Jojk som musikalisk råvara:

användningen av samisk musik inom svensk konstmusik under 1900-talet.

Abstract

Jojk as musical resource: the use of Sami music in Swedish art music during the 20th century.
During the 20th century, several Swedish composers have used extracts of Sami music as raw material for larger works. In this article, these works and their presentation in composer comments, handbooks and CD leaflets are viewed as a concert hall representation of Sami music and Sami culture aimed at an educated Swedish audience. The aim is to pinpoint how this representation has been done. Since none of the composers has Sami origin, the mere use of Sami music can be seen as taking a stand for its musical qualities. The main contact with Sami music for the composers is through collector Karl Tirén, either through personal friendship (Wilhelm Peterson-Berger) or via Tirén's edition Die Lappische Volksmusik from 1942. From the 80s, recordings published by museums and the Swedish Broadcasting Company replace Tirén's edition as source. The distinct character of every single jojk being dedicated to something or somebody is kept up only by Peterson-Berger in his third symphony (1913-1917). P-B viewed the jojks as parallells to Wagnerian Leitmotive and built his symphony around a programme, where jojks picturing mountains, log-fires and cultivated land are used as motives. Eduard Tubin, Estonian refugee in 1945, in his second piano sonata with a programme from the Estonian national epic Kalevipoeg, picturing the hero guided by a Sami shaman, attempts to reconstruct shamanistic drum rythms from some of Tirén‘s transcriptions, but the actual ground for this might be just a translational error. Other composers reproduce in text the titles of the jojks but regard these associations as insignificant; instead, the jojks are said to represent more abstract values such as living in harmony with nature or transcendental religious attitudes. Sami music was almost entirely vocal; however, all composers use the melodic lines instrumentally, except for Rolf Enström in his electro-acoustic work Tjidtjag and Tjidtjaggaise where an authentic field recording is presented and gradually electronically processed. The manifold repetition of a single motive, crucial to jojk aesthetics, is displayed by Folke Rabe in his horn concerto and von Koch in his fifth symphony; both have been criticized for this “nagging” technique, apparently not adhering to conventional aesthetics. Three different historical attitudes, roughly corresponding to the spirit of the time, can be perceived. For Peterson-Berger during the 1910s jojk represents a psychological primordial force. Works from the forties and fifties by Hilding Rosenberg and Erland von Koch mainly view jojk as an archaic musical raw material, to be freely used. Composers working in the seventies and eighties (von Koch, Rolf Enström, Folke Rabe) stress jojk as a product of Sami culture and express respect for Sami attitudes toward interpersonal relations, nature and transcendental experiences. In these decades composers interact with Sami in the composition process and are eager to present the music to Sami people. There has thus been a change from seeing the Sami as carriers of a fading archaic culture to acknowledgement of them as independent active subjects, a standpoint which in the light of international views on safeguarding folklore, and of rising Sami ethnic consciousness, will be a necessity for non-Sami composers attempting to use sami musical material in the future.