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Beginners Guide to Swedish Music
Andrew Cronshaw has written this excellent introduction to Swedish music.
You'll find many of the artists and their CDs here on the Cube Roots Music website - but there are some external links so that you can find out more.
Sweden’s traditional music is a patchwork of regional styles - particular tunes and ways of playing them, and particular songs, are associated with a township or local area, and often with individual musicians. When the youth radicalism and back-to-nature trends of the 1960s sparked a revival of enthusiasm for traditional music this regionalism was cherished, the young musicians identifying with the music of their home region and often seeking out and learning from its older tradition-bearers, joining or forming spelmanslag, local music-making clubs, gathering at fiddling and dance meets, spelmansstämmor, and forming folk bands.
The majority of players in the revival in its early days were fiddlers, and though the instrumental range in Swedish roots music has expanded these days the fiddle is still the key instrument, played solo, in duet or with other instruments. In the last decade or so some leading fiddlers in bands and duos have also taken to the rich sound of newly developed Swedish fiddle variants with resonant sympathetic strings, which are based largely on the viola d’amore.
The fiddles have been joined, though, by a boom in the making and playing of the nyckelharpa, the keyed fiddle. This almost died out during the 20th century, but in its Uppland heartland Eric Sahlström and a handful of other players championed it through the thin years and now there are tens of thousands of players worldwide, many of high skill and innovativeness. The instrument comes in a variety of versions but essentially has four bowed strings stopped by wooden tangents and a set of additional sympathetic strings that give a silvery ring to its sound.
The most popular form of tune among fiddlers and nyckelharpa players is the polska, a dance descended from the ‘Polish-style’ dances mazurka and polonaise that swept Europe in the 17th century. Not to be confused with the 2/4 polka of Czech origin that arrived during the 19th century, Swedish polskas are in a nominal 3/4 time, but not all the beats are necessarily the same length; in the traditional music stronghold of the county of Dalarna in particular polskas have a lurch to them that fascinates players and dancers alike. Other tune forms include the gånglåt (walking tune), brudmarsch (wedding march) and swinging halling, which in Norway is danced as an exhibition of male high-kicking prowess. Unlike in, say, Ireland or Scotland, where dance music has taken on a life largely unattached to actual dancing, in Sweden playing and dancing go very much together, and players are generally able dancers.
Fiddles and nyckelharpas aren’t the only instruments in today’s Swedish roots music. As pretty much everywhere else in the world, forms of the accordion are common. Being, in the wrong hands, capable of extreme brutishness to the subtleties of fiddle music, and incapable of its microtonal nuances, accordions were viewed with suspicion among traditional players in the revival but, while it’s still bowed strings that dominate, gradually the small push-pull diatonic accordion (what in Britain is known as a melodeon) has gained acceptance, even in the national competitions that award the Zorn badge and titles of Riksspelman. And there are now also some experts on the big chromatic piano or button accordions whom fiddlers trust for their sympathetic playing.
The revival has also reactivated the making and playing of other instruments, including the Swedish bagpipes (säckpipa), the pastoral no-hole natural-scale whistle (sälgpipa), wooden whistles (spilåpipa or spelpipa), animal horns, bowed lyre (stråkharpa), jew’s-harp (mungiga) and the hurdy-gurdy (vevlira). The grainy, dronal nature of many of these instruments was particularly emphasised by the band Hedningarna, which began acoustic and then developed a wild, exciting and popular amplified music deeply rooted in Swedish polska and Finnish runo-song. For a while there were several Swedish bands, prime among them Hedningarna, Den Fule and Hoven Droven, playing an immensely meaty, exciting folk-rock, sometimes dubbed ‘drone-rock’, that wasn’t a superficial rocking-up of tradition but sprang from the power of the music itself and involved quite a few of the finest and most interesting musicians. Hedningarna still exists but its members, after some line-up changes, are largely occupied with other projects, while Hoven Droven and the younger band Garmarna are still active.
Unlike in the British folk revival of the 1970s onward, the guitar and other fretted instruments were little seen on the Swedish roots music scene, but are emerging now with a distinctively Swedish form. Having experience of the bouzouki in playing Greek music, multi-instrumentalist Ale Möller applied it to the accompaniment of Swedish traditional music. Flatback bouzoukis, mandolas and citterns were also becoming a feature in other European roots musics. Finding the diatonic scale of standard versions of such instruments inadequate for reaching the microtones of Swedish and Norwegian fiddling and folksong, Möller had intermediate microtone frets fitted to his instruments. Gradually, largely as a result of his outstanding playing and feeling for traditional music, the use of these flatback fretted lutes spread, and distinctively Swedish forms have evolved, some with extended bass strings, some with stud capos that screw into the fingerboard to modify open tunings. Such instruments are becoming a staple in today’s roots bands, in conjunction with fiddles, nyckelharpa and vocals. Greatly influential has been Roger Tallroth, who in nyckelharpa/viola/guitar trio Väsen has developed a marvellously propulsive style on 12-string guitar that he and others also apply on citterns and mandolas.
It was instrumental music that dominated the first couple of decades of the revival, but Swedish tradition is rich with songs and ballads, vocalised dance tunes (tralling) and the wild, piercing sounds of women’s herding calls (kulning). Only recently have the singers (mainly female at present) been coming through in numbers, at first as members of bands but increasingly making solo albums and exploring an ever-wider range of traditional and new material. Lena Willemark, though, has been a key figure throughout. A transfixing live performer, she’s a magnificent, exciting singer of traditional songs and ballads, a doyenne of the blue microtone, a spine-tingling deliverer of kulning, and a gutsy fiddler. She’s a member with Ale Möller and fiddler/bagpiper Per Gudmundson of the trio Frifot, sang with another long-established key band, Groupa, on one of their finest albums (Månskratt, recently re-released on CD), and as well as solo and other projects has also done beautiful work with the jazz of pianist Elise Einarsdotter and saxist Jonas Knutsson and with the band Enteli.
Swedish traditional music and its current manifestations aren’t cut off from other areas of music; indeed they’re strong and deeply rooted enough to embrace them and still emerge with music that’s distinctively Swedish. For example, in the mid 1960s, before the folk revival had really got under way, pianist Jan Johansson and others were making jazz based on traditional fiddle tune themes; Johansson’s work in particular has had a lasting influence. Today, as Sweden’s population becomes increasingly multicultural, creative tradition-rooted musicians are actively making connections with the interesting musicians who arrive in the country - for instance Ale Möller, as well as continuing work with Frifot, Shetland’s Aly Bain and others, leads a big band with Greek, Indian and Senegalese vocalists, while fiddler Ellika Frisell, ex-member of Kapell Frisell, Den Fule and Filarfolket (one of the most influential Swedish roots bands of the 1980s) has won acclaim and a Radio 3 World Music Award for her duetting with Senegalese kora player and singer Solo Cissokho.
Plunge into the panoply of CDs of Swedish tradition-rooted music pretty much anywhere and you’ll find remarkable music and - since this is a mutually supportive scene where musicians attribute their sources and talk about their influences - connections to plenty more. But you’d be missing out if you didn’t hear at least some of the following musicians and bands. Many of their CDs are available from Cube Roots (and if they don’t seem to be, ask anyway!).
All the names in the list below have clickable links to their homepages or other useful sites for further info. Internet searching will turn up a lot more. I’ve written about most of them in the Sweden chapter of the 2nd and imminent 3rd edition of the Rough Guide to World Music, and most of their recordings are reviewed in past, current or future issues of fRoots magazine.
Ale Möller
Lena Willemark
Per Gudmundson
(or all three of the above as Frifot)
Filarfolket
Groupa
Väsen
Harv
Nyckelharporkestern
Bazar Blå
Norrlåtar
Hedningarna
Garmarna
Hoven Droven
Swåp
Didier François
Alwa
Gjallarhorn
Ranarim
Ulrika Bodén
Sofia Karlsson
Svart Kaffe
Ellika & Solo
The heart of much of this music is solo fiddling, so listen, too, to some of the many great fiddlers of today and the past. For straight recordings of them (including some of the musicians in the bands above) look at the many releases on the Giga label. Apart from its total reliability in recording only the greatest - mainly fiddlers, unaccompanied in solo and duet, but also some other instrumentalists and ensembles - Giga’s booklet notes are always interesting windows on the lives and self-deprecating humanity of the musicians.
For archive recordings of instrumental music and singing made throughout the regions of Sweden during the 20th century, plus some of the work of Jan Johansson and others, there’s Caprice’s 25-CD series Musica Sveciae: Folk Music in Sweden.
No single compilation covers the full range of Swedish roots music, from solo tradition through drone-rock and onward, but the US label NorthSide’s three Nordic Roots samplers are a very inexpensive way to hear tracks by many of the leaders in the more progressive-roots end over the past decade or so.
Andrew Cronshaw, May 2006
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