TEACHING YOURSELF

As a kid, I learnt to play the violin. Each week I went to the music school – an hour’s tram ride through Amsterdam – and came home with a lot of homework, after having played last week’s work and suffered the criticisms of my teacher. Later, during my years at the conservatorium, this practice continued. But I had found some freedom! For as a teenager I had mastered the guitar, on my own, and I had already started my first rock band. After these music schools I worked as a professional folk and rock player, and as a violin teacher, during 30 years.

Decades later I took up the viola d’amore, followed by the nyckelharpa. Though I attended a number of harpa-workshops this was largely self-study: I had to be a student ánd that student's teacher at the same time. Luckily this time I could choose music and method myself. 

Many nyckelharpaplayers will recognize this. Like me, most harpa-players are autodidacts, self-taughts, especially outside Sweden. Many may have played the violin before they started on the nyckelharpa. For them the start of the self-study is not that complicated; they have quite some experience using bow and fingers. 

(It took time until I noticed the vast technical differences between playing the violin and playing the harpa. Being a fiddler can in some respects even become a handicap.) 

But then? Possible teachers maybe live hundreds of miles away. Workshops can inspire, bring ideas, present tunes, yet quite often their main focus is not on developing technique. Online lessons can be more specific, yet even these have their limitations. And of course, tunes can even be picked up online, by ear or from scores (but scores never tell the whole truth, lacking the “feel”, of rhythm, pulse, emphasis. Just think of the various types of polska….). And in fact one does not learn to play an instrument during lessons! It takes studying time, at home mostly. In that respect, even the violin student with weekly lessons has to do the work hiomself.

The autodidact has one advantage, certainly. He/she can choose what music to play. But then: how to develop technique, creativity, expression?

As a violin teacher I had a special niche. I had chosen not to teach kids; most of my students were young adults that gave the violin a first or second chance. Many of them wanted to play by ear, by heart. Most wanted to play rock or folk. Some were fed up with the old-fashioned violin methods that focused on classical music only, often presented with a side dish of boring and uninspiring exercises. During 30 years of teaching, leading workshops for students and music teachers. During those teaching and playing years, I slowly developed some ideas, guidelines that possibly can assist the self-teaching musical student playing the violin and possibly even the nyckelharpa.

·       First, it seems a good idea to balance musical joy and purely technical study when practicing. As a violin student in the 60s and 70s I had to work with the bowing and fingering exercises of Sevcik – which are sufficient to kill all musical joy.  Sevcik isolates specific technical issues and forces the student to practice these without a real musical context.  This maybe helps some diehards to become skillfull craftsmen – but at the cost of musical creativity and pleasure.

An example of a Sevcik exercise. The position-shifting ones are even worse....

So rather choose tunes you like, and tackle technical problems involved only when your musical joy itself is not sufficient to take you over the technical hurdles, for it often does, after a while! Just do not pick easy tunes all the time.

·        Listen to your playing, but don’t be super-critical! Grant your playing some tolerance. Only when a defect keeps popping up and bothers you, the time has come to tackle it in detail. To help yourself in this process, occasionally make some recordings of your playing and listen. Listen like a benevolent audience would do. But don’t record yourself every day.

·       A constant 100% concentration can be counterproductive. Playing an instrument is not just your brain steering your muscles. Allow your mind to wander a little while practicing and playing. Some 80% concentration probably will do. Rely on the unconscious powers within your body and brain. Of course, full concentration is needed when you really very consciously want to tackle a specific difficulty.

la   Really important for me: playing by heart if possible, and whenever posible. Maybe not when playing a Bach concerto, but certainly folk tunes. Whether you learn a tune by ear or from a score, put that guide away as quickly as you dare. Start playing “too soon” together with the audible quide while allowing yourself to ruin some bars. Your first by ear-rendering does not have to be complete or perfect at all. You can fill in incomplete or inaccurate parts on the flight, while keeping on playing. Of course some bars will keep on escaping, and will need more detailed study. Playing by heart allows for expression and, if that’s your aim, for variation and improvisation. Some tunes come in as many variants as there are players, just through this playing by heart. Especially in folk music there are no “correct” versions: the music is alive. And music is free for all, without obligations to adhere to a certain fossilized version. Bach died a long time ago, and so did Sven Donat. You’re the boss of your own playing. Playing by heart makes the music your own music.

·       And when you have mastered a tune to some degree, play it ten times over, keep repeating. You may experience that your thoughts start wandering away - maybe to last night's meeting, to the shopping you have to do, or whatever. Meanwhile, your body (and soul) keeps playing the tune! It is exactly by doing this that your organism will find a bowing pattern, a flow, or an ornamentation that just suits you and the tune. And when your consciousness returns to your actual playing: listen. Is this what you want to hear? Does the result suit you and the tune? Otherwise: repair.

(A small warning should be made here: when having practiced all the time only in this way, with self-tolerance, 80% concentration and a wandering mind, a confrontation with an audience may be a shock! In the stress of performing for an audience, my concentration would suddenly become like 150 procent: I was overconcentrated. In panic I had the feeling that I had not studied enough, that I hadn’t really mastered the tune, the instrument or the bow. I think even performing for an audience has to be practiced. When studying for a performance, imagine that you have an audience before you, maybe a very critical audience. Maybe make recordings of your playing, in audio or video, maybe with an aim to uploado these to social media when really satisfied with the results. Play the program for friends. And when actually performing the concert: take a deep breath, and grant the audience the delight of “playing from your heart”)

Every now and then, open up the expression channel while studying. Play the tune sweetly, or comfortingly, dramatically, mysteriously. Play around with the tune, with ornamentations, variations. Tunes take no harm, and you can always start from the beginning again. You can destroy a painting, but you can’t destroy music. There is always another time. Music is fair game.

And of course: listen to fine players! Watch them. There is an enormous amount of fantastic YouTube-videos, provided by many excellent harpa teachers and players. No obligation to copy them (though copying some versions can accelerate your selflearning process immensely), but like workshops they can be a real source of inspiration.

So: be your own boss, be selftolerant – but not continuously. Decide again and again: this time I choose musical joy – this time I pick the technical difficulties that I have always tripped over, and work on them. And nobody can turn a person into a musician but that person herself!

Where the English language just has the word musician, in Dutch we have two words. A violinist in a large orchestra would call himself a musicus, a player in a rock or folk band would call herself a muzikant, meaning a person who plays the music of his or her own choice, playing it the way he wants to play it. For him or her, the word musicus might be associated with “being an employee, no freedom, no space for creativity”, and possibly with filling out tax forms. I wish every musician to be a muzikant!

  

HOW ARE YOU TUNED?

When I started on the nyckelharpa, I was 68, a bit late for a major change indeed. I had been a violinist for many decades, earning my living playing Irish and Dutch folk as well as classical music and improvised rock. And by teaching the violin.

It often takes a lot of effort to change one’s routines. My routine was to play instruments tuned in fifths: violin and five-stringed viola. I tuned the second harpa string to D. I was only half aware of the fact that C was the most common tuning in Sweden. Not that I intended to play Swedish music, yet I ended up playing a lot of Swedish for the love of it but that’s another story. First when buying strings I noticed that Prim marked the second string C. I tried C-tuning at that point. Not very thoroughly, I must admit. As I said: it takes a lot of effort to change routines. After some days I hurried back to D.

When a good friend and nyckelharpa colleague studied at Esitobo, there was a discussion about tuning. The teacher drew the anecdote that when Marco Ambrosini’s first nyckelharpa arrived after long transportation, he assumed that the second string during the voyage lost its proper pitch – so he turned the string “back up” to D. Through this mistake D-tuning came into the world, for Marco became one of the first very influential nyckelharpa players and teachers outside Sweden. Indeed, many of the “continental players” nowadays use D-tuning.

Recently, I contacted Marco, to put an end to this story. To my surprise however, Marco answered that this was exactly what happened! This small history absolutely shows my personal bias: I thought Marco had deliberately chosen D. For that would make sense to me: Marco plays a lot of classical music, both baroque and modern. He stuck to D-tuning. He teaches a lot, while even stimulating others to teach.

Marco Ambrosini

I have long been surprised by the lasting Swedish love for C-tuning. Reasoning back in time I have begun to understand. Both August Bohlin and Eric Sahlström, the creators of the present three row chromatic nyckelharpa, played the nyckelharpa as well as the violin. The standard harpa up till the 1960s was the silverbas, tuned C, with two melody strings (C and A). What Bohlin and Sahlström basically did was extending the silverbas by adding keys to the G, the third string. However, their aim was not to change the repertoire, which was basically from the north of Uppland, their home area. Here C-tuning fits in very well. No reason to take an effort to change routines.

During the 1970s, the era called the green wave (“gröna vågen”; Thomas Fahlander describes the folk music explosion of the period in his Gift dig aldrig med en spelman), building and playing the nyckelharpa became popular all over Sweden. This was the period when traditional folk music became sort of canonised. In theory every change, every adaptation could be considered a violation. Here in Holland, the urbanisation had been so strong that little if any Dutch folk music was left. We played a lot of Irish and British music however, and we felt the same about those traditions, so I wanted to sound exactly like an Irishman, when playing the fiddle. Hence no wonder C-tuning survived in Sweden, the harpa being a unique instrument from (a small area within) Sweden. Even though many who started on the harpa were fiddlers. Actually both Bohlin and Sahlström were accomplished violinists.

However, a number of nyckelharpists chose D-tuning, not only because of their fiddle backgrounds but even because the Swedish violin repertoire became played on the harpa. For many, D-tuning helps when playing that repertoire. In the online Cadence nyckelharpa-book, Emilia Amper wrote (p.99):

“If you play a lot of traditional nyckelharpa tunes from the area Uppland in Sweden, you will find a lot of tunes in C major. The style of playing includes a lot of open strings and use of drones; here the C-tuning is perfect! …. If you on the other hand play a lot of tunes from all over Sweden, a lot of fiddle tunes etc., an open D-string , and therefore the D-tuning, is much more suitable and useful.”

 

Emilia Amper

Yet I know quite some musicians who happily play such tunes in C-tuning. But something else happened. The nyckelharpa became known outside Sweden. Slowly. First after 2000 something like a scene of widely spread-out nyckelharpists started to develop in Europe, in America, in the Far-East. The majority of these harpa beginners played the violin. For them, the harpa really was a keyed fiddle (or viola). Meanwhile, the strong ideological appeal of the folk music movement slowly had waned. And: the harpa found other genres, especially in Europe. Marco Ambrosini was and is one of the main protagonists of this development. Moreover, though harpa teachers were scarce, most of the continental teachers used D-tuning, and put strong emphasis on genres like baroque and other classical music, as well as jazz and folk music from other areas. All these are factors in a choice for D.

And here I bring in my strong wish concerning the harpa. It is a fantastic instrument, with an unequaled sound and many possibilities. Besides being incorporated in Swedish folk it should have conquered the world and many genres, around 1600 already! Why didn’t it? Historical and technical reasons, which I hope to write about in the future. It should have, and it still could happen. But here, I think, D-tuning really can help, at least in helping violinists to start playing the harpa. I mean both violin beginners, amateurs, as well as experienced, even professionals. The latter may be used to virtuoso playing, with solo Multi-part harmony pieces: Bach’s violin solo sonatas, Paganini or Kreisler pieces are just an example. While experienced Swedish C-players apply brilliant double stops to their tunes, as I see it mastering a piece with continuous playing in thirds or sixths really benefits from tuning in fifths.  A player like Johan Hedin has presented good examples of what D-tuning can do in this respect. By the way, using instruments with four rows of keys, as has become more and more popular, also would melp to get other musicians to start playing harpa.

Johan Hedin

I hope all musicians thrive by playing their music their own way, whatever tuning they choose to use. I still play a lot of Irish (on my harpa as well as on my viola d’amore, which I largely have tuned in fifths). But I don’t want to be a copy of Irish musicians anymore. Aren't there enough folk musicians within Ireland? I don’t want to act “Irish fiddler” anymore - I want to sound like myself.

CONQUERING OTHER MUSICAL GENRES WITH THE NYCKELHARPA

 Many seem to think that if one plays the nyckelharpa, she or he of course plays Swedish folk music. The experiences and ideas of the Resonans quartet's members show that this automatic linking of instrument and genre absolutely is not necessary!

We founded the Dutch nyckelharpa quartet in 2020, just before the Covid-pandemic broke out. The background of the musicians and repertoire of the quartet show that the nyckelharpa may very well be used in non-Swedish genres, here varying from ancient music to Latin, jazz and rock&roll. In this blog I will show how the four musicians met the harpa and what their ideas and expectations were.

The Resonans quartet. From left to right: Elayne Lussenburg, Tonny Holsbergen, the author Jos Koning, Tim de Wijs

Tim de Wijs has been  a professional violinist and violin teacher for all his life. He even plays the clarinet, saxophone and recorder. He loves renaissance and baroque music as well as jazz, music from the Balkans and klezmer. And he is a tango specialist!

For Tim the nyckelharpa was totally unknown, until he heard Marco Ambrosini playing Vivaldi at the Alte Musik-festival in Stockstadt am Rhein, 2011. He was immediately taken by the instrument’s sound and appearance, and spoke to Marco. As a complete coincidence, a friend of his son turned out to own an “unemployed” nyckelharpa. Tim bought this harpa right away. As many continental beginners he visited the Nyckelharpa Days at Fürsteneck. He even participated in the Encore European Nyckelharpa orchestra in 2013. In all this, Marco Ambrosini was a central person.

Tim chose D-tuning. He was not even aware of the C-tuning tradition in Sweden. For him the harpa is an ancient music instrument, which he even uses in his ensemble Flutamuse. Nowadays he plays a Condi harpa with four rows of keys. In Resonans, he even plays  clarinet. Tim supplies the quartet with Balkan, klezmer and Latin music.

Tonny Holsbergen owes her nyckelharpa career partly to her father, who after his retirement startet with fine woodwork and wanted to build instruments for his musical daughter. Tonny, originally a singer and dancer with a Mediterranean and Balkan repertoire, took him to a festival of instrument builders in France. There, her father decided to build her a hurdy gurdy, an instrument on which she is versed. In total, he built her four hurdy gurdies and a kanklès. Tonny, knowing the nyckelharpa as a Swedish instrument from the Dutch folk music movement of the 1970s, then asked him to build a nyckelharpa. This beautifully carved harpa was her first; others followed. Presently, she plays a four row. After some experimenting she chose D-tuning. She visited the Fürsteneck days several times, as well as other workshops, working with teachers like Magnus Holmström and Olov Johansson.  In Resonans apart from the harpa she plays percussion instruments, hurdy guirdy and guitar.

Like Tim, Elayne Lussenburg was trained as a professional violinist, specialized in baroque music. She has played many years in an ensemble with a “medieval” (in practice mostly renaissance) repertoire. In this musical world, as in the folk music movement, there is a huge interest in lesser known musical instruments. Elayne tried everything that could be bowed. One day a colleague handed her a nyckelharpa, an instrument she didn’t know at all. Being a superior autodidact, she found out most things by herself, including D-tuning and various techniques. At first she played Susato and worked with Didier François’ CDs. Only later she visited Fürsteneck. And  Österbybruk – where the connoisseurs immediately recognised her harpa as a Hasse Gille…! Unfortunately, it was one of Gille’s first pieces of work, so succesively she tried other instruments, ending up with a four row Mayr (like Tonny and myself). Elayne even plays the octave and violin harpas. Unless Tim and me, Elayne gradually quit playing the violin, concentrating fully on the nyckelharpa. She loves to play Swedish music but her first choices are baroque and folk music from Holland, France and Belgium..

And myself (Jos Koning)? I started as a semi-professional folk fiddler. I already knew the nyckelharpa as a Swedish instrument in the 1970s. One day my colleague violinist Hans bought a hardingfele. A violin with resonance strings! To my surprise, Hans traded the hardingfele a year later, in Sweden - for a nyckelharpa! I was shocked. Hans and I played Swedish music, in our trio Twee Violen en een Bas. Just for fun - the trio was specialized in early Dutch music. But a nyckelharpa? At that time I found that really ten steps below a violin or hardingfele.

Between 1985 and 2005 I lived and worked part time in Dalarna. After those years I started playing the viola d'amore, for me a kind of super hardingfele: seven strings plus seven resonance strings. At first I only used it in baroque music, but later the amore increasingly took the place of my five-string viola. My Vansbro trio High Tide stopped after I had left Sweden,  Julia Boreland, another High Tide member, moved back to the USA. But in 2018 she told that she studied at Esitobo for a year, after buying a harpa in the States. I suddenly thought: I'm going to play nyckelharpa too! I still don't understand why. And way too late – I was almost 70 years old then.

My first harpa was an instrument from the building courses around 1980. I actually wanted to have a four-row but I couldn't find one at first. I immediately opted for D-tuning (I hardly knew that C-tuning existed).  For myself I almost only play Swedish music; I have supplied Resonans with arrangements of Swedish tunes plus some klezmer, classical and rock&roll. Through Resonans I also discovered the continental nyckelharpa world. In 2020 Johannes Mayr built me  a four-row harpa. With my background as a musicologist and sociologist, I soon fell for the temptation to study the relations and differences between the Swedish and the continental nyckelharpa worlds and their histories. At present I use the harpa in various ensembles, playing mostly Swedish and Celtic music.

Most musical instruments are hardly limited to one genre. The Resonans experience shows that the nyckelharpa absolutely does not have to be limited to Swedish folk music!

HUR SVENSK ÄR NYCKELHARPAN (How Swedish is the nyckelharpa)?

I myself got to know the nyckelharpa when I lived in Sweden, and I had always assumed that it was also originally a Swedish instrument, used to Swedish folk music....until I met fellow nyckelharpists in Holland, who later would become my colleagues in the Dutch nyckelharpa quartet Resonans. For some of them it was not a Swedish instrument at all; it belonged to early music (or Early Music?, I mean: music from before 1750 from all kinds of countries, say from Machaut to Bach). Why Swedish? Well-known forefighters of this, for me surprising, idea of the harpa are professionals such as Marco Ambrosini, Didier François, Annette Osann and Jule Bauer. They also regularly collaborate with early music departments of conservatories, and with well-known baroque ensembles. To support their ideas about the origin of the harpa, they often refer to old paintings. The angel in the church in Siena from the early 15th century is an example:

And there are more examples. But not many, at least: not outside Sweden and the area immediately surrounding it. What we see in this picture is a kind of fiddle with keys. And with a lid over the tangent system. In that respect, the instrument has elements of a later nyckelharpa. But would we call this a nyckelharpa? Do we call a Javanese rebab a violin - after all, the rebab also has strings, bow, sound box, etc. Do we call a Turkish zurna an oboe? A taragot a clarinet? Difficult - we call a lever harp, a concert harp, a triple harp all just harp....

Back to the facts. After 1600, these types of keyed string instruments are in fact no longer found in "continental Europe" (I'll use the Scandinavian name for Europe without Scandinavia), except very sporadically - as a beggar's instrument. In what we now call baroque music it was not used att all. At the same time, in Sweden and especially in Norra Uppland, we suddenly find numerous instruments after 1600 that are strongly reminiscent of the contemporary nyckelharpa in terms of shape.

Enkelharpa, model from the early 17th century

Swedish researchers like Jan Ling and Per-Ulf Allmo have puzzled over where this instrument came from so suddenly. Several theories have been suggested: via the Sorbian fiddle from eastern Germany. Via the blacksmiths recruited from Wallonia who went to work in Norra Uppland. There is little concrete evidence for these theories, so actually we don't know. However, the later development from this "enkelharpa" in Uppland is easy to follow. The oldest ones did not have sympathetic strings. These appeared first around 1670 (my theory: scientists had become acquainted with instruments from the Middle East and India around that time, and thus discovered the principle of sympathetic strings. The viola d'amore got its sympathetic strings also first around this same time). The musical possibilities slowly expanded: first the kontrabasharpa and after 1850 the silverbasharpa. By the way, the word kontrabasharpa has nothing to do with the double bass but everything with the place of the bourdon strings.

From 1930, first August Bohlin and later Eric Sahlström developed the well-known chromatic nyckelharpa with three playing strings. So we are dealing with a truly modern instrument! Bohlin and Sahlström based themselves entirely on the silverbasharpa: they kept the low bourdon string and in fact only put tangents and keys on the second lowest, the G. They also kept the tuning of the two highest playing strings at "silverbas height": C and A.

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August Bohlin on the left, Eric Sahlström on the right

I will write about this "C tuning" later. It is interesting to note that both these two harpa innovators were violinists. So though they were totally used to fifths tuning, they kept their new instruments in silverbas tuning, C G C' A'.

After Sahlström, development continued - but more and more outside Sweden. In Germany and France, builders began developing nyckelharpas with keys on all four strings. They also built harpas with lower or higher tuning. Esbjörn Hogmark writes in his book "Nyckelharpa" (which unfortunately only appeared in Swedish) that he is inclined to say with some disdain that "people in Sweden know why keys on the low C is not such a good idea", but Swedish builders have now also, hesitantly, started with four rows, oktavharpor and fiolharpor. And that tones on the low C string would not sound good on a chromatic harpa is completely belied by the non-Swedish instruments of e.g. Condi, Mayr and Osann. And actually, the first four row harpa was built by a Swede, Erik Olsson in Hedemora, during the 1950s! Yet he seems to have been out too early.

How Swedish is the nyckelharpa? Very Swedish, I would say, and even enigmatically Uppländsk. Which does not alter the fact that the sound is ideally suited for some genres other than (Swedish) folk music. In fact, I hope and expect that the automatical "tying" of nyckelharpa and Swedish music eventually will disappear. Also, the initiative in the world of harpa building is now largely found outside Sweden. And indeed, it is especially a pleasure to play old music on a harpa!