lydia's musical adventures in Sweden, 2012–2013

Our first student concert was a smashing success. I was really impressed by how well everything pulled together: complicated arrangements with the entire group, small ensembles, instrument changes, introductions, medleys with songs,… all of it with everyone working together, having fun and seeming, by and large, pretty calm. Everyone had some responsibilities for leading a larger group and performing in a smaller one and making an introduction, in addition to remembering a whole slew of arrangements. Everyone was so well prepared that any little glitches were comfortably absorbed. Even the logistics of moving 11 people around in an organized fashion — with a different configuration for every single number for two full sets — seemed to go off without a hitch, as far as I could tell. (I personally ended up with a lineup that entailed switching instruments a preposterous number of times, which may motivate me to put in more planning time on the set-list front before our holiday concert.)

And… snow! First flurries of the year, between when I walked over to the main hall and when the concert started. Enough to show a few flakes on the ground, and then a few more in the morning.

Pics mostly kinda blurry but I’ll post anyway, since they are otherwise pleasant.

I think there will be YouTube bits later, which will make up for my not getting around to reporting anything about the actual music.

The day after we got home from Linköping, we had visitors. ESI was a stop for the 2012 tour of Ethno on the road, a group of 5 young musicians selected from the Ethno summer music camp, plus 2 program leaders who collaborated with them to create the touring show. (Ethno is “the world’s largest international folk and world music camp for young musicians,” ages 17-25, and you can read lots more on their site.)

This year’s touring group included folks from Sweden, Denmark, France, Belgium, and India — all stellar musicians, and it was really interesting to see how they brought their diverse traditions together. We met with them in the afternoon for a workshop: they (mostly Lies, the buttonbox player from Belgium) taught us a lovely 3-part 17th c. menuett from the south of Belgium, we taught them a couple of simple tunes from Uppland, and then we had a lesson in singing raga.

I am afraid we were not very good raga students. It was clear that Rajati, the young Indian singer, had chosen the most basic song she could find for us to work on, and she did a great job of demonstrating and explaining how the improvisatory aesthetic works — but there is an awful lot to learn! She made several attempts to get us to sing without her help, but we didn’t ever get very far before we started to sound muddled. It was a fascinating exercise, though, and she sounded beautiful. Perhaps we would be a smidge better at it if we weren’t all in a post-festival stupor?

For those of you who are keeping track of 5-string fiddles: Thyge, from Denmark, is playing a 5 made by Barry Dudley in GA. I had a fun time talking with him about instruments and builders.

In the evening, they performed their concert set for us, with a slot saved for us to play together the tunes we had taught each other in the afternoon. There was a little bit of dancing and jamming after the show, but not very much because we were all about ready to fall over in a heap.

There are videos from our set! Two of our three tunes. The recording quality (both audio & video) is a bit squinty, and evidently the button-pusher had to do something else first at the beginning of each tune, but if you use your imagination you can pretty much get the idea.

D-moll schottis av Konsta Jylhä fr. Kaustinen

Slängpolska (or Polonäs) e. Gustaf Blidström

I realize I have been remiss in not identifying our cast of characters, but I was thinking I would pull together something super-informative and organized and ask everyone’s permission to post photos and stuff. Wouldn’t that be cool? But meanwhile, here is a simple list.

The spelkurs has 11 students:

• nyckelharpa and fiddle — me, Elisabet (Kungsängen SV), Marie (Linköping SV), Anni (Helsinki FI), Saana (Kaustinen FI), Johannes (Münster DE)
• nyckelharpa — Einar (Nortällje SV), Jonathan (Oskarshamn SV), Jonatan (Alvesta SV)
• fiddle — Andrea (US), Matilda (Vallentuna SV)

(There’s a wide variety of other instruments around here, too — Jonathan in particular has a whole roomful, and was pressed into service as our bass player in Linköping.)

The danskurs has 6 students: David (Borås SV), Johanna (Kungsängen SV), Johanna (Linköping SV), Alma (Karlstad SV), Bo (Ormeshaga SV), Chloe (Bristol UK).

Most of our class went to Linköping for a grand weekend of music festival excesses.

I am pleased to report that the Tobo spelmanslag (9 of our 11 course members) played really well! We’ve been rehearsing hard for about three weeks (including most evenings for the last couple of weeks), selecting three tunes we’ve learned together and putting together arrangements. We played our 10-minute set at midnight (the Friday schedule went to 3am), and I was really proud of how well everyone pulled together, even/especially the ones who were nervous onstage. We’d been predicting the usual tempo escalation in the heat of the moment, but we managed to hold them all right where we’d intended. Go, team!

There were so many great concerts to go see that there was hardly time to go dance or play. Some favorites:

• Hazelius/Hedin, an impressively tight duo, plus you get oktavharpa together with oktavmandolin.
• Nordic Dance, a Swedish/Norwegian collaborative youth project featuring a handful of stellar musicians and a half-dozen great dancers from each country (of whom one is our dance-course classmate David!), with an elaborately choreographed series of vignettes featuring a variety of dances from Nordic countries.
• Ola Bäckstrom / Per Gudmundsson / Jon Holmén. Master players from Dalarna, tight settings in 1-2-3 voices. It was like the best facets of listening to the Ola+Per CD, but in 3D, as it were. Ola was playing a 5+4 string fiddle, bottom string tuned up to D, sympathetics at D F# G A.
• This Is How We Fly, folk/improv with 5+5 string fiddle and percussive dance and clarinet and percussion. This is some of what Caoimhín is up to now.

Favorite dance sets: Björnlert/Pekkari/Hedin, who should make a CD together so I can buy it. Jeanette Eriksson / Mats Berglund. Though, things were even tougher on the dance-partnering front than usual, I thought. (Number of skilled dancers not in my class who I managed to dance with: zero. Lucky thing Andrea is such a great dancer!) The Orsa spelmanslag also plays great dance music, and I popped briefly into a session that had Maria Röjås and an assortment of other folks tralling (singing) for dance.

Andrea coordinated the carpool logistics for the whole class, which turned out to be a somewhat complicated job. It wasn’t clear until the last minute how many cars going to go, how many people were preferring to go by train, whether there would be trunk space for instruments/bedding for any of the train travelers,… As it happened, we both rode down with Alma, picking up one passenger in Uppsala on the way there and returning both him and another on the way back.

Our lodgings were a third-floor classroom in a nearby school, about a 20-minute walk from the venue. Fortunately, Andrea and I had managed to borrow sleeping bags and mats in time (thank you Petra!), despite having accidentally forgotten all about the question until a couple days before the festival. Our room stayed pleasantly quiet — I was in bed nice and early by 3-3:30a both nights, didn’t hear a peep out of the later arrivals (the earplugs may have helped).

Rainy weather here seems especially rainbow-prone. We saw several on the way down, and one of the two on the way home was extraordinary: a full arc, doubled immediately within through a large segment of the top, and with a second fainter outer arc for a swath of the left side. The part that was most surprising was that I am accustomed to seeing rainbows that appear to end somewhere off in the distance — this was the first time I’ve seen one with color so strong that its ends appeared in front of the trees in the near distance. Sadly there was no good place to pull over and attempt a photo, so y’all will just have to imagine it for yourselves.