lydia's musical adventures in Sweden, 2012–2013

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 them in real life. But then the date got even more exciting: we-the-ESI-class were offered the opportunity to play a couple of short sets during the breaks. Cool!

Daniel-and-Emma-and-Niklas’s concert was at least as amazing as their record. Super-tight band, interesting arrangements, great tune selection — also great stage presence, and wonderful to watch how much fun they have playing together. Their dance sets were also brilliant, and I had a very nice evening on the dance floor.

Our ESI sets, which had gotten a little less rehearsal time than I had expected, went quite well too — I was proud of us. I think it helped that we had all just had a practice session at playing for dancing. The second of our two 20-minute sets, in particular, I thought had more relaxed playing and more smiling faces and more gazes torn away from nyckelharpa keys than we have had in any previous performance. Yaay, team!

Gunnar and Maria came to the concert and took us home with them — Mills and I visited them in August, but this was Andrea’s first chance to see them since that serendipitous meeting in Brattleboro a couple years ago. They were of course lovely hosts, beginning with their heroic willingness to go to a folk concert in town late on a Friday night. It was great to see them again. And also fun to have someone we knew in the audience when we played.

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 practice before Umefolk, and also I signed up for a solo set on harpa because it sounded a little scary.

I was impressed by how well everyone played, and by how many of us took up the challenge. There was some really great dance music, in every single set, all evening! Everyone did a great job of managing whatever nervousness came up. Reviews say my solo went fine too, even “Trollrikepolskan” (a bit of a stretch at dance tempo), and that I totally got away with playing one of my own schottises. (Well, OK, one review and it’s from Andrea. That counts.)

I didn’t get a lot of pics because I was mostly busy dancing. But I would say the event was an unqualified success, and there is a rumor that there will be more to come.

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 kinds of collaboration emerge. The concept is inspired: cross-genre exposure, meeting new musicians, visiting another folk school, getting practice with creating arrangements in advance and with others, mini performances. The execution, however, seemed to retain a few wrinkles.

On our end, we paired up a couple weeks in advance, and then each pair chose a corresponding group of 3 Wik students based solely on their names and instruments. Andrea and I elected to work together, since we don’t do that so often here. We picked the group with a bass clarinet, which also happened to be the only one that was sure not to involve a drum set. Our entire class worked hard at advance prep, made a special point of sending them mp3s ahead of time (two from each ESI group) so the Wik students could learn the melodies, worked out other parts and arrangement ideas — in short, treated the whole thing like an active assignment.

We received no prep materials in exchange — and when we arrived, only one of our three collaborators showed any signs of having listened to our mp3s at all. (I gather that other groups met with more active partners.) So we used a lot of time teaching melodies, which seemed like a poor use of resources. Also I was disappointed that working with a “piano” player meant, in our case, that we were shunted to the overflow parking (the library rather than one of the music rooms) with a keyboard-shaped object, when there were real pianos in most of the other rooms.

All of these handicaps notwithstanding, it was a pleasant day with genial folks. I thought we managed to get some interesting work done and create some creditable music together, albeit not necessarily during the designated performance time at the end of the afternoon.

The one tune our Wik group brought was a sort of Swedish-Balkan tune. They didn’t know what it was, had recently gotten it in a class chapter about Balkan music and thought maybe their teacher had made it. Since two of the three parts sounded awfully familiar (except for the Swedish lyrics about eating crayfish, and choosing what I thought was the harmony line as the melody), I ran it by some friends back home and came back with a concurring diagnosis: Macedonian, often just danced as a lesnoto. That tune has probably not seen too many nyckelharpas before. :)