Category Archives: Journal

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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Eric Sahlström’s 100th birthday in Uppsala

By lydia | Published: August 26, 2012

Saturday’s packed agenda began with the 11am dedication of a museum exhibit about Eric at the Upplandsmuseet, in an upstairs room with central spiral staircase, a space that was really not designed with extreme overflow in mind. Outside, musicians were assembling for the spelmanståg, though in this case a tåg is a parade rather than […]

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