the new string solves 2 of them, and the 3rd has a little bit of a wolf on it that none of the assembled experts had a solution for. But I am fine with that, and extremely pleased to have my harpa in tip-top working order.

In the afternoon, we had a fun lesson/session/visit with our new friend P-G (Per-Gustaf), whom we met in Uppsala when we were marching next to him in the parade during the Eric-birthday celebration. He lives in the next town over, Örbyhus, and is the current tradition bearer of the Jernberg family of fiddlers (he is a riksspelman on nyckelharpa). The ESI library has a copy of the comprehensive scholarly volume of Jernbergslåtar (Jernbergs’ tunes), with lots of great historical photos and text and transcriptions galore. We looked through photos, we played/learned some tunes, we listened to more tunes, we had fika, we watched a video of Ceylon Wallin. Now we’ve got more great tunes to learn! And a song.