Author Archives: lydia

Folk music history & Tolfta kyrka

By lydia | Published: September 6, 2012

On Wednesday our special guest lecturer was Gunnar Ahlbäck. We spent the morning here at school. We started on the first floor, learning lots of detailed history about the founding of ESI and about some of the various photos and paintings on the first floor. (As well as being a historian, Gunnar is the artist […]

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Harpa maintenance and ergonomics

By lydia | Published: September 4, 2012

Monday and Tuesday we worked with Olov. In the mornings we played a fair amount, but also we focused on ways to make our playing and practicing more comfortable and effective. We learned bow exercises and stretches, we talked about different ways to sit and different kinds of harpa straps, and about temperaments and string […]

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Väsen in Viksta

By lydia | Published: September 3, 2012

Väsen played a free concert last night in Viksta kyrka. Several ESI students have cars, so we all piled into three of the cars and trooped over there. It’s about a half-hour drive. It was awesome. We are very lucky. I don’t have anything pithy to say but I didn’t want the event to go […]

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Stockholm: Skansen & more new family

By lydia | Published: September 2, 2012

It was raining last time I went to Skansen, too. But this time we went for the spelmansstämma there on Saturday — Andrea’s and my first gig in Sweden! Sort of. Musicians get into the park free if they’re planning to play, and ESI paid our train fare there in exchange for taking over a […]

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First week of school

By lydia | Published: August 30, 2012

Our course has begun! Everyone was here in time for Wednesday lunch, right on schedule. The rest of Wednesday was orientation, mostly in Swedish but with some of the general info about staff & facilities in English. We opened with a slängpolska demo (Olov on fiddle, Ditte on ‘harpa, Ami and Andreas dancing), and later […]

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Mills’s last day

By lydia | Published: August 28, 2012

Yesterday we went into Uppsala for the afternoon, on Mills’s last day before he had to fly home. Andrea and I had a few errands to do, but mostly we went for a walk around town and looked at fun things. We checked out the well stocked Myrorna thrift store, where Andrea bought a nice […]

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