Hartsa med brylcreme

Om tradition och folklorism i 50-talets folkmusik

Abstract

From the point of departure of a folk song (Marching melody from Gärdeby) which by way of radio and television gained great popularity both in Sweden and abroad, light is thrown upon the phenomena, institutions, organizations etc., which in different ways gave the concept of folk music its meaning in the Sweden of the 1950’s. An important was played by Sveriges radio’s broadcasts. Until 1956 there was only one national program and no competition from TV. Until about 1950 radio’s choice of folk music was characterized by a view of folk music which amongst other things implied that it was principally presented, arranged and performed by professional musicians and opera singers. Around 1950 it was given another appearance thanks to Matts Arnberg at the Swedish Radio. Through field recordings of folk songs and melodies where the tradition survived in different parts of the country, Arnberg built up a large collection of folk music which is now kept in the Swedish Radio archives. By building up his radio programs around his collection he tried to bring about a change in the view of folk music. Sveriges radio (at that time called Radiotjänst) released, 1949-1953, thirty-three 78rpm records with folk music and herding calls from different parts of the country. On 14 of these records the tune was played by folk music groups. These, like the Swedish Folk-Musicians’ Association, which amongst other things organized folk music meetings, had principally grown up during the 1940’s. Many were critical of the folk music groups maintaining that they were foreign to true folk music. Sveriges radio’s record releases gave fuel to the debate which flared up around 1950 and continued for several years.
Another subject for debate was the regional dominance of Dalecarlia in folk music. Sweden’s only professor in musicology at that time, Carl-Allan Moberg, devoted a great deal of his research during the 1950’s to Swedish folk music, which lead to, amongst other things, basic and later classic articles in STM. In cooperation with Matts Arnberg, Moberg and his post-graduate seminar undertook a journey to Darlecarlia in 1954 to make recordings. Even the director musices at Uppsala University, Sven E. Svensson, researched into folk music by documenting and analysing older ways of playing with characteristic intonational deviations from the scale types of classical music. Svensson also arranged folk songs for the Suenska ungdomsringen and the Swedish Folk-Musicians’ Association. These arrangements are strongly marked by the ideals of classical music. Nothing is left of folk music character other than a melodic skeleton. Such attitudes to folk music were typical of the 1950’s when at national folk music meetings year after year newly written
festival overtures were performed. The tradition of building classical works on folk tunes was still current, but the debate for and against and above all bow continued. The Music History Museum also researched into Swedish folk music, where Olof Andersson
(one of the editors of Svenska Låtar) established his variant register of songs. In 195 1 the Swedish Folk Song Archive was founded where older Swedish folk music was subjected to an extensive source investigation and where an extensive song register was made. One of the initiators was Ulf Peder Olrog, whose valuable research into the special song tradition in the Abo archipelago was based on recorded material. That which in the 1950’s was called folk music and which then becomes a generally accepted part of Swedish musical life, is organized folk music, or, more directly, what folk music organizations introduced as folk music. In all of these forms, folk music during the 1950’s is a folklorism phenomenon - seeking to recreate the music of a past agrarian society in an organized form and accordingly with a quite different function. As a folklorism phenomenon, folk music takes on many forms. One can distinguish, a little schematically, between the search after the genuine, the original and the historical on the one hand, and adaptions and modifications of the music in the folk dance revival on the other. Finally, a third factor, a desire to place folk music within a suitable art music pattern, remained the natural ideal for many people in the 1950’s.