Author Archives: lydia

Friday at Skeppis

By lydia | Published: February 10, 2013

One of my favorite new albums is the brand-new Ek-Ahlberg-Roswall record Vintern, which is brilliant on oh-so-many levels. And we enjoy Niklas Rowall as one of our regular-if-infrequent teachers. So we were all excited that his band was going to play in Stockholm on a date we could actually get there, so we could see […]

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Practice spel till dans

By lydia | Published: February 6, 2013

Since several of us have been wanting to get more practice at playing for dancing, and our dancers are ever-obliging, a couple of folks organized a dance evening where anyone who wanted to play could sign up for a 15-minute slot. Andrea and I signed up, since of course we are scouting for opportunities to […]

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Peter comes to visit

By lydia | Published: February 3, 2013

My cousin came up from Stockholm to see me in my current habitat, and we had a lovely afternoon together. We went for a long walk in the beautiful sunlight, we toured the school and played ping-pong for a while, we had fika, we talked about lots of stuff. It was neat to have a […]

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Vinterstämman

By lydia | Published: February 3, 2013

ESI is the current host of the annual midwinter spelmansstämma for Tierps kommun, so we had a houseful of (mostly) nyckelharpa players again. Fun sessions, yaay! There was a signup list to play for dancing in the evening, so Andrea and I signed up. The paper did note that all the time slots were after […]

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In memoriam

By lydia | Published: February 2, 2013

Since I’ve been here, we’ve lost some amazing musicians and wonderful people from both sides of the Atlantic. From the nyckelharpa world, Hasse Gille (d. 12/31/12) Nyckelharpa builder and extraordinary musician. He had been in the hospital for much of the time since his visit to our class as guest teacher in September, and in […]

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Field trip to Wik

By lydia | Published: January 28, 2013

A mere hour’s drive south of us, there’s another one-year music course at the Wiks folkhögskola. Theirs is more of a world-music program, with plenty of percussionists and nary a nyckelharpa in sight. But every year our two classes get a day-long opportunity to meet up and work together in small groups and see what […]

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