That character is most obvious in its traditional music, but it also pervades the new Norwegian jazz (which bears few similarities to American jazz), as well as classical music and some aspects of singer-songwriting

The country’s topography has a lot to do with Norwegian music. Not just the famously scenic fjords up which quite large ships can find shelter, but the valleys (daler) that lead up from them. These deep valleys are far easier pathways of communication than travel across the high intervalley ridges or the glaciers at the top of some of them. Each string of valley villages has for centuries tended to have its own musical style, and though present-day travel is easier, the highly regionalised character of Norwegian traditional music is a key part of its essence.

Nowadays while many of the Norwegian musicians who meet and mingle in the cities look away from traditional music to more global forms, their pop, rock, jazz and classical music often has something about it that’s distinctively Norwegian, and some of the country’s leading musicians in all genres embrace a strong sense of place and the influence of traditional music.

One of the UK jazz rhyming slang words for “chords” is “Norwegians” (fjords…), which is ironic since chords are pretty alien to Norwegian traditional music – at heart it’s a thing of linear single-line melody and rhythm, not blocks of harmony.

A natural scale is derived from the natural harmonic series, rather than the mathematically equal set of semitones that has become the norm in most Western music. It’s what you get if you blow progressively harder down a whistle with no finger-holes – an instrument called in Norway a seljefløyte (‘sallow flute’). In the past these were constructed by slipping the bark off a willow-stick, cutting a notch in the bark-tube for the air to hit and reinserting a short cylinder of wood pared flat on one side to make an airway to the notch. These short-lived instruments were typically an instrument made by animal-herders to help pass the time. Today’s are made of more durable materials, often birchbark-wrapped plastic tubing. A whole diatonic natural scale is played by closing or opening the end of the whistle with a fingertip.

Notable players of seljefløyte other traditional wind instruments include:

Steinar Ofsdal (who is a member of the band Bukkene Bruse with fiddler Annbjørg Lien, singer-fiddler Arve Moen Bergset and keyboard player Bjørn Ole Rasch), Hans Fredrik Jacobsen, Per Midtstigen, Tellef Kvifte

That type of scale is also heard in Norwegian traditional singing, and in the music of Norway’s best-known traditional instrument, the hardingfele or Hardanger fiddle. Smaller and slimmer than an ordinary fiddle, usually ornately decorated with pen-drawn acanthus patterns on the soundbox, mother-of-pearl in the fingerboard and a scroll often in the shape of an animal-head, it has two major differences from the standard fiddle. It has a much flatter bridge, so two or more strings can easily be played at the same time, and running under the bridge are four or five extra, fine-gauge strings that ring in sympathy with the bowed strings, producing a high silvery reverberation. Both it and the ordinary fiddle, which is itself widely played in Norway, are played in a variety of tunings to suit individual tunes and to give ringing drones.

The Hardanger fiddle is traditional in an area of Norway roughly west of Oslo to the sea and north nearly to Ålesund, including of course Hardanger, and its heartland is generally considered to be the triangle made by Telemark, inner Hordaland and Valdres. The rest of Norway is standard fiddle territory.

It’s usual in Norwegian tradition for fiddlers to play solo, which gives them rhythmic and pitch freedom – their music often has microtones, intervals of less than a semitone that give an exquisite ‘blue’ sound to particular notes. But fiddlers also play in bands, particularly when making what’s known as gammaldans – literally “old dance”, but actually the newer couple dances such as waltz, reinlender, polka or skotsk that became fashionable in the nineteenth century, to some extent displacing the older dance forms, bygdedans, that were done to an older stratum of tunes known as slåttar. Slåttar subdivide into three beat dances such as springar, springleik and pols, and two-beat dances including gangar, rull, the stately wedding brurmarsj and the halling (the latter a display of male physical prowess involving kicking a hat from the end of a stick).

Solo fiddlers tend to play slåttar, often as subtle and expressive pieces, while gammaldans tunes are played fairly straightforwardly for dancing by gammaldans band, which usually feature accordion with perhaps fiddle, guitar, bass and sometimes drums.

There are very many fine players of both hardingfele and ordinary fiddle, and many CDs, some of solo tunes, some combining them with other instruments. As a starter here are some names, in no particular order (a few of them play both types of fiddle, but I’ve listed them under their main one)

Hardingfele: Hauk and Knut Buen, Hallvard T. Bjørgum, Leif Rygg, Annbjørg Lien (see also Bukkene Bruse), Nils Økland, Sigurd Eldegard (1893-1962), Spindel (Sigrid Moldestad and LivMerete Kroken), Jan Beitohaugen Granli, Trio Hardanger, Lars Underdal, Vidar Lande, Håkon Høgemo

Ordinary fiddle: Susanne Lundeng, Per Sæmund Bjørkum, Gjermund and Einar Olav Larsen, Majorstuen (Norwegian Grammy-winning six fiddle band including Gjermund Larsen), Arne M. Sølvberg, Sturla Eide Sundli (in Flukt - fiddle, accordion and drums trio – and duo with guitarist Andreas Aase), Over Stok Og Steen (band playing gammaldans material but with a very musical and elegant approach), Hege Rimestad (not a traditional fiddler, but a fiddle innovator)

The Valdres valley is also the focus of playing of another, less common, instrument, the langeleik, a long box zither bearing some fretted and some open strings, while the south-west Norwegian silversmithing valley of Setesdal is homeland to makers and players of the jew’s-harp (munnharpe - another instrument which, like the seljefløyte, is entirely overtone-based so can only play in the natural scale).

Langeleik players: Elisabeth Kværne, Gunvor Hegge, Ole Aastad Bråten, Marit Mattisgard

Jew’s harp players: Ånon Egeland (multi-instrumentalist, playing both types of fiddle as well as traditional flutes), Hallgrim Berg, Bjørgulv Straume, Svein Westad, Frode Nyvold

Today’s musicians are of course free to choose what instruments they play and where, but these regional tendencies are still quite strong, not only for the instruments but also for their tunes and playing styles.

Norwegian traditional singing has a very natural-scale and often microtonal character. There is more continuity between folk song and religious song in Norway than in many countries, and indeed there is quite a body of religious folksongs, but they’re not like gospel or English hymns, they’re sung in a folk, if slightly ecclesiastical-sounding and pure-voiced, style.

Singers, largely traditional in repertoire:

Jon Anders Halvorsen (also a member of vocal group Dvergmål), Kirsten Bråten Berg, Agnes Buen Garnås, Unni Løvlid, Sondre Bratland (the most famous male singer of religious folksongs), Arve Moen Bergset (also well-known for religious folksongs, and a member of Bukkene Bruse), Berit Opheim (who was a member in the early 1990s of one of the first bands combining traditional music with new jazz, Orleysa, which featured percussionist Terje Isungset and Brazz Brothers trumpeter Jan Magne Førde), Eli Storbekken, Tone Hulbækmo (one of the few players of Norwegian harp), Sinikka Langeland (from the traditionally Finnish enclave of Finnskog, so plays Finnish kantele), Camilla Granlien and Tone Juve of the group Skrekk

Norway also has a distinctive breed of vocalists, songwriters, and setters to music of the works of Norwegian poets, who are very characteristically Norwegian in style, with typically spacious and elegant production on their recordings. A prime example is the work, largely separately but sometimes together, of the Bremnes siblings – Kari Bremnes and her brothers Ola Bremnes and Lars Bremnes - from the Lofoten Islands, touches on the religious-song territory of Sondre Bratland et al, but in its spectrum of traditional, rock, classical and art-song, literature and visual art it has no parallels in, for example, British music; it’s a kind of Norwegian chanson. With few overt connections to traditional music, and singing in English, but with a musical and lyrical approach reflective of today’s Norwegian non-pop sound, is the avant garde-ish, quiet new-jazz and poetic work of the likes of Sidsel Endresen or Susanna And The Magical Orchestra.

Singer Odd Nordstoga, after membership of Vinje folk band Blåmann Blåmann, made a rapid but uncompromised transition from deep tradition to the high reaches of the pop charts with his 2004 debut solo album.

Another instrument comfortable with a natural scale is the trumpet. There have been in history pastoral wooden horns and the ancient lur, and the bukkehorn (goat-horn, though more usually today a ram’s horn) is played again by a handful of today’s musicians. And in tradition and still occasionally played today there is a clarinet, the tungehorn, an animal horn with finger-holes and a single reed. Norwegian jazz reeds-players, specifically saxists, and trumpeters have been central in the evolving of the new Norwegian jazz, which again tends to that open, airy, natural-scale sound, sometimes with clear influences from folk-song and solo fiddle music. They have been joined by a new wave of very distinctive Norwegian drummers, creating their own very non-standard kits.

Trumpeters: Arve Henriksen, Nils Petter Molvær, The Brazz Brothers (also saxes)

Saxists: Karl Seglem (also tungehorn and bukkehorn, in his own band and Utla), Jan Garbarek, Frøydis Grorud of vocal/sax/keyboards trio Vintermåne

Drummers: Terje Isungset, Helge Norbakken, Paolo Vinaccia, Audun Kleive

Except as a parlour instrument, the guitar hasn’t much of a tradition in Norway, but is of course common in today’s pop and rock, and a few guitarists are developing a style that integrates excellently with traditional music.

Guitarists: Knut Reiersrud, Tore Bruvol, Øyvind Lyslo, Andreas Aase

As just about everywhere else, the accordion (trekkspill) is a presence in Norwegian traditional music. Their fixed notes don’t allow for the microtones of other Norwegian music, and in the hands of many players they can, as elsewhere, be crashingly brutal. But there are some very sophisticated and sensitive accordion players, and a few who have found tones and ways of playing that are sympathetic to the fiddle.

There’s more than one type of accordion, of course: the small button accordions, known in Britain as melodeons, with one note on the push and another on the pull, can have one diatonic row (enrader) or two (torader), and then there are the bigger chromatic accordions, either with buttons or piano keys.

Accordionists: Stian Carstensen (chromatic - with the band Farmers Market and other projects), Kristin Skaare (chromatic), Gabriel Fliflet (piano-accordion), Jon Faukstad (2-row)

keyboard – church organ

Organists: Iver Kleive, Kåre Nordstoga

While Norwegian traditional music is a thing of light and air, rather than bottom end, there are some fine double-bassists with rich, melodic, sustaining tone, and some of them work in the area where new Norwegian jazz meets traditional music.

Bassists: Arild Andersen, Bjørn Kjellemyr

Folk-rock, on the vocal, fiddles, electric guitar, bass and drums model, didn’t really happen in Norway as it did in the UK and some other European countries, but there are some bands today that would fit that description, particularly the heavy-rock-folk of Gåte.

Norway’s national radio, NRK, has a 24-hour digital and streaming internet channel, Alltid Folkemusikk, devoted to recordings of traditional music from CDs and the radio archives.

(Note: The music of the Sámi peoples indigenous to north Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia’s Kola peninsula will be getting its own descriptive pages on the Cube Roots site, so it isn’t covered here).

Andrew Cronshaw