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This lecture-recital presents three points (from the beginning, middle, and close of our century) illustrating differing ideologies and methods in which traditional Norwegian folk music has been appropriated and translated by Norwegians themselves to be incorporated into other musical styles (such as classical art music, jazz, and world music). More specifically we focus on the music of a single folk district, Telemark, as it has been interpreted varyingly by Edvard Grieg, Eivind Groven, and the Chateau Neuf Spelemannslag. The presenters include scholars from the fields of ethnomusicology, musicology, and music theory; along with performers with diverse backgrounds in classical, jazz, and folk music.
In 1901 Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) began work on what has been
considered by some his most original and exemplary contribution
to the Norwegian national style - his Slåttar (Norwegian
Peasant Dances), op. 72 for solo piano. The suite is an arrangement
of hardingfele (harding fiddle) tunes from Telemark which
have been part of an aural tradition transmitted from fiddler
to fiddler for many generations. This project was not initiated
by Grieg, but rather resulted from the persistent efforts of Knut
Dahle, a hardingfele player, who wrote to Grieg over a
span of ten years to enlist the aid of "the land's greatest
musician" in transcribing and preserving these folk melodies.
From both written and musical evidence, it appears, however, that
Grieg, a foreign-educated city-dweller, actually had very little
direct knowledge of or contact with the indigenous folk music
of his country. Norwegian national composers seemed to regard
folk music, not as something to preserve, but as raw materials,
as bits of rock. As Grieg's contemporary Rikard Nordrak writes:
"Nationality in music . . . means building a house out of
all these bits of rock and living in it."
In the case of his Slåttar, Grieg's stated object
in arranging the music for the piano was "to raise these
works of the [peasant] people to an artistic level." Grieg
never heard Dahle play, basing his composition instead on written
transcriptions made by his friend, Johan Halvorsen, a classically-trained
violinist. Although considered by Grieg to be written down "in
a manner reliable even for research-work," the transcriptions
represent a rather crude translation of the idiomatic pitch systems,
rhythms, ornamentation, and metric structure of the folk into
a Western art music style. The performance portion of this presentation
includes several movements from Grieg's suite heard side-by-side
with the same tunes performed on the hardingfele in the
traditional folk style.
The Norwegian composer and ethnomusicologist Eivind Groven
(1901-1977) spent much of his career striving to bridge the gap
between his native folk music and Western classical music. In
contrast to Grieg, Groven was born and raised within the strong
folk tradition of Telemark and was widely respected for his research
in this area. His first instruments were the indigenous hardingfele
and seljefløyte (willow flute), both of which utilize
non-tempered tuning systems. It was his belief that Norwegian
folk music was based upon intervals of the harmonic series, a
hypothesis he presents in his "Naturskalaen" (1927).
Upon his first encounter with the piano as an adult, the music
he heard sounded so different from the folk music with which he
grew up that he found it rather harsh to his ear and considered
12-tone equal temperament to be out-of-tune.
It was as a result of this clash of cultures that Groven resolved
to construct a keyboard capable of playing in pure tuning, or
just intonation, first experimenting with the piano, and later
succeeding with a 36-tone organ which can automatically adjust
the tuning dynamically during performance. Groven's organ uses
a standard keyboard manual to which each individual key can be
connected to one of three possible pipes each tuned to a slightly
different frequency. Of the organ's two modes of operation--fixed
and dynamic tuning-the former was intended primarily for playing
arrangements of traditional Norwegian folk music and the latter
for Western tonal art music. It was his intention that the keyboard
should adapt itself as much as possible to the intonation of the
performers, not the other way around. With various scales, Groven
tried to approximate the tunings employed in folk songs and by
indigenous Norwegian folk instruments such as the hardingfele
and seljefløyte.
The performance includes some of Groven's folk and classical compositions
featuring a newly constructed 36-tone piano system modeled after
Groven's organ.
Formed in 1994 at the University of Oslo, the Chateau Neuf
Spelemannslag (CNS) is representative of a new kind of Norwegian
folk music which incorporates influences of classical, jazz, rock,
and world music. The music of the CNS is firmly rooted in Norwegian
traditions, and the performers have studied with several well-known
and respected folk musicians and dancers. After learning the melodies
by ear, the members of the CNS develop the arrangements collectively.
The non-conventional orchestration gives the band its unique sound;
along with the singers and traditional instruments like the fiddle,
hardingfele, accordion, and a Norwegian type of recorder,
one hears saxophone, clarinet, oboe, electric bass, guitar, piano,
and percussion. The term spelemannslag refers to a local
or regional fiddle club, a longstanding tradition the CNS not
only descends from, but redefines. Today most spelemannslags are
constituent members of the Langdlaget for Spelemen, a 75-year-old
national organization dedicated to the preservation and perpetuation
of Norwegian folk music and dance. The acceptance of the CNS as
an official registered spelemannslag was somewhat controversial,
due to both their music and the make-up of the ensemble. The fact
that CNS is a spelemannslag, and not simply a band, means that
they are part of Norwegian folk culture, not external to it, and
perhaps more importantly, that Norwegian folk music is not a static
body of preserved works, but rather is a living, evolving tradition.
The performance portion of this part presents music by the CNS,
highlighting folk music from the Telemark tradition.