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The Celtic Collection - Mountain Dulcimer
by; Lorinda Jones

Photo by Dale Rempert

Swedish Tunes on the Mountain Dulcimer

Art by Susan Overby West. Used by permission.

I still haven't decided what it is about Swedish music which so strongly attracts me. Perhaps the soulful melodies which seem to keep you company over those long dark winter months. Or maybe it is the wonderful syncopated rhythms which seem just beyond the grasp of intuition. I know the first call was the amazing harmonies of the traditional fiddle ensembles. Swedish fiddle ensembles generally play in two or three part harmony. This harmony, based on thirds, sixths, drones and contrapuntal lines is improvised but has a very strong stylistic consistency, and once a fiddler chooses a harmony to play, he tends to play the same harmonic line most of the time. I began playing Swedish music on concertina where I could play the harmony lines and found the concertina to blend in beautifully with some of my excellent fiddler friends. As I became more deeply involved in the music, I started to learn to play multiple parts on the concertina. Later I began to learn to adapt a substantial amount of Swedish music to the mountain dulcimer.

Hummel	Older Hummel

At first it would seem that the dulcimer is an odd choice of instrument for playing the Swedish repertoire, but there are traditional precedents. The Swedish hummel is a dulcimer like instrument which seems to have enjoyed a degree of popularity going back as far as the early 17th century. Hummels are zither-like instruments, usually with two or three fretted strings and several more strings which were parallel but unfretted and could be plucked for chords or strummed as drones. In Denmark, the instrument was called a humle. (One must remember that in the 1600's a substantial part of Denmark was under Swedish rule.) The word "hummel" derives from the German word 'hummelchen', a type of bagpipe named for a bumblebee, so one can picture the buzzing drone reminding one of the bee's hum. In Norway, the langeleik is a similar instrument but the frets are dramatically raised from the fret board. The earliest known langeleik dates from 1524. The bodies of most of these Scandinavian zither-family instruments are long and box-like, although there are some examples of more recent hummels with a heart-shaped body - just as contemporary dulcimers come in various different shapes. In addition, the Swedish "guitar" or cittra also shares the quality of having some of its strings fretted, with the majority of them unfretted. The cittra is still used in the music of Uppland which is also home to the nyckelharpa, a keyed fiddle which has much in common with hurdy-gurdies and makes extensive use of drones. These world repertoires of music which make such common use of drones always feel very natural on dulcimer.

Swedish Cittra

One of the more challenging aspects of Swedish music is the rhythmic intricacies of the dance tunes. Swedish tunes are usually in duple, triple or compound meter, but these meters are rarely straightforward; particularly the triple meters. Although the Swedes do play waltzes, most of the triple metered pieces are what is known as polskas, the best known of which is the hambo. Polskas generally have subtle accents, often on the third beat, and there is a tendency for one or more of the beats to be slightly shortened or lengthened with regard to the other two beats. The combination of these accents and irregular timed beats makes the music exceptionally challenging to internalize as well as play. The hambo, for example, has a pronounced accent on the first beat, a secondary accent on the third beat, and the second beat can be ever so slightly shorter than the other two (there are several different types of hambos). These accents are generally created by specific bowing techniques, so when the piece is played on a non-bowed instrument, such as an accordion, the nature of the piece can change quite dramatically.

Duple metered pieces are represented by marches, walking tunes (called gänglåts) and several dance forms; schottishes, reinlanders, snoas and polketts being the most common. The schottishes have a wonderful internal bum-tebum-tebum-bum rhythm.

Snoas and polketts (polkas) are faster and the most rhythmically straight forward of the dances. Most Swedish duple tunes have a certain degree of dotted rhythm to them (similar to a hornpipe) regardless of how they are notated. This is even true of the marches and walking tunes. Walking tunes are used for ceremonial processions of all sorts, particularly those associated with weddings. There is even a separate category of tunes used for gift-giving which are usually in the same meter as the walking tunes, but can occasionally be in waltz form. The Swedes also differentiate between the standard gammeldans (literally "old dances") and the much older regional dances, the bygdedans which have the greatest amount of diversity and rhythmic intricacy.

I play most of my Swedish music in a GDD tuning, although I find ADD works better for certain tunes. The Swedish minor modes do not comfortably fit into Dorian or Aeolian scales, and other modal pieces often are played with neutral thirds on the fiddle. When they are reinterpreted by fixed pitch instruments, there is a tendency to switch between major and minor modes in such a way that makes them impractical on a diatonic dulcimer. Therefore, most of my Swedish and Norwegian repertoire is limited to the pieces in major (Ionian) or raised 4th (Lydian) tunings. The latter is more common in Norwegian tunes, but sometimes occurs in Swedish music from the border regions.

Swedish tunes are generally named for the village where they come from or a famous fiddler who was known for playing the tune. Sometimes the same tune will be known by both names which can lead to a certain amount of confusion, and since it is likely that a famous fiddler will be known for many polskas, the name "Polska efter So-and-so" will be applied to many tunes, which does little to clear up the matter.

Musical arrangements © 2005, 2006 Mark Gilston, Artwork © 2005 Susan Overby West, Photograph of Mark Gilston © 2005 Dale Rempert

Visby is a walking tune from the town of Visby in Gotland, a large Island off the east coast of Sweden in the Baltic Sea. I learned it from a 1975 recording of Edwin Johnson, a fiddler originally from Rättvik in Dalarna, central Sweden who moved to Minnesota as a young man and plays in an older traditional style. I play it in DAd tuning with full chords throughout and a strong rhythmic drive.

About the Author Mark Gilston has been performing traditional folk music for over thirty years. His vast repertoire encompasses songs and instrumentals from North America and most of Europe, particularly the British Isles, Scandinavia, and the Balkans.

Mark was born and raised in New York City. Both of his parents were steeped in the folk music revival scene of the 1950's. He grew up listening to 78's and LP's of American, Russian, Spanish, Caribbean and Israeli folk music. His sister was a professional harpist. Learning guitar and taking piano lessons starting at age 5, he was constantly immersed in music.

His interest in Balkan music developed in his early teens when he began folk dancing. A good friend sent him back a goat-skin bagpipe from Bulgaria and he began to teach himself how to play the instrument in 1969. In 1970 he moved to Montreal to go to college and became a regular at the Yellow Door Coffeehouse where he bought his first own dulcimer. He started playing concertina two years later.

After earning a Bachelor's degree in Folklore, Mark went to graduate school at SUNY Binghamton and ended up settling there until 1994. Sometime in the early '90's he discovered Swedish spelsman music and fell in love with the traditional fiddle music of Sweden. Rather than trying to learn yet another instrument, he began playing this music on concertina which he found was capable of playing the intricate harmonies of multiple fiddle parts. In May of 2002, Mark moved to Austin, Texas and in 2004, Mark won the Oklahoma State Mountain Dulcimer Championship.

Mark has given concerts for numerous colleges, folk music organizations and clubs and performed and given workshops at festivals throughout the United States as well as England and Canada. He has four CD's which can be purchased at his web site http://www.markgilston.com/