Norway – Music and Musical Life
Norway2BOOK.book Page 273 Thursday, August 21, 2008 11:35 PM Chapter 18 Norway – Music and Musical Life Chapter 18 Norway – Music and Musical Life By Arvid Vollsnes Through all the centuries of documented Norwegian music it has been obvi- ous that there were strong connections to European cultural life. But from the 14th to the 19th century Norway was considered by other Europeans to be remote and belonging to the backwaters of Europe. Some daring travel- ers came in the Romantic era, and one of them wrote: The fantastic pillars and arches of fairy folk-lore may still be descried in the deep secluded glens of Thelemarken, undefaced with stucco, not propped by unsightly modern buttress. The harp of popular minstrelsy – though it hangs mouldering and mildewed with infrequency of use, its strings unbraced for want of cunning hands that can tune and strike them as the Scalds of Eld – may still now and then be heard sending forth its simple music. Sometimes this assumes the shape of a soothing lullaby to the sleep- ing babe, or an artless ballad of love-lorn swains, or an arch satire on rustic doings and foibles. Sometimes it swells into a symphony descriptive of the descent of Odin; or, in somewhat less Pindaric, and more Dibdin strain, it recounts the deeds of the rollicking, death-despising Vikings; while, anon, its numbers rise and fall with mysterious cadence as it strives to give a local habitation and a name to the dimly seen forms and antic pranks of the hol- low-backed Huldra crew.” (From The Oxonian in Thelemarken, or Notes of Travel in South-Western Norway in the Summers of 1856 and 1857, written by Frederick Metcalfe, Lincoln College, Oxford.) This was a typical Romantic way of describing a foreign culture.
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