#swedish fiddle

[flintandpyrite]

In July of 2018, I was at Bingsjöstämman, the largest fiddle festival in Sweden--

ok hold on for non swedes: a fiddle festival in Sweden is quite different from what we think of a music festival is like in the US (I have no experience with live music except in the USA and Sweden). Swedish fiddle music is extremely participatory and a living tradition. There is no canon of accepted tunes that "everyone" knows. There is a lot of overlap though, and a lot of improv -- almost every Swedish fiddle tune has a second part, called a stämma, where the second fiddle improvises, on the spot, an accompaniment to the main tune. Instead of there being several stages with schedules of musicians and a lot of static audience members, everyone brings their instrument, and they wander through the festival listening until they come across a group playing a tune they want to learn, and join in. There are still stages with famous musicians playing to an audience but they are almost secondary to the huge masses of wandering musicians grouping up to play, then breaking up and moving on.

ANYWAY. Bingsjö 2018. About 10 PM (the fiddle festival runs all night, we later played the sun up around 3:30 AM -- it only set for about 5 hours due to the northerly latitudes) I was wandering about with my violin and came across a smaller stage behind the main barns where two fiddlers were playing the strangest Swedish fiddle tune I'd ever heard. It almost sounded baroque. I managed to catch some of it with my phone's recorder but it was less than three minutes long. You can hear the barn swallows swooping overhead in the recording:

Visit Original Link

I have been looking for this tune ever since. I eventually managed to track down the musicians I recorded here (Anders Bjernulf and Fredrik Lindh) but despite listening to as much of their discography as I could find I never found it.

And then, tonight, I was scrolling through fiddle tunes on youtube and:

That's it!!!! The stämma isn't quite as complex or multi-layered here but it is definitely the right tune. I don't know why it's so compelling to me but I really love the sense of movement it has.

[voluptuarian]

Weekly World Music: “Swart” - Lena Willemark

Lena Willemark is a Swedish composer, singer, and fiddler who began her solo career in 1989. Her sound frequently draws on jazz and traditional music; she also frequently sings in Elfdalian, an extremely rare language spoken only within the parish of Älvdalen in Dalarna, that evolved from Old Norse.

She has collaborated with a variety of other artists over the years, and in addition to her solo career is also a member of several bands including Frifot, “a group devoted to improvising on traditional Swedish tunes” and Nordan, which reworks medieval ballads.

Black as a forest lake Above the water the moon hangs I am waiting for a whole new life I am waiting And the heart yearns for the light.

[flintandpyrite]

[LOUD, turn your volume down first] 

Nothing is visible in this video because I was playing the violin and couldn’t hold up the phone at the same time, but this is my spelmanslag playing three Swedish tunes: a “short 1” uneven 3/4-time springar from Värmland, a “short 3″ springar, and a borderland halling. We learned them during a session in Sweden with Mats Berglund. If you’re interested, my favorite album of his is a compendium of short 3/short 1 tunes called “24 Polsdanser frå Finnskogan”