Re-creation, Re-shaping, and Renewal among Contemporary Swedish Folk Singers

Abstract

Since the end of the 1980s interest in traditional vocal music has increased among amateur and professional performers in Sweden. Attention has grown also among music educators and scholars, and to some extent among producers, clubs, etc. Different kinds of educational institutions offer courses in traditional vocal and instrumental music and dance. New stages for formerly local, vernacular singing include during theatre performances, museum exhibitions, music videos etc., and of course concerts, CDs, and festivals.

Parallel to the increased amateur activity there is a strong tendency towards formalization and professionalization of traditional music in Sweden, as well as mediaization. Musical experimentation within and along the borderlines of traditional music is quite common, but also performance of traditional songs in more or less traditional ways. This "vocal vogue" is more or less simultaneous with a successive shift from revitalization of folk music as cultural heritage to an establishing of folk or traditional music as a "genre," or what Slobin (1993) calls a subculture or micromusic. What is happening in Sweden is in many ways connected to similar processes in other countries and other musical and scholarly milieus.

This essay presents an analytical model I use for measuring performers' attitudes to and ways of treating traditional music. The concepts "recreation," "reshaping," and "renewal" are used to define different, but often concurring and overlapping, approaches to traditional material and styles, and different levels of continuity and change. The model is also intended to function as a tool for the study of creativity in the re-creative processes. In the text I also present some sounding examples of recreation, reshaping and renewal in some contemporary performers' and composers' music.