lydia's musical adventures in Sweden, 2012–2013

The way this one came about is: a couple of years ago, Andrea & I were playing Swedish fiddle tunes at the Brattleboro farmers market with Mary & Susan, and someone we’d never met before came up to say that he was visiting from Sweden, and that we were playing tunes from his childhood village in Hälsingland! So that’s how we met Gunnar. Then he played a few tunes with us, and invited us to come see him next time we’re in Sweden.

Mills and I were delighted to take Gunnar up on his offer of visiting his home, which is a peaceful countryside sanctuary that’s about an hour’s commute west of downtown Stockholm, in Kungsberga. To get there, we met him at a commuter train station and he drove the rest of the way. When we were nearly there, we detoured past a charming little farm market run by a Thai woman who is his local source for lemongrass.

Gunnar and his wife Maria made us feel very welcome. We toured their home and gardens — Maria is an architect, so the addition they put on their older house feels very organic and masterfully designed. Gunnar is justifiably proud of the brand-new sauna he just built, which doubles as guest cottage, and we were honored to be its first occupants. Daughters Lovisa and Linn joined us for a yummy and companionable dinner.

Mills has been looking into commissioning a new instrument, so we went to visit one of the most prominent luthiers of the nordic mandola species. Ola Söderström has a workshop in Upplands Väsby (north of Stockholm, between the city and its airport). He picked us up at the train station, and regaled us during the short drive back to his shop with a local-history story: evidently the building that now houses his shop (and others, and a café) is famous as the central scene of a thrilling story about a murder that was first unfairly pinned on clearly innocent immigrant Italian musicians, who were then vindicated. I’m afraid I can’t remember enough details to point to a more informative account, but you can imagine something suitably juicy on your own.

As with many commissioned instruments, the trick is that the maker doesn’t have one you can try that’s just like what you’d want, because once they are made, they go home with their buyers. But Ola did have his own instruments for us to meet, and a wide variety of his other creations. He even brought along a fiddle I could play for a few minutes so Mills could get more of an idea about how it would feel to play in his usual role as accompanist.

I don’t know whether anyone besides me will find this entertaining, but I have been having fun with trying to document what we’ve been seeing during our many hours on trains (and buses). Lots of trees and fields, cows and sheep, a tractor, a rainbow, golf courses and football games, bus stops and train stations, trains politely outfitted with outlets and trash bags,…

(Click to view larger image, click again to magnify)

There’s another series of “waiting for the train (or bus)” pics, maybe those will show up here at some point…

We were only in Örebro for a couple of hours, but I thought you might like to see pics of pretty buildings. We had a little picnic on a lawn overlooking the castle, then a wee perambulation around town before it was time to go catch our train. I’m including a pic of calligraphy in stone, for those of you who appreciate that sort of thing.

Though also, another report of credit-card tribulations: Since we had a couple of hours and a fiddle to carry, we thought we’d stow our stuff in a locker. The locker does accept credit cards, but not ours. Then after I went and got change, it swallowed all of my coins but would only register some of them, and wouldn’t return any. Long phone maze told me how to file a complaint form, which I will probably do at some point before I lose the notes.

I’ve seen a variety of butterfly gardens, but this one in Karlskoga is also for bees. There are even a couple of bee-houses, each of different construction. I spent a little while learning to use the aperture priority on my new camera so I could take more satisfying pics of the critters, though they still don’t hold still for long.

From the park, we wended our way down into town, with a side trip up past a pretty wooded cemetery and thence to the top of a hill with an overlook across Lake Möckeln. It was a beautiful day for a walk, and we even found both raspberries and blueberries (happy birthday, Mom!).

At the bakery in town, I found another entry for my collection of “fun desserts made using sheets of green marzipan” — because in a country where that’s a grocery store staple, there should be a proliferation of little green monsters. Though this one consisted largely of sugar, not so much on the princesstorta-inspired contents. I’ll keep working on it.

Karlskoga has an extensive network of bike/foot paths, very friendly once you know where they are. (Google’s pedestrian directions don’t. Which would have been useful information that first night when we were carrying both packs and a fiddle, and it wanted to send us on highways.) Our route home from town to the youth hostel took us past the extensive park that reaches along most of the town’s lakefront. There were lots of folks out enjoying the evening, swimming or cycling or picnicking or water-skiing,… we were speculating that there might be room for the entire population of 27,000 people to stretch out in the parks without crowding each other.

The youth hostel is run by the Karlskoga Folkhögskola, which has an extensive campus. Our room in one of the frontmost buildings was pretty ritzy by hostel standards, although it is only a “double” room by virtue of having a narrow couch that converts to a bed — I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a “single” room when only one person wants it. But still: bright and clean, private bathroom, nice kitchen facilities, wifi (that works somewhat sporadically), quiet and scenic setting.

Getting out of town again was something of a trick. We still can’t buy tickets online directly from SJ.se, which is where we can get all our timetable info, because the site no longer likes my credit cards now that I’m in Sweden. (The same cards worked from home.) So we went down to the bus station, where they informed us we’d need to get tickets from the store a couple blocks away. Said store said no, you need to get tickets for just the first part of your trip from the bus station. Bus station said, we can’t sell you tickets but you can just buy them on the bus. Happily, that worked fine, and then we bought train tix for the next phase of the journey once we got to Örebro.

(I was going to call this post “Visit with a heathen,” but I’m going with Mills’s suggestion instead.)

In Karlskoga we got a chance to visit with Anders Norudde, builder and inventor of many violin-related and harpa-related instruments. He’s also well known as a musician, notably with the band Hedningarna (“The Heathens”), and has a certain wild-and-heathen-ish reputation to uphold. But we found him a gracious host: he picked us up at the youth hostel, gave us a tour of his workshop, showed us some of his many projects, and even fed us lunch and drove us to a park afterward.

An instrument he built several years ago was in for some updates: it’s got 4 bowed strings and 8 sympathetics, and a blindfolded angel as its scroll — very interesting to play, with a personality kind of like a hardingfele’s. His current commissioned building project is a viola that is in some ways a copy of a historic Småland fiddle, also with beautiful inlay on fingerboard and tailpiece; I’m not sure we got a count on how many sympathetics it’s destined to have. In the room of earlier projects, I especially admired a hardingfele whose back floral painting includes beetles. The series of instruments inspired by the Mora harpa includes the ones he has electrified for Hedningarna.

If you want someone to invent an instrument for you that involves sympathetic strings, I’ll bet Anders would be game. I’ve already started plotting…