The Scandinavian Soundscape

"The North is most assuredly entitled to a language of its own"
-Robert Schumann

I spend a lot of time talking and writing about the “Nordic sound”, or how the music from scandinavia has a particularly unique aesthetic compared to the rest of Europe, yet I rarely find a chance to go into detail about what that really means. Now, as I sit here in an uncharacteristically humid and hot day in New Hampshire, my mind is wandering to colder places (though it normally does anyway) and while my mind is sitting on the cliff perched above a fjord or on a rocky skerry on the barents sea trying to ignore the pool of sweat I’m sitting in, I may as well take this time to write about it to keep myself there.

It’s hard to find a place to begin on this topic, because there are so many components to the scandinavian soundscape. From the rich mythology I ramble about, to political reasons pervading the classical and romantic eras, to stubborn cultural and aesthetic differences from the rest of Europe, to basic geography, it’s impossible to pin the difference on one of these topics.

At the most basic place, one must look at what was happening between the cultures of the German musical powerhouse and our arctic cultural island of Scandinavia. From the horrors of the 30 years war with Sweden leading the protestant militaristic charge against catholic Germany itself to Karl the 12th keeping the Swedish dominance in Europe alive until the Battle of Poltava in 1709, Sweden was too preoccupied with trying to be (and paying to be) Europe’s “big brother” to focus on the arts. Even when musically active, the composers and performers of baroque and classical Sweden had no outlet for their music, as they were surrounded by enemies on all sides. Just as a match that can’t breathe, composers of this time in Sweden found their flames dying out without neighboring countries with which to share their creations.

Hop on over to Norway and one will find the opposite situation affecting the arts equally. In John Yoell’s words in his book “The Nordic Sound”:

“From the 15th through 18th centuries a credible, if not crushingly original, musical tradition grew up alongside the royal courts in Copenhagen and Stockholm. [but] What was going on in Norway during these years? ‘Not much’ makes a fair reply. Norwegians are by no means devoid of creative genius, but political and economic reverses conspired to punch a hole in the country’s history. During the baroque and classical eras the cultivation of music depended on a leisured aristocracy; [but no such aristocrats] lived in Norway.”

Norway was simply a province of Denmark, used for its timber, mining, labor and fishing, while barely being allowed to have its own language. This kept Norway a peasant country for most of the Classical Era and into the mid-Romantic era when Norway finally gained independence in 1814 (and it did not take long for budding composers to bare fruit under this newly found independence). On the other hand, while this situation was less than ideal for art music and concert halls, this peasant culture formed a fertile breadbasket for folk music, which is a topic that deserves its own essay later.

More from John Yoell on the topic: “In those days Norway could support few professional musicians and these worked in widely scattered posts. The governing upper crust of Dano-Norwegians naturally looked to Copenhagen for musical stimulation, leaving Norway’s ‘national voice’ slumbering in the ignored world of folk music.”

So, now knowing that Sweden was busy fighting against the very musical powerhouse of Europe for the Classical and early Romantic eras, it makes it quite obvious to see why Sweden had little influence coming from the strides in advancements Bach and others were making in art music. Even then, if they did happen to receive any influence, they were too deep into post-war political and economic upheaval to pay it much mind. Conversely, Norway was too busy laboring away and fighting for Denmark to have much time to learn, play, pay for, or watch operas or sonatas of the time.

Even then, why is it that when Scandinavian music finally did start to come around, that it had such a distinctive sound despite being exposed to the same operas, concertos, symphonies, and sonatas the rest of Europe had already been familiar with for decades? The answer to this comes from the peasant culture discussed earlier, nourished mostly in Norway with a struggling Sweden lagging behind.

Folklore in Europe was intrinsically tied to heathen, pagan, pre-christian beliefs. Further, when Christianity came to a tribe, it was not content to exist side-by-side with other belief systems, but existed in absoluteness. As a result, when a culture was converted to Christianity, its folklore was forgotten and unwritten, and very often made heresy to even speak of, meaning the folklore of mainland Europe was forgotten when conversion was completed before the 10th century even came into sight. Pagan beliefs of what is now Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, or even England were completely eradicated by the sword and had no time to be recorded.

Scandinavia had the unique history of being converted by (mostly) choice rather than by the sword. Simply, they couldn’t be converted by force. As a matter of fact, Christians feared fighting Vikings so deeply because Vikings didn’t fear death as the rest of Europe did, but came looking for it. Christian afterlife was decided by God, and judged based on a series of rules you had to follow, and if broken, you could be denied entrance to heaven (later, sent to hell, which was ironically a germanic-norse concept). Vikings had a glorious afterlife awaiting them, so as long as they died in battle, they looked at an eternal battlefield with endless mead and feasting. Put these two beliefs against each other in battle and it doesn’t take much guesswork to see who would be the most reluctant to fight whom.

After a few hundred years of the church failing to force the vikings into conversion, they had no choice but to play the long slow game of trying to achieve conversion of these pagans diplomatically, as much as it pained them. This was a blessing in disguise for scandinavian culture, as it was during this time that Christians adopted many Viking traditions such as Christmas, Easter, adding the -son suffix to names, language, sagas, and even the modern concept of a comb. Christianization of the vikings didn’t come to fruition until the 11th century after countless instances of murder and betrayal of key pagan leaders by prominent norsemen promised fame, power, and fortune by the church for carrying out God’s will.

From the 9th to 11th century, though it ended in blood and conversion, monks and missionaries lived side-by-side with the vikings, and they learned much from each other. Where the Vikings taught the Christians craftsmanship and lore, Christians taught Vikings to read and write. This gave a 200 year window for the Viking folklore to be written down and recorded as well as shared with their educated neighbors, which in the end, even after conversion, allowed their culture and heritage a chance to live on and inspire us into later centuries where other culture’s beliefs and stories were not so fortunate. With this knowledge of how simple folk life and folklore was allowed to survive and grow well into the classical and romantic era when common musical practice of mainland Europe finally reached an independent Scandinavia, we can see the beginnings of the nordic sound come together.

Jump forward the 19th century, in the heat of the romantic era, where nationalism and folklore were the most abundant stimulus for fueling the flames of art and music of the time. From John Yoell’s “Nordic Sound”:

“For almost 500 years the Nordic peoples had received a steady flow of foreign ideas. They showed some flashes of response in science and literature, but musically they had largely remained a colony. But by glorifying the ancient past, romanticism caused the resurrection of the entire panorama of the old Nordic world. Read again after centuries of neglect, the sagas and eddas gave the modern Scandinavians a badly needed link with the past to bolster their cultural confidence. 

Folklore, the ‘living’ past and presumed key to ethnic idenity, broke to release a flood of previously disregarded songs, dances and tales to enrich both music and literature. The twin rivers of romanticism and nationalism began flowing together … By no means does all worthwhile Scandinavian music fall within the romantic ear, but this was a time when northern composers began to put their best foot forward; for the first time, a few of them even managed to draw the attention of the entire world.”

When you are born and raised in a land of dwarves, elves, trolls, ettins, wizards, world serpents, fearsome winged valkyries, wandering wizards, towering mountains, vast glaciers, magical runes, gaping fjords, and apocalyptic battles between gods and giants in the heavens, it is only natural that the music made from the cultivation of these tales, sagas, and stories would be of equal imagination, wonder, and mysticism and take on the very aspects and aesthetics of such mythology and landscapes. Grace the ideals of the romantic era regarding national identity, the inherent bond between music and literature, nostalgia, preoccupation with nature and the arcane, and freedom of expression into these lands and it evidently did not take long for Yoell’s proverbial flood to surge out from Scandinavia.

Yet, the literary and folklore culture of Scandinavia only serves as a muse for the music, and literary inspiration can only do so much to drive the sound of the music it sparks. So one question remains, where does the actual sound come from? As alluded to earlier, Scandinavians only had exposure to two musical settings in their daily lives: the wholesome choral music of the Protestant church, or the lively organic folk music from their dance halls and farmhouses. While the rest of Europe was listening to compositional titans of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Couperin, and Beethoven, who made relentless advancement in how harmony and melody can be experimented with, our Scandinavians were humming simple peasant fiddle tunes, or those harmonies stuck in their heads from church that morning. In their culture, music was all-pervading in its most wholesome and organic state of chorus and dance.

After Scandinavian countries were first exposed to the Romantic era of the rest of Europe, it did not take long at all for the first composers of the time to start making waves across Europe with these very dispositions towards how music should sound. These composers had no need to try to one-up Beethoven or Chopin in what and what can't be done with harmony. These composers simply wanted to put their humble countries on the map by setting themselves apart with their own homegrown sound. To listeners south of the Baltic, the lands of the cold north were still a land of mystery to a vast majority of them. Thanks to composers such as Ole Bull, Edvard Grieg, Johan Svendsen, and Hugo Alfven, to name a few, with northern harmonies like hearthfires and melodies of northern lights were soon brought to the unwitting listeners from the south. In this culture around mainland Europe that had grown so use to the harmonic advancements being made since the 16th and 17th centuries in their art music, this garden of organic harmonic simplicity in the north that had been untouched by these experiments were allowed to grow in an alternate reality of "what if that harmonic convention never happened to music?" Simply, when listeners around the world would first hear Nordic composers, they would hear music as if it were from another ancient time that they had left behind, and that is what made it so enchanting. This music perhaps may have spoken to those listeners of Germanic descent in particular, as a theory steeped in more than fantasy is that the Scandinavians were the rightful heirs and guardians to the untouched Germanic tradition due to the aforementioned events leading to the northern peoples keeping key aspects of their culture even after conversion. (Yoell, 17)

As discussed in the previous essay, music serves to bring people places they never thought they would go. The music of Scandinavian romantics brought German, Italian, French, English, Spanish, and even African and Asian listeners of the time to the foot of a Norwegian fjord or the streets of a Hardanger town from the unexpecting comfort of a concert hall chair. With these composers bringing a little piece of their faraway homeland through their music wherever it went, the organic folk root simplicity and wide scope of the Scandinavian soundscape proved it had the power to inspire people from all corners of the world to feel as though they were in a place of unparalleled beauty and wonder. 

Listening examples:

Ola Gjeillo, Tundra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn_JxxDAr5A

Edvard Grieg, Piano Concerto Mvt. II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU4vPj4c3fU

Edvard Grieg, Peace of the Woods https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgRvjTtrzEo

Hugo Alfven, Dalecarlian Rhapsody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtBcubFeES0

Ole Bull, Saeterjentens Søndag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXqnLooMLO0