An Essay on Norwegian Musical Identity
This year Norway is celebrating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Edvard Grieg, fully recognizing the fact that Grieg is still the name by which Norway and Norwegian musical life are known throughout the world. Grieg was the first composer to depict the Norwegian landscape, folk life, history, and folk poetry in a way that made everybody listen. He was sometimes reproached for being far too national, but paradoxically it was the national features in his music that made him worldfamous and international.
Many of his composer colleagues at home and abroad imitated his way of using folk music, and Grieg retained a dominant position in Norwegian music for a very long time. This resulted in stagnation and in a complete rejection of his music by subsequent generations of composers. For a time it seemed as though folk music could no longer offer contemporary composers inspiration or raw material for their music. But in a country with an unbroken folk music tradition it would have been strange had composers not realized sooner or later that the inherited popular forms of music indeed had something to offer.
To understand how certain Norwegian composers have gone back to their roots at a time when national identity and distinctive national traits are again at the centre of public attention, we must very briefly review the development from folk music to art music in Norway over the past two hundred years.
Norwegian folk melodies and dances were written down for the first time in the eighteenth century. In 1740 the German music theorist Johan Mattheson published a Norwegian halling in a work entitled Etwas Neues unter den Sonnen! Das unterirrdische Klippen-Koncert in Norwegen. Here the music was reproduced in the context of an account of a subterranean otherworld concert that the town musician of Bergen claimed to have experienced on Christmas Eve 1696.
In 1781 the French music historian Jean-Benjamin de la Borde printed twenty-one Norwegian folk tunes and dances in the large work Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne. A series of commonplace books belonging to organists and town musicians are also preserved. In these books one finds typical European dances side by side with folk music variants. The first piece of art music based on a Norwegian folk melody was written by the German organist and composer Abbé Vogler. During a visit to Norway in 1794 he wrote a set of variations on the melody Stusle Sundagskvelden. In 1806 Vogler used the same melody in a new set of variations in an organ concerto entitled Polymelos, "ein nazional-karakteristisches Orgel-Konzert für the regierende Königin von Bayern". In the preface he claimed to have written down the melody at the borders of Greenland...
In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, Norway was forced into a union with Sweden after having been under Danish rule for more than four centuries. The creation of the new state resulted in a vast outpouring of patriotic songs in the years after 1814, many of them inspired by the songs of the French Revolution. Norwegian composer Waldemar Thrane, who had studied in Paris with Anton Reicha, was the first to create a national musical idiom in his music drama Fjeldeventyret (1825). However, Norway possessed no musical institution where national musicians and composers could be trained, and after his death in 1828 there was no immediate follow-up on Thrane's attempt to add local colour to Norwegian music.
The interest in folk culture that had emerged all over Europe at this time led in the 1840s to a serious campaign for the collection of folktales and ballads in Norway. The farmers gained more influence in political life, as a result of which the culture of rural areas became better known in the towns, and this was an important source of inspiration for authors and painters seeking national independence in language and art.
In the first half of the nineteenth century Norwegian folk tunes or national tunes came increasingly to be used as the basis of compositions. Many visiting artists used folk tunes in their piano improvisations, variations, and études. This trend took on particular significance after the February Revolution of 1848. Ole Bull's composition Et Søterbesøk (Visit to a Sheep Shieling) is a typical example of how popular Norwegian folk melodies and dances were combined in medleys.
Norway had both poets and painters who were able to express the sentiments of the time, but there were still no composers of importance. At the start it was foreign musicians visiting Norway who tried to integrate folk melodies into their works. One of the first names of any significance among these was Rudolf Willmers (1821-78), a pupil of Hummel who made a concert tour to Christiania (Oslo) and Bergen in 1839. Audiences were invited to deposit folk melodies in a vase on their way in to the concert, and at the end of the evening Willmers improvised on these themes. He subsequently published several collections of piano pieces with titles like Sounds from the North or Nordic National Songs. Willmers ended his days as a professor in Berlin and Vienna. Today he is unjustly forgotten, for his particular version of the "Nordic sound" set the tone for other composers who wanted to infuse their music with a Nordic colour.
When Edvard Grieg had his Piano Concerto in A minor performed in Leipzig in 1872, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik spoke of Previous page: (top) facsimile extract from Grieg's Fugue for String Quartet; (centre) Edvard Grieg; (bottom) forms of notation in Lasse Thoresen's Les trois Régénerations.
Opposite page: extract from Harald Sohlberg's Vinternat i Rondane (1901).
"a lot of atmosphere but surprisingly few thoughts1' in combination with "originality of detail, Nordic colours, an exciting blend of major and minor tonality, of Gade, Mendelssohn, and Willmers with a little Weber and a lot of Liszt". The wording of this review shows that Willmers's music was still sufficiently known to be used as a point of reference.
Grieg was an outstanding innovator. He did not merely create a personal style based on characteristic features of Norwegian folk music; he was the first to exploit this music as material for largescale cyclic works. Grieg took the characteristic features of folk music and made them function as building blocks in a larger compositional structure. This integration of folkloristic elements into art music served as a model for his contemporaries at home and abroad, and he became the guiding light for his successors in the twentieth century. Grieg's works from the 1870s were also an important source of inspiration to the young French school in their search for a national style, and at the beginning of the twentieth century composers like Bartök received impulses from his final masterpieces (e.g. Slåttene op. 72).
The collection of Norwegian folk music in the field continued into the present century, and the generation after Grieg kept looking for new ways in which to utilize it. Political circumstances kept the interest in things national alive. In 1905 the union with Sweden was dissolved and Norway achieved full independence. In 1930 the nation celebrated the introduction of Christianity to Norway by St Olaf. Events like this demanded a national flavour in the music written for them. Finally, the German occupation of Norway lengthened the life of the national romantic style all the way down to 1950.
David Monrad Johansen (1888-1974) was the leading national romantic figure of the period between the two world wars. He attempted to create a Nordic style by the use of archaisms and certain impressionistic features. Old Norse literature and the discovery of Gregorian music of Norwegian provenance were of great importance to this trend. The modality of medieval church music was seen as having a connection with the scales found in Norwegian folk music.
Geirr Tveit (1908-81) was one of the composers who took a special interest in this question, trying to clarify the basis of his technique of composition in a theoretical treatise whose fundamental premise was that the Old Norse and West Norwegian scales were primitive forms of the church modes.
Tveitt was not alone in seeking a theoretical frame of reference for a national style of composition. Both Klaus Egge (1906-79) and Bjarne Brustad (1895-1978) exploited the scales of folk music, in Egge's case with the characteristic features of Hardanger fiddle music as his point of departure: transposition allowed all twelve tones in the scale to be utilized, and the traditional melodic ornaments and rhythms were also incorporated into an international technique of composition based on polyphom and bitonality. Brustad received significant impulses from Bartók and Kodaly, whom he met in the mid-1930s.
A marked break with national romanticism occurred after World War II. Young musicians now looked for international points of orientation, travelling to America and France to study. Some of them tried their hand at a kind of neoclassicism under the influence of Nadia Boulanger and Jean Rivier in Paris. In this spontaneous reaction to "Norwegian provincialism" there was little room for folkloristic elements. Dodecaphonic works began to appear, and after 1960 the Norwegian avantgarde marched under the banner of Penderecky and Ligeti. A counter-reaction set in at the end of the sixties with the first neoromantic compositions, and the doctrinaire attitude of the previous decades gave way to pluralism. A new generation began to listen to the sounds of folk music.
Norway, unlike some other countries, has never experienced a n continuity in its folk music tradition. On the contrary, folk music enjoyed a great increase in popularity in the 1970s and was even discovered by jazz and pop musicians, who realized that they could give their own genres local colour by borrowing folk elements.
One of the first classical composers to use folk music in a similar way was Johan Kvandal (b. 1919), who brought the neoclassical and Norwegian folk traditions together in a quintet for hardingfele and conventional string quartet. Other younger composers still felt that the heritage of Grieg was hard to bear and looked further afield for folkloristic models that so far had remained untouched. Folke Strømholm (b. 1941) and Ragnar Søderlind (b. 1945) became fascinated by the natural surroundings of Northern Norway and simultaneously discovered the potential of the Sami yoik. Strømholm used the latter as thematic material in orchestral, chamber, and piano works and was also influenced by indigenous performance practice to the extent that he incorporated its monotonous and ecstatic elements into his writing.
Some of the Sami-inspired works from the 1970s reflect the political conflict between Norwegian society and the Sami minority in its midst. The building of a power station on the Tana river in Northern Norway was the culmination of a bitter ecological-political struggle, and the neoromantic Søderlind formulated his Second Symphony as a statement of protest, using a yoik in much the same way as Tchaikovsky used his Russian theme as a victory motif in the 1812 Overture. The difference is that the music of Søderlind's symphony ends in resignation.
Whereas folk music never became a significant factor in the actual compositional technique of this last-mentioned generation in Norway, it brought about a radical change in the music of Lasse Thoresen (b. 1949), who has been professor of composition at the Oslo Conservatory since 1988. Thoresen's first youthful attempts at composition were based on folk music transcriptions published by O. M. Sandvik, and his natural model of expression was the lyrical pieces by Grieg that were obligatory repertoire for piano pupils at the time.