Welcome to Lennart Sohlman´s Swedish Fiddle Site!
This is an invitation to ramble about the vicinity of the rivers of Ljungan and Ljusnan in the "midnorth" part of Sweden (see map)*, among a variety of traditional fiddle tunes. To many of the tunes, you will find an accompanying second part suggested, and to some tunes are also added a midi version. You will also find tunes from some other parts of Scandinavia, though the emphasis is on the regions of Jämtland, Härjedalen and Medelpad, with their rich and varying - but perhaps not so well-known - folk music traditions.
* Actually, the area covers the geographical centre of Sweden; if you fold a map so the northernmost tip of Sweden touches the most southernly, the majority of the tunes in this collection will gather neatly in the fold.
To the Tune List
A few words about the tune
transcriptions
About the two-part arrangements
About abc notation
Using midi - a commentary
About myself
Links
What you will find here is a selection of tunes, collected over quite a long time by me and my fiddling wife Yvonne and stored as notations and rough sketches of arrangement on sheets in binders and in desk drawers. These are tunes which we have learnt, taught, and played together with friends, from the late 60´s to this day, and tried out in several dancing occasions through the years. Some of the tunes we have learnt directly from "the source", others derive from the great tune collections made in the first decades in this century by Nils and Olof Andersson (Svenska Låtar, "Swedish Tunes", in 24 volumes) and Einar Övergaard at the end of the last century (recently edited and published by Märta Ramsten).
It is our hope that these tunes will be played - and that they will played by two or more fiddlers together and with dancers within hearing distance!
There are many, more or less strictly traditional, ways of playing together to get the most out of the music and the instruments within Swedish folk music as it is played today. The arrangements you will find here should be regarded as mere suggestions or hints, to be varied and elaborated (or simplified) after your own taste, ability, style and liking.
A rather simple way of playing together is letting the second fiddle follow the tune, generally a third below; this "second tune" (or "andrastämma") can then be the point of departure for variations and adjustments for harmony, rhythm and playability. Many of the tunes in this collection will have such a second part suggested.
Possibly influenced by the success of the instruments of the accordeon family, introduced during the 19th century, an "accompaniment" style of playing second fiddle has evolved, particularly striking in dance music, keeping the basic rhythm with chords on the fiddle to go together with the tune. In some of the tunes, you will find a notated "kompstämma" (accompaniment second part).
An old way of playing together, whenever possible, is playing the tune in unison, though an octave apart. In Norway, particularly in the Röros area, this is quite common and is called "grovt og grant" (roughly "thick and thin", which I think is self-explanatory). In a couple of tunes, I have written down such a bass part, just for demonstration, and there are several other tunes where an "oktavstämma" easily might be added. Go find them!
N.B. The usual standard for writing arrangements for two instruments is using two parallell staves. In this collection, however, you will find the tune and the second part separately written, simply because this is the way my music-writing program, abc2win, works.
I have used a handy shareware music notation program for all the tunes in this collection, abc2win. A while ago, I learned about the abc notation system, and have found it immensely useful within its limitations. It permits you to work directly from your computer´s keyboard, writing down the tones in a tune as plain text, following a coding standard. A tune notated in abc is very small, compared to having it as music notes in bitmap, gif or jpg formats, and you can easily insert it in an email message or send them as attached files. Here is Äppelbo gånglåt in abc (290 bytes):
T:Äppelbo gånglåt
M:2/4
L:1/16
C:efter Ärtbergs Kalle
R:Gånglåt från Dalarna
K:G
D2|"G"G2GD G2B2|"G"d6 Bc|"G"d2dB d2de|"D"c2cB A2AB|\
"D"c2cd e2dc|"G"BcBA G2FG|"D"A2AF D2EF|"G"G6::Bd|\
"G"g2g2 g2fe|"D"f2f2 f2gf|"C"e2e2 egfe|"G"e2d^c d2=cB|\
"D"c2cB A2GA|"G"BcBA G2FG|"D"ABAF D2EF|"G"G6:|
And here you have the same information, transcribed to music notation with abc2win and converted via bitmap to gif format, 5 kB:
Pretty neat, isn´t it?
There are lots and lots of tune collections on the web (you most certainly have found out already!), and you will find a couple of links to the more voluminous ones below, as well as the most important links to the abc tools.
Another program which I have found very useful is abcmus, which permits you to listen to your abc tunes with all the midi options (and some others), and to edit and save the tunes as midi files.
The abc versions of the tunes will eventually be included in this site.
(If you have a soundcard or other midi sound source)
Strictly, midi is the very opposite of rendering traditional dance music, which (in my opinion) should be characterized by a living, bouncy rhythm, with allowance for impulses and inspiration, following your mood and the spurs of the moment. So, actually, one might condemn midi as being even worse than the conservation of living music by printing dots on sheets of paper. Nevertheless, some midi editions of tunes are included here. Why? - The primary aim of this site is trying to arouse an interest in the music traditions and tunes here represented, and stimulate to music making together. The midi versions, with their deficiencies, can be regarded as possible sounding complements to the stiff notations, giving some hints to tempo and melody line in the tunes. Besides, they are small (less than 4 kB) and easily loaded from the net.
There is one reservation more I have, concerning midi: there is a wide variety
of soundcards and other generators, and in my experience,
there is also a huge variation of the quality of sound, using the same midi
version on different sound sources. What sounds quite acceptable in one system
might sound frightful in another; that´s why I have included two different
alternatives in many of the midi examples, for you to try out. If neither
gives an acceptable sound (usually: too much of a treacly, synthetic vibrato),
console yourself with the thought that a fiddle, however plain or worn, played
upon with heart, in any case sounds infinitely better.
Here are three vallåtar, herding calls, rendered in midi as an experiment:
I was born 1947 and live in Älta, near Stockholm, with my wife Yvonne, who is a primary level teacher. My own professional background is in social psychology, consultancy and education. I have owned a fiddle since I was 8, and have played music periodically more, periodically less, but the traditional music of my country, particularly that of Jämtland-Härjedalen-Medelpad has always had first priority (though I now and then like to remind my fingers and bowing arm of our many visits to Ireland, with a reel or a jig).
This is what we look like when we
play
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If you found this site interesting, you will probably enjoy some of the following links.
About abc notation and shareware using abc:
abc home
page
abcmus home page
abc2win
Tune collections on the web (I have only included some of the largest ones; there are several more):
Richard
Robinson´s Tunebook
JC's Scandinavian Folk
Dance Music
the web-wide
abc index
About fiddling:
The
Fiddle Web
NAFA
Fiddle-Related Web Sites
And these might interest you as well:
Folkmusikkaféet
Allégården
FolkNet Sweden
Scandinavian folkmusic
links
Henrik Norbecks Svenska
folkmusiklänkar
Rune Granquists hemsida
(midi tunes from the Swedish west coast)
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