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A New Destiny for Folk Music?: Icelandic Composer Leads Nordic Network for Ethnomusicology

> Janet Sturman, University of ArizonA

Four years ago Icelandic-born composer Guðrún Ingimundardóttir

(Rúna) did not picture herself directing a consortium linking

nine nations in the North Sea region. Today, Runa works as

project director of the North Folk Database Project, to advance

the research, preservation and dissemination of folk music and

dance on the northern margins of Europe. This effort at regional

integration is more than a practical response to modern ways of

life and the demands of a global economy. It also promotes an

ideology linking musical resources to the work of sustaining the

environment and local culture and offers models for initiating

projects towards this end. Furthermore, this composer-led project

reminds us of the influence composers can exert on society

and academia. Finally, it underscores the value of integrating

ethnographic music study into the training of composers and

performing musicians.

Profile of an icelandic comPoSer

Guðrún Ingimundardóttir (Rúna)

by GUðrún inGimUndArdóttir

It is programmatic and this section describes the sun coming up over the ocean - the rays of the sun dance across the water, rush over the land, desolve a fog in the distance and reveal a magestic mountain range, and ends with a song praising the warmth and light of the sun.

Journey Home.mP3

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As a classically-trained composer and a student of ethnomusicology Runa displays a

sophisticated sensitivity in her encounters with contrasting landscapes and worlds of

music. Born in the small fishing village of Húsavík in 1963 she earned her bachelor of

music in composition from the Reykjavik College of Music (Tónlistarskólinn í Reykjavík)

in her icy and starkly beautiful home country. Afterwards she moved to the sunny desert

southwest of the United States where she completed a masters degree and then earned

a doctorate in composition and a minor in ethnomusicology at the University of Arizona.

When asked which composers, apart from her teachers, have influenced her music,

Runa replies that Shostakovitch has always inspired her and in recent years so also has

the music of Morton Feldman and the ideas of R. Murray Schafer. During the author’s

interview with Runa in November of 2008 (Ingimundardóttir 2008b), we listened to

sections of her symphonic composition Heimferdin - The Journey Home and indeed a debt

to Shostakovitch can be clearly heard within Runa’s strong, individual voice.

Runa describes her compositions as “atmospheric…and rooted in an appreciation of the

sound as it is.” She explains: “I love the idea of focusing on the moment.” She notes that

moment, time and silence fascinate her and that environment also makes a difference:

“I believe that my sense of timing is influenced by my sense of moment and place. If you

come from a place where everything is slow, basically silent and quiet, then you need

very little to make the listener exclaim ‘ah hah’ “ (Ingimundardóttir 2008b).

A connection between Runa’s sophisticated musical compositions and folk music may

seem somewhat remote, but Runa sees it differently. “There is definitely a relationship

between my composition and Icelandic tradition,” Runa observes. “In the United States

listeners typically describe my music as dark… [Her mentor, composer] Dan Asia used

to say, ‘whenever I listen to your music, it begins to rain’…I began to ask myself what

I was doing to have that effect on people.” These experiences helped her to recognize

distinctive differences between her own musical sensibilities and those of her American

colleagues. Runa describes her melodic conception as rooted in her solid acquaintance

with Icelandic folksong, which her American colleagues often describe as gloomy. She

hears those dark tunes as “just normal melodies.” Runa explained that recognizing such

contrasting perspectives helped her to realize that “we cannot lose what we are doing in

Iceland” (Ingimundardóttir 2008b).

When asked what Icelandic music had the most impact on her, Runa replies:

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“Chanting and folksongs.”

When I was growing up there was no Icelandic national instrument, so

for me it was the songs. I learned them from my grandparents. It was

the way of taking care of a child; I would sit on my grandfather’s knee

and he would rock me and chant or recite, so would my grandmother. I

learned folksongs from all around me. My parents sant to me too and we

sang in school during class periods just called “song.” Later, I would sing

all the time for my sons. They had their favorite songs that they would

ask me to sing. So, for me, music is vocal, melody is central.

With that background I picked up on pitch class construction “like that”

[she clicks her fingers]. Usually Icelandic melodies are a mixture of

Phrygian and Lydian scales. I loved having a small area that I could then

play with; set construction comes naturally to me; you have a small

collection and then you fiddle around with it (Ingimundardóttir 2008b).

During her graduate study in the United States, Runa took courses in ethnomusicology

(her teachers included the author) and acquired new interests in musical traditions from

around the globe. In the summer of 2007 she traveled to Ghana where she studied African

drumming and dance. “It was fascinating to see a way of approaching music totally

different from the way I do,” Runa recalled: “I thought, I would like to bring this music to

Iceland [and teach it there], but I realized that I could not do that without [there being]

a strong tradition of Icelandic music… But there is nothing being done in Iceland, from

the top down, to promote the study of Icelandic traditional music, despite the efforts

of performing musicians outside the academy who have in the last couple of years been

working to generate new interest in folk and traditional music” (Ingimundardóttir 2008b).

legacieS of comPoSer leaderSHiP

It is easy to think of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881-1945) as the exemplar

of the composer-as-ethnomusicologist. Along with his countryman, friend and fellow

composer Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967), Bartók traveled around the Hungarian countryside

recording peasant folk songs. In addition, and in contrast to Kodaly, Bartók also traveled

to other countries seeking roots of Hungarian practices and looking to compare folk

traditions. He collected and studied folk music from Romanians, Slovakians, Serbs,

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Croatians, Bulgarians, Turks, and North Africans, including Algerians. Many musicians may

not realize that Bartók also loved nature. This passion is linked to his search for those

basic forces that should govern composition. In his essays Bartók compared folk music to

natural phenomena (Bartók 1976: 321). He believed that the compositional principles of

folk music derived from nature and therefore merited scientific study to understand the

complex and subtle modes of its expression.

In her discussion of Bartók’s organicist philosophy of composition, Judit Friyesi concludes

that Bartók conceived the study of folk music “as part of a continuous preoccupation with

reality. Such preoccupation was not part of artistic creation per se… rather it was similar

to the study of a language in which an author plans to write poems” (Frigyesi 1998:

104). Bartók’s attitudes towards folk music as tied to place and fundamentally natural

continues to exert profound influence in ethnomusicology, folklore and composition,

even as composers and scholars subject such conceptions to renewed evaluation.

Ethnomusicological research has, for example, disproved Bartók’s view that folkmusic

derives only from spontaneous and communal creation.

When Runa was asked if Bartók ‘s work inspired her, it is his compositions that first

came to her mind: “Yes, we studied Bartók in music conservatory, particularly his string

quartets, but his work as an ethnomusicologist did not come to our mind. [For the study

of Icelandic folk music] we have the example of Jón Leifs (1899-1968), an Icelandic

composer who studied in Germany and later traveled around the country [from 1925-28]

making recordings” (Ingimundardóttir 2008b).

Leifs is best known for his efforts to integrate Icelandic folk musical forms with European

concert music. His 1922 Four Pieces for Piano, op. 2, represent early work in this vein

and feature the parallel fifths of the Icelandic tvísöngur and the metric shifts of rímur (a

monophonic genre of secular vocal music). Leifs was also inspired by a deep bond with

the natural landscape of his native country, including geysers (Geysir, op. 51), volcanoes

(Hekla, op. 52), waterfalls (Dettifoss, op. 57), and icebergs (Hetfís, op. 63). Leifs’s

nationalistic perspective, received little encouragement from his countrymen during his

lifetime (Ingólfsson 1999) however, his commitment to national and ecological resources is

attracting renewed attention today.

Composers of new music working in Iceland today cultivate an international performance

network. Among them is Snorri Sigfus Birgisson who, in addition to his composition for

instrumental ensembles and electronica, has set Iceland folksongs and songs from

Old Icelandic manuscripts for voice and chorus (notendur.centrum.is). He performs

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as pianist with the celebrated CAPUT ensemble, an Icelandic chamber group known since

1987 for its exciting premieres of Nordic and contemporary music from around the world.

Activities such as those nurtured by CAPUT and other promoters of new music in Iceland

offer a solid model for exchange that could serve the projects envisioned by the North

Folk Database project for addressing folkloric practices and traditional music.

folk muSic Performance and reSearcH in iceland

The revival of instruments dating from the Viking era has directly influenced

contemporary performance of Icelandic folk music. Sigurður Rúnar Jonsson, known as

Diddi Fiðla, worked with museum artifacts to reconstruct the ancient bowed lute known

as the fidla. Runa recalls that she never heard this instrument while growing up but today

Jonsson and a few other people, Chris Foster and Bára Grímsdóttir, as well as the couple

Marta Halldórsdóttir and Örn Magnússon, play the fidla in public performances in Iceland.

These same individuals have also reconstructed and play the langspil (a 3-5 stringed

long-necked psaltery), the string instrument that eclipsed the fidla and which is now

identified as the national instrument of Iceland. Revivalist Örn Magnússon dates the

langspil back to the fourteenth century but again it is only in the late twentieth-century

that performers resurrected it. He compares this instrument with dulcimers and psalteries

from around the world, and like many other contemporary listeners, he favors the

langspil’s melancholy tone and the haunting drone produced from its un-bowed strings.

(Walsh n.d.). Runa explained that the archival langspil did not have frets so it was difficult

to recreate the tuning. Marta’s idea is that the frets were set according to the Lydian

scale something she discovered by trying to play folk music. Also subject to debate is the

technique of playing the instrument: one researcher wants to play it with a bow, another

with a pin, a stick of wood. (Ingimundardóttir 2008b).

The revivalists have not written or published anything about their work. Runa notes:

“This is the problem with bottom up research; writing about their project is not the

aim [of these revivalists]; they want to play the music. Someone needs to write a paper

documenting their work and findings” (Ingimundardóttir 2008b). Clearly, this might be

work undertaken by researchers at the new North Folk Database.

Earlier scholarship on Icelandic folk music undertaken by Arni Magnússon (1663-

1730)

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took the form of manuscript collection. Born in Dalasýsla, western Iceland, Magnússon

went to Denmark to study at the University of Copenhagen and later became the

secretary to the Royal Archives in Denmark and a professor of antiquities. His collection

of manuscripts from Nordic countries was originally stored at the University of

Copenhagen, and the Danish Royal Library, but the Icelandic manuscripts were returned

to Iceland in the 1970s and are now housed at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic

Studies (www.arnastofnun.is). Rich resources for contemporary scholarship and

composition, these manuscripts document religious and literary texts, as well as ancient

legends, including stories of elves and ghosts. “We of course believe in elves; ghosts too;

they are part of our life,” noted Runa (Ingimundardóttir 2008a) paradoxically expressing

a belief that scholars outside the region might deem folkloric, and which in the popular

understanding of that term might be viewed as anti-modern or erroneous.

introducing tHe nortH folk data BaSe ProJect

The North Folk Database Project (NFD) seeks support from the Northern Periphery

Programme (NPP) (Ingimundardóttir and Olfsson 2008). The NPP is a funding arm

of the European Union and its goals include increase productivity, trade and travel

in the region. Five of the nations represented in the NPP partnership: Finland,

Guðrún Ingimundardóttir and her son

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Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Sweden are European Union States. The Faroe

Islands, Greenland, Iceland and Norway are the four non-member states. The North Folk

Database’s goal of promoting research, preservation and dissemination of folk music and

dance of the northern periphery area is advanced by a team of institutional partners

representing eight of the nine collaborating countries. The lead and founding partner is

The Folk Music Center in Siglufjördur, Iceland. Other partners include: Ole Bull Akademiet

in Voss, Norway; the Murberget Museum in Härnääsand, Sweden; the Greenland National

Museum and Archives in Nuuk, Greenland; The Oidrecht an Clare College for Traditional

Studies in Ireland , Lews Castle College of the University of Highlands and Islands

Millennium Institute in Scotland; as well as The Kansanmusiikki Institute in Kaustinen in

Finland (Ingimundardóttir 2008a).

The performance and dissemination of traditional music and dance varies greatly among

these member nations. Traditional music of Scotland and Ireland circulates widely

among international audiences while the music of other nations like Iceland and the

Faroe Islands is less known and is poorly represented in global contexts. Runa speaks of

“a national wealth that has yet to be harvested and recognized for its sustainability”

(Ingimundardóttir 2008a).

The partnership of the NFD represents a “fantastic opportunity for small countries to

create cooperation with the bigger countries, where the [folk music] education system is

so much more advanced,” observes Runa. “It is very useful for us to take these advanced

models to our rural areas” (Ingimundardóttir 2008a).

Approaches to musical instruction and dissemination vary widely among the member

nations. While academies in Finland promote not only the performance of folk music

but also the creation of new musical practices that integrate and build upon folkloric

heritage, instruction in other NFD nations have resisted integrating rural and folkloric

practice into the academy in this manner.

Finally, and perhaps most significant, there has been surprisingly little interest in

sharing musical traditions among the nations in the northern periphery. Runa observes

that Scandinavian musicians are more likely to travel to far distant nations to perform

and share their music than to their northern neighbors (2008). Her observations are

supported by ethnographic studies of the contemporary folk music scene. For example,

Tina Ramnarine (2005) offers details of contemporary Finnish collaborations with Cuban

or Senegalese musicians, but very little regarding collaborations with Swedish,

Icelandic, or Norwegian musicians.

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tHe ScoPe and goalS of tHe nortH folk dataBaSe ProJect

The North Folk Database Project has four divisions that will advance research, instruction,

promotion, and dissemination activities:

1) a Folk Music Center

2) a Folk Music Academy

3) a Folk Music Festival

4) the North Folk Database (Ingimundardóttir 2008a).

The Folk Music Center represents an expansion of the center that opened in 2006 in

Siglufjordur, Iceland’s northern most town, where the composer and folk music collector

the Rev Bjarni Thorsteinsson (1861-1938) once lived and worked. For 25 years Bjarni

collected and transcribed music from many singers and lovers of folk music from around

the country, published along with all music manuscripts he could find containing Icelandic

music in 1906-1909 as “Íslenzk þjóðlög.” The introduction to this monumental collection,

as well as portions of the manuscripts, originally compiled and typeset by Bjarni is now

available online through the Icelandic Music and Cultural Heritage website known as Ísmús

http://ismus.musik.is.

Already the center offers a kind of living museum, bringing to life the world of Icelandic

folk music. Visitors can see people of all ages chanting rímur (rhymed epic poetry),

singing the tvísöngur (melodies set in parallel fifths), reciting nursery rhymes, and playing

folk instruments such as the Icelandic langspil and the fidla. The Folk Music Center of the

NFD will organize and support exhibits, programs and concerts that will travel between

the Northern Periphery Nations. It will house a museum that, like existing museums of

folklore elsewhere in the partnership, will display tangible items reflecting regional

heritage such as clothing, pictures, documents, works of art and sound. In addition, the

Center will display high quality digital videos from the North Folk Database (described

below). The Folk Music Center will arrange concert programs featuring traditional music

and dance and will host researchers, composers, and musicians in residence available to

work with participating nations to advance the understanding of traditional music and to

promote the creation of new works of art based on the old traditions (Ingimundardóttir

2008c).

Instruction is an important aim of the NFD and the Folk Music Academy is the

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division charged with managing that work. NFD national partners that have established

formal programs of folk music instruction in their music academies offer models for the

partner nations where such curricula have yet to be developed: the Faroe Islands, and

Greenland. Runa notes that “It is common practice of the areas’ folk music educational

institutions and folk music festivals to concentrate on their own tradition in isolation from

their neighbors” (Ingimundardóttir 2008a). The partnership will facilitate and promote

study, practice and access to research of folk music and dance traditions among the

partners nations.

The NFD Folk Music Academy plans to offer courses in traditional instruments, singing and

chanting, folk dance, research, composition, and acoustic ecology. This latter program

establishes a truly new path for music instruction. Using the term “soundscape” coined

by Canadian composer R. Murray Schaefer (Schaefer 1969) to help explain this area of

emphasis, Runa explains:

The remote areas of the northern periphery are endowed with a unique

and fragile acoustic environment. Our sonic environment is linked with

the creation, perception and national characteristics of music, and as

such should be valued, researched, catalogued and preserved to the

same extent as is our air, water and soil. To that end, the Soundscape

research is closely tied to the objectives and character of the North

Folk Database project and will be conducted where possible at the Folk

Music Centers’ locations. (Ingimundardóttir 2008b)

A music festival, to be shared by all the NFD partners, will be an essential activity of the

North Folk Database project. The Festival will present performances of folk music and

dance, premier new and original compositions, and host symposia. “This close encounter

with different traditions will also make us more aware of our individuality, and strengthen

the definition of each unique cultural heritage,” explains Runa (Ingimundardóttir 2008b).

At the core of all this work is a common and shared database where documentation of

music and dance from all the partner nations is compiled, store, and made accessible.

The content emphasizes high quality digital video recordings documenting research

of traditional music and dance in all the nations of the North-Atlantic. Specialists will

oversee and determine the material selected for the database, including documentary

commentary for each recording, as well as dance and musical transcription

when appropriate. Documentation is a critical aim of this collection, for while

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archival holdings exist in many of the member nations, including the folkloric and sound

archives in ISMUS, the majority items are not supported with scholarly commentary or

documentation, reducing their value to contemporary users (Ingimundardóttir 2008b).

tHe Significance of tHe nortH folk dataBaSe ProJect (nfd)

While it is too early to assess the impact of the North Folk Database project, the initiative

itself merits wider attention and support. It offers an important model of cultural

cooperation in the struggle of small nations to protect, manage and promote traditional

music and dance (c.f. Wallis and Malm 1984). It reveals a renewed interest in the links

between the sonic cultural heritage that includes music of a region and people and

the environment that nurtured that heritage. It is this aspect of integration that most

distinguishes the NFD. First, the NFD integrates nations: although NFD partners work to

preserve distinctions between their cultures, they share investigative and promotional

aims emerging in part from related conditions of climate, sparsity of population, natural

environment, complicated topography, culture and history (northernperiphery.net).

Second, the NFD integrates disciplines: the work of music performers and composers, with

researchers in the fields of ethnomusicology, folklore, literature, acoustics and ecology.

Third, the NFD integrates people across economic, social, institutional and educational

divides by promoting exchange between rural and urban centers, and by facilitating

collaborations between academic and community experts.

The study of “bottom up” movements, long a focus of folklore, and more recently in

anthropology, celebrates movements for social change, documenting the activities

of marginalized, minority, or impoverished individuals and communities that resist

domination to build alternative routes to power. The trend is one Runa recognizes, yet

she also argues for the need to promote “top down” activity when it results in creating

official space for previously under-represented arts practices. She wants more places

in the academy for the study of traditional music. She aims to establish curricula for

training music students and composers in the practices of local folk music as well as in

the application of ethnographic research towards music study. Such curricula will give

musicians a wider perspective for helping to solve problems of environmental and cultural

sustainability (Ingimundardóttir 2008a).

Many of the NFD project’s aims correspond to UNESCO initiatives regarding cultural

heritage. UNESCO has hosted a series of international meetings and dialogues

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concerning the safeguarding of cultural heritage which it defines as including oral

traditions and expressions, including language…performing arts, social practices, rituals

and festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe and

traditional craftsmanship (unesco.org/culture/ich/index). For Runa, some of the most

crucial issues that have emerged in those debates concern the processes of identifying

cultural heritage and determining who guides the work of preservation. Here again she

asks: “do we want to preserve traditional heritage from the bottom up or the top down?”

(Ingimundardóttir 2008b). One of the UNESCO projects is to compile lists of representative

intangible heritage from of all nations. Ensuring a balance of power in representation on

this list is a difficult task. For the work of compiling such a list, Runa asserts the need to

seek data from the “bottom up”: “Iceland and Greenland are losing their heritage. The

work is to identify what people are doing today, how they connect to their roots, and

begin making new recordings” (Ingimundardóttir 2008b).

The integrative work of the North Folk Database is poised to offer new responses to

the realities of our so-called post-modern world in which digital media has blurred the

boundaries between categories such as folk, vernacular, elite, mass, dominant and

marginal. The work of the NFD is likely to change fundamental understandings of folklore,

and the music, dance and other traditions we associate with that concept.

As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblatt (1998) has pointed out, our understanding of the

folkloric depends on contrasts, folklore has been conventionally understood as: archaic

not modern, rural not urban, aural not printed. Sharing folkloric practices via the internet

or via digital transmission challenges such conventional oppositions, as does situating the

training of folk performers in conservatories and universities. The paradoxes of folklore

in modern life prompt Kirshenblatt-Gimblatt to insist that the contemporary value

of folklore, and in this instance she means both the subject and the discipline, “is to

understand it as a mode of cultural production” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblatt 1998: 292).

The structure of the North Folk Database is uniquely equipped to embrace folklore as

cultural production. With its partner institutions from nine nations, its four arms of

operation, and with a composer/ethnomusicologist at the helm, the NFD is poised to

embrace those paradoxes in productive ways. No single perspective shapes its operation.

Can the NFD integrate the understanding of culture with the performance of it? Can it

address power imbalances by encouraging dialogue, exchange? Can it help match tradition

to the needs of contemporary societies? By addressing such questions the NFD may

find itself in a position to define a new future for folklore and for the ethnographic

study of music.

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Rather than lament the passing of performance customs tied to vanishing social practices

and economies the NFD has the opportunity to create new performance contexts.

Paul Gilroy calls for envisioning tradition so that it is no longer viewed as opposed to

modernism (Gilroy 1993:188). It could be argued in response that such an act also calls

for a new vision of the modern that makes room for tradition. With the formation of the

North Folk Database, Runa has taken the first step in creating an alliance ready to tackle

the charge.

by JAnet stUrmAn, University of ArizonA 2008

referenceS

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