The Nature of Nordic Music

Tim Howell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315462837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The Nature of Nordic Music explores two distinctive yet complementary understandings of the term 'nature': the inherent features, characters and qualities of contemporary Nordic music, and how the elemental forces of nature, the phenomena of the physical world (landscape, climate, environment), inspire and condition creativity here.

Within a broader debate about the meaning of 'Nordicness', 12 case studies challenge our assumptions about a 'Nordic tone' to reveal a creative energy that is diverse and cosmopolitan in outlook. Each of the three parts of the book – 'Identities', 'Images' and 'Environments' – accommodates an eclectic array of musical genres (classical, popular, jazz, folk, electronic).

This book will appeal to anyone interested in Nordic music and culture, especially students and researchers.

Part I
Identities

1
‘Nordicness’ in Scandinavian music

A complex question

Michael Fjeldsøe and Sanne Krogh Groth

The question of what makes ‘Nordic’ music distinctive is a contentious matter. One could even ask: does it actually exist? Or, if so: how does it manifest itself? Like ‘nationness’ (as in Danishness or Finnishness) it is a construction of identity that reveals itself in discourses on both music and Nordicness. To a large extent it is an open signifier, as concepts of Nordicness can be associated with either something dark, cold and obscure or something related to light, brightness and the aurora borealis. In recent years concepts of Nordic cool and Nordic noir, derived from popular Scandinavian design and TV series, have also emerged. In order to establish how specific musical features can be regarded as Nordic, one must first establish in what sense the notion of Nordicness can be understood.

Firstly, Nordicness is not something that is just there, waiting to be found. Rather, it is something people do: a cultural practice. As a result, it is what many people choose to identify with, and through this act of identification – through listening, singing, playing, composing, thinking, talking or writing (about) it – ‘Nordicness’ becomes and remains real. If people stop doing it, it will disappear. Secondly, it works like nationalism. Since the late eighteenth century, the concept of a ‘Nordic tone’ has been established through an idea of Nordicness formed by a group of mainly intellectuals. It was disseminated through society by means of printed and later mass media and subsequently defined through acts of passive or active identification: through discourse, private and public activities and, at times, large, highly publicised and symbolic events.

By accepting Nordicness as a construction that comes into existence through dis-cursive acts, we also alter the way we understand the process through which music is perceived and received by its audience and critics. It is not possible to uphold the idea that a specific musical feature, whether in a score or in sound, is the origin of a perceived imagination; instead, we must have some idea of what to look for in advance. If music does display features that correspond to a certain notion of being Nordic and they are perceived as doing so, then Nordicness becomes real. Musical characteristics that become iconic or commonly accepted examples of Nordic music can, in turn, contribute to the specificity of the notion of Nordicness.

However, this is not a fixed relationship that can be pinpointed by way of specific stylistic features that differ from non-Nordic music. On the one hand, both music and discourses change over time; on the other, as Dahlhaus has remarked, such distinctive features tend to share common traits with music from other nations or larger regions, at least within the same part of the world (Dahlhaus, 1980, p. 95). A drone fifth is no more Norwegian than Polish; it is through the act of interpretation and identification with Nordic sound that it becomes a Nordic feature, and it is through the strength of the narrative attached to it that it gains authenticity and authority. Thus, in order to discuss what makes Nordic music distinctive, it is necessary to analyse how particular musical features interact with notions of being Nordic, and how they may be articulated in music, in programmes or introductions to the work of the artist and in the reception and contextualisation of music.

‘Norden’ as an imagined community

Being Nordic is, just like being Swedish or Icelandic, to be part of an ‘imagined community’, to quote Benedict Anderson. As he observes, all societies that are larger than the traditional community of a village or local neighbourhood are, indeed, imagined (Anderson, 2006 [1983], p. 6). Another point, which can be drawn from modern theory of nations and nationalism, is that ‘nationalism is an ideology of the nation, not the state’ (Smith, 1991, p. 74). Nationalism is a set of ideas based on the assumption that each individual belongs to a nation defined by a shared language, history, traditions and culture, and that this is the basic unit which ought to have cultural autonomy and political jurisdiction in its own affairs. States can, and often do, adopt and support this ideology. But it is crucial, if one wants to be able to analyse such complex lived imaginations and their transformations, to uphold the distinction between the nation, based in society and carried by a national movement of people believing in and living out this idea, and the acts of the state, supporting, neglecting or opposing such a movement.

As children, we stated our addresses as first name, family name, street, city, region or landscape, country, ‘Norden’, Europe, the Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Universe. Today, if we adopt a long historical perspective, there is no doubt the nation has obtained the hegemonic position in this hierarchy. The default setting in the hegemonic discourse is belonging (or not belonging) to a nation and a common understanding that this is the most important level of identity. Of course this view is not uncontested, but since World War I, when large European empires disappeared and social-democratic visions of an international proletarian movement claiming class as the primary means of identification dissolved as well, nations and nation states have been the prevailing ideology governing European societies. This does not mean, however, that other levels of identification, such as gender, age or subcultural preferences, are not still of importance.

In the present context, an interesting question is how the hierarchy of the levels ‘country’, ‘Norden’ and ‘Europe’ works and interacts. In some respects region or landscape is also of relevance, as narratives of folk culture are most often localised within a specific region (a folk melody is identified as ‘from Dalarna’ in Sweden) and indigenous Sami people live across national borders. How these levels relate to each other is a complex question: our childhood hierarchy of Denmark, Norden, Europe may be the cultural ideology installed by the common discourse of the 1970s–1980s, but it may not be accurate today. One question concerns how Nordic identity can link the idea of national identity to the notion of being European. Were we first Danish, then Nordic and finally, mediated through our Nordicness, European? Or did being Nordic run parallel to our being European?

The first notion is the expressed ideology of Nordicness and Scandinavianism. Due to a common history, related languages originating from the same Old Norse (although this is ideology as well) and a common culture, being ‘Nordic’ is a common layer of identity shared by the people of Scandinavia. On the other hand, specific studies of music history in the Nordic countries since the nineteenth century point to the fact that most often Scandinavian composers studied in the European centres of musical education independently of developments in other Nordic countries. In the nineteenth century, Leipzig was the centre and model of musical education, where composers from all over Northern and Eastern Europe learned how to write national Romantic music. Later, in the twentieth century, the assimilation of European modernism was obtained in similar ways by independent and parallel stories of going to Berlin, Vienna, Paris or Darmstadt. They may have met Scandinavian colleagues there, but they rarely planned to do so.

Recognising a ‘Nordic tone’

The first time a significant ‘Nordic tone’ was recognised in symphonic music was when Niels W. Gade’s early work Overture: Reminiscences of Ossian, Op. 1, premiered in Leipzig in 1842. It had been premiered in Copenhagen on 19 November 1841, where no one had noticed its ‘Nordic’ tone (Sørensen, 2002, p. 43). Ossian was allegedly a Scottish bard from the third century whose poetry was translated by James Macpherson in the 1760s – at least that was what Macpherson claimed. At the time he was widely believed. When Gade’s Symphony No. 1 (after Kjæmpeviser) was performed in Leipzig in early 1843, Gade was enthusiastically greeted as a ‘Nordic’ composer by German critics, with Robert Schumann being the most prominent. Two things made this unexpected success possible: first, a discourse of ‘the North’ had been installed in German intellectual life through literature and philosophy; and second, the idea of national music was strongly favoured (Matter, 2015, pp. 25–97). In fact, it seemed as though they were just waiting for someone like Gade to appear.

These works had, on the one hand, affinities with Mendelssohn’s Hebrides (or Fingal’s Cave) overture (1830) and his Scottish Symphony (sketched in 1830 and finished in 1842) and with the Lied-based beginning of Schubert’s C Major Symphony, which was first performed in 1839. On the other hand, Gade used folksong-like themes: the second theme in the overture very much resembles an actual folksong, Ramund var sig en bedre mand, and Gade claimed to have based the symphony upon ‘Kjæmpeviser’, songs of ancient giants. Actually, what he used as his main theme was a folk-like melody that he himself had composed a few years earlier called Kong Valdemar’s Jagt (På Sjølunds fagre sletter). The ‘Nordic’ tone was perceived to exist in ‘the dark, misty tone [which] vividly resembles the Nordic legends and ballads’ (Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 1842, p. 68, in Matter, 2015, p. 26), in the character of folksong and especially in examples where brass scoring combined with arpeggio figures reminded the critics of bards striking their harps before battle.

It was not simply by luck that Gade struck a Nordic tone. He had, in fact, studied in Copenhagen with Andreas Peter Berggreen, a composer as well as a collector and editor of folk songs. In 1842, in the preface to the first volume of his monumental Folke-Sange og Melodier: Fædrelandske og Fremmede (Folksongs and melodies: native and from abroad), containing approximately 2,000 melodies from 30 countries, Berggreen gives a statement of his view on Nordic music:

The melodies, more than the texts, bear the impression of the individual character of the nation in which they originated. It seems to me that grace and a deep erotic feeling is more common in Swedish than in Danish melodies of which most have a quality of greater seriousness. In Norwegian melodies an idyllic cheerfulness prevails along with a feature of melancholy which is common in all Nordic songs.

(Koudal, 2005, p. 107)

Berggreen treats the music of each nation as a subcategory of Nordic music. He even provided a kind of basic recipe for how to compose a Nordic melody, an idea of how it should sound, to which Gade, as his pupil, had access. His specific remarks are quite open, mentioning ‘seriousness’ as a reference to the common use of minor modes, a melodic movement from the third to the first degree of the scale and a steady, even flow in the melodic lines. The latter was often associated with the 6/8 metre. It could be claimed that Kong Valdemar’s Jagt, which was originally composed for a collection of songs to texts from Danish national history, also edited by Berggreen (1840, p. 25), fits Berggreen’s programme well (see Example 1.1). The point is that the idea of national music was already present in

Example 1.1 Niels W. Gade, Kong Valdemars Jagt (Berggreen, 1840, p. 25).

the musical culture before the works of classical music that would come to embody this idea were composed.

The Leipzig model

Although modern ideas of the nation and the people were established as early as the late eighteenth century by Herder and others, the 1840s was the decade that saw the national movements in Europe gain wide support, a development that led to the bourgeois revolutions in 1848–49 (Hroch, 2005, pp. 109–234). When it came to music, Leipzig was at the centre of these developments and became in particular a kind of model for organising musical life in Northern Europe. Leipzig had, as a town with no residential court (Dresden being the residence of the kings of Saxony), based its reputation on trade and printing and publishing houses, not least within the field of music. It was a town with a rich musical tradition going back to Telemann and Bach in the eighteenth century. In 1835 Mendelssohn took over the position as director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra and turned it into one of the leading symphonic orchestras in the world, and in 1843 he founded the Leipzig Conservatory, which became the model for a large number of European conservatories (Wasserloos, 2004, pp. 21–28).

The Leipzig model of a high-ranking symphony orchestra and a first-class conservatory would be highly influential in the years to come. The scope of influence of this model is evident from the fact that in the years from 1843 to 1880, 41 per cent of the students in Leipzig came from outside Germany, amounting to some 1,359 foreign students. Of those, 413 came from the United States, 337 from Great Britain and 140 from Scandinavia. Edvard Grieg, for example, spent four years as a student in Leipzig, from 1858 to 1861. Russia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Poland an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of examples and illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Identities
• PART II Images
• PART III Environments
• Index