This post is about the week I spent in Sweden, August 25 - September 2, 2007
Hello from Finland! It has been quite rainy here. We have had only a handful of sunny days in the month since I arrived, and today is one of them, so I will try to get outside for a few hours this afternoon. Because of the wet weather, Eli and I have had lots of time to practice, practice, and practice. We have been learning to play the traditional Finnish instruments called kantele and jouhikko. More on that some other time. For now, I would like to introduce you to my friend Sören Åhker and tell about my week in Sweden when we finished my nyckelharpa.
P.S. This story got a little longer than I had originally intended, and I didn't actually write it in one afternoon. I hope you find the web links informative -- locating them is one of the things I like about writing about my adventures in this format. I just wanted to give a heads-up in the beginning of this message that it might take a while to read.
If you're wondering what a nyckelharpa is, the American Nyckelharpa Association's website
Sören showed me some examples of decoration on different harps that he had around. For example, the nyckelharpa that his grandfather had built was decorated using tools made from the tiny gears out of a cuckoo clock. The gear-mark had been gently tapped into the soft spruce wood of the top of the instrument. It was beautiful. But we didn't have any old cuckoo clocks around. Sören wood-burns a decorative pattern into the harps that he makes. I didn't want my harp to look too much exactly like Sörens', so we experimented with other wood-burning patterns. Neither of us was satisfied with any of our experiments, so we decided to leave the harpa without any wood-burned decoration. I think the lack of wood-burning accentuates the other decorative elements on the harp, like the key box and tailpiece in the shape of a canoe, and Jock's hand-carved crown-shaped decoration on the tailpiece. (Jock "the Norwegian Termite" had hosted the nyckelharpa building class at his wood carving shop in the Twin Cities.) So Sören and I went on to the stain.
Sören has started using a reddish colored stain which he mixes with the dark brown color that he had previously used exclusively. Most of Sören's harps that I have seen are a bit darker than I wanted, so we diluted the stain with water. At first the color seemed shockingly red, but Sören assured me that it would change once we put the shellac on. The first picture above is me the next day, sanding between coats. You can really see how red the harp was after the stain. The shellac is yellow, so the harp ended up a vibrant reddish-golden hue. One other thing about the shellac: Sören was trying to explain to me that the shellac has lice in it. I did not understand everything he said, but I found it puzzling enough to try to learn more about it: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-shellac.htm
So finally the harp got its first coat of stain and I got to sleep!
In the next few days, I sanded, stained, shellacked, and polished the harp body, keyboxes, keys, tailpiece, and tuning pegs. (I had sent the pieces to Sören in May, and he had carved the keys in the few weeks before I arrived and made a few other adjustments.) Sören showed me how to make tangents (the little pegs that press on the string when the player pushes a key), and I made most of them one evening when he was at a meeting for his hunting club. Finally all the pieces were ready.
This is where Sören basically took over putting the harp together, which was fine with me. The final steps have to be completed with precision or else a lot can go wrong when you try to play later. Sören told me lots of stories (in Swedish) during the week. Before he started building nyckelharpas, he had worked in an industry in Uppsala where they manufactured lathes. The tolerances they were working with were measured in thousandths of a millimeter. So the precision involved in making a nyckelharpa is easy for him. And it's only wood, he says.
Then Sören made the bridge and cut the slots in it for the strings. Then he showed me how to put the strings on. He has a useful tool that attaches to a cordless drill which turns the tuning pegs of the 12 resonating strings. When all the strings were on, he asked me to go get the tuner out of his nyckelharpa case.
Soon he asked for the bow that hangs in the window in his workshop. "This was one of Eric Sahlström's (legendary nyckelharpa player's) bows. I always play the first notes on a new nyckelharpa with it so it can teach all the new nyckelharpas how to play." Many times in the past several years since I glued the top on, I have tapped on the body of my nyckelharpa to see if I could hear any sound inside. I was unprepared for the fullness and resonance of the sound that came from the instrument when Sören started to play it. I had waited nearly 5 years to hear a noise from this instrument; it was very moving to hear the first notes from it. The movie below is the first tune. The buzz in the background wasn't there in real life; Sören's camera battery was almost out of juice.
Sören's partner Eva teaches school in the small town of Ilsbo. She had asked me earlier in the week if I would come and speak to her 5th and 6th grade English classes. So on Friday, Sören and I took nyckelharpas to school. When Eva introduced me, she did it in such a way that all the students assumed I didn't speak any Swedish. I explained where I am from and why I happened to be in Ilsbo on this particular week. Sören and I played a tune for her students, and then Sören went to play some more tunes for a different class while Eva's students asked me some questions which they had prepared. Then I asked them some simple questions such as what pets they have and what they like to eat. I enjoyed interacting with the students, and we had a funny moment where I almost fell out of my role of not understanding Swedish. One of the students said something funny (in Swedish) about the animals at her house, and everybody laughed, including me (oops!). I remembered some of my first interactions with Swedes included people laughing, but I did not understand what was funny. So I think my language learning has come full-circle -- now I get to laugh too.
Sören and I had spent the better part of the week in the workshop, and we needed some fresh air. The new nyckelharpa was basically done, except for a few fine adjustments. We thought it might like to get out of the house too. On Saturday, we drove about an hour to an animal park that has all the animals found in Sweden. (The nyckelharpa stayed in the car here.) We spent several hours at the park, stopping in front of each enclosure until we saw the animal(s) in it. The park is built on a hill (think downhill ski slope), so even though the enclosures are fairly large, the animals are still quite visible for visitors. I found it interesting that the lynx population in Sweden is much healthier than ours in Minnesota due to a prey species that looks like a miniature white-tailed deer. The lynx easily brings down these small deer which are about the size of a medium-sized dog. Some of the owls were so well-camouflaged that we had to search the enclosure for a while before we found them. We went into the children's area where they had the usual goats and chickens which we passed quickly to get to the moose calves. As I scratched one of the two on the head, he looked at me with a docile gaze. I still can't believe I petted a moose.
After a pizza dinner, we went to see Peter Hedlund and his family. Peter is a world-class nyckelharpa player who has visited Minneapolis several times to give concerts, workshops, and lessons. He plays one of Sören's nyckelharpas. We had coffee with Peter and his wife Karin and son Jonas. Peter played a few tunes on the new harpa and he said he thought it sounded great. He also commented, unprompted, that he thought it looked nice too; it wasn't over-decorated.
Hello from Finland! It has been quite rainy here. We have had only a handful of sunny days in the month since I arrived, and today is one of them, so I will try to get outside for a few hours this afternoon. Because of the wet weather, Eli and I have had lots of time to practice, practice, and practice. We have been learning to play the traditional Finnish instruments called kantele and jouhikko. More on that some other time. For now, I would like to introduce you to my friend Sören Åhker and tell about my week in Sweden when we finished my nyckelharpa.
P.S. This story got a little longer than I had originally intended, and I didn't actually write it in one afternoon. I hope you find the web links informative -- locating them is one of the things I like about writing about my adventures in this format. I just wanted to give a heads-up in the beginning of this message that it might take a while to read.
If you're wondering what a nyckelharpa is, the American Nyckelharpa Association's website
http://www.nyckelharpa.org/resources/index.html has a concise yet thorough answer. For a video, this Youtube clip is a good one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZsUdLzdTdE A brief part of this clip includes someone playing a hurdy-gurdy which is the instrument with the crank. It is a relative of the nyckelharpa.
My friend Elise Peters from Minneapolis put a nyckelharpa in my hands for the first time (maybe in 1999) at a Swedish Elderhostel program where we were teaching Swedish language and culture. http://clvweb.cord.edu/prweb
In 2001, I borrowed a harp from a member of the Twin Cities Nyckelharpalag (group) for a year. After playing it nearly every day that year, I knew I wanted to get my own instrument. When the Nyckelharpalag started putting plans together for a nyckelharpa building class to be held in Minneapolis in November of 2002, I was one of the first to sign up. I wanted to build the instrument that I would play. Sören Åhker was the master builder who taught that workshop.
Sören is widely acclaimed as Sweden's best full-time nyckelharpa builder. He started building nyckelharpas full-time in 1999, and this summer he built Nyckelharpa #100. Also this past summer, one of his recent creations won first place in the annual midsummer harpa builder's competition. http://www.sorenahker.com/eng/eindex.htm
In 2001, I borrowed a harp from a member of the Twin Cities Nyckelharpalag (group) for a year. After playing it nearly every day that year, I knew I wanted to get my own instrument. When the Nyckelharpalag started putting plans together for a nyckelharpa building class to be held in Minneapolis in November of 2002, I was one of the first to sign up. I wanted to build the instrument that I would play. Sören Åhker was the master builder who taught that workshop.
Sören is widely acclaimed as Sweden's best full-time nyckelharpa builder. He started building nyckelharpas full-time in 1999, and this summer he built Nyckelharpa #100. Also this past summer, one of his recent creations won first place in the annual midsummer harpa builder's competition. http://www.sorenahker.com/eng
The day after my 1200km bicycle ride in France, I traveled to Sweden to work with Sören in his workshop. I was very glad to stand still for a week and work on my harp!
My flight from Paris to Stockholm was delayed, and I missed the northbound train I had planned to take by 5 minutes. I was able to take a later train, but I didn't get to Sören's town until almost 11PM. Sören is a night owl, as I found out, so this was not a problem for him. I was severely sleep deprived, having slept a total of about 10 hours in the previous five days. When we got to Sören's house, he wanted to decorate the harp and put on the first coat of stain so it could dry overnight. I could see the logic in that. It was about midnight by then. I hadn't been asleep at midnight for any of the last five nights, so what difference did it make?
My flight from Paris to Stockholm was delayed, and I missed the northbound train I had planned to take by 5 minutes. I was able to take a later train, but I didn't get to Sören's town until almost 11PM. Sören is a night owl, as I found out, so this was not a problem for him. I was severely sleep deprived, having slept a total of about 10 hours in the previous five days. When we got to Sören's house, he wanted to decorate the harp and put on the first coat of stain so it could dry overnight. I could see the logic in that. It was about midnight by then. I hadn't been asleep at midnight for any of the last five nights, so what difference did it make?
Sören showed me some examples of decoration on different harps that he had around. For example, the nyckelharpa that his grandfather had built was decorated using tools made from the tiny gears out of a cuckoo clock. The gear-mark had been gently tapped into the soft spruce wood of the top of the instrument. It was beautiful. But we didn't have any old cuckoo clocks around. Sören wood-burns a decorative pattern into the harps that he makes. I didn't want my harp to look too much exactly like Sörens', so we experimented with other wood-burning patterns. Neither of us was satisfied with any of our experiments, so we decided to leave the harpa without any wood-burned decoration. I think the lack of wood-burning accentuates the other decorative elements on the harp, like the key box and tailpiece in the shape of a canoe, and Jock's hand-carved crown-shaped decoration on the tailpiece. (Jock "the Norwegian Termite" had hosted the nyckelharpa building class at his wood carving shop in the Twin Cities.) So Sören and I went on to the stain.
Sören has started using a reddish colored stain which he mixes with the dark brown color that he had previously used exclusively. Most of Sören's harps that I have seen are a bit darker than I wanted, so we diluted the stain with water. At first the color seemed shockingly red, but Sören assured me that it would change once we put the shellac on. The first picture above is me the next day, sanding between coats. You can really see how red the harp was after the stain. The shellac is yellow, so the harp ended up a vibrant reddish-golden hue. One other thing about the shellac: Sören was trying to explain to me that the shellac has lice in it. I did not understand everything he said, but I found it puzzling enough to try to learn more about it: http://www.wisegeek.com/what
So finally the harp got its first coat of stain and I got to sleep!
In the next few days, I sanded, stained, shellacked, and polished the harp body, keyboxes, keys, tailpiece, and tuning pegs. (I had sent the pieces to Sören in May, and he had carved the keys in the few weeks before I arrived and made a few other adjustments.) Sören showed me how to make tangents (the little pegs that press on the string when the player pushes a key), and I made most of them one evening when he was at a meeting for his hunting club. Finally all the pieces were ready.
This is where Sören basically took over putting the harp together, which was fine with me. The final steps have to be completed with precision or else a lot can go wrong when you try to play later. Sören told me lots of stories (in Swedish) during the week. Before he started building nyckelharpas, he had worked in an industry in Uppsala where they manufactured lathes. The tolerances they were working with were measured in thousandths of a millimeter. So the precision involved in making a nyckelharpa is easy for him. And it's only wood, he says.
One of the most exciting moments of putting the harp together was placing the sound post. Nyckelharpa builders have learned a lot about this point from violin makers. The sound post is a very important little dowel that supports the bridge and allows the sound to resonate throughout the instrument. It is placed just behind the bridge on the A-string (highest pitch) side. The wood grain of the sound post goes perpendicular to the grain of the top of the instrument. And it has to be placed through the opening of the f-hole, an opening through which most of us could not put our little finger!
Then Sören made the bridge and cut the slots in it for the strings. Then he showed me how to put the strings on. He has a useful tool that attaches to a cordless drill which turns the tuning pegs of the 12 resonating strings. When all the strings were on, he asked me to go get the tuner out of his nyckelharpa case.
Soon he asked for the bow that hangs in the window in his workshop. "This was one of Eric Sahlström's (legendary nyckelharpa player's) bows. I always play the first notes on a new nyckelharpa with it so it can teach all the new nyckelharpas how to play." Many times in the past several years since I glued the top on, I have tapped on the body of my nyckelharpa to see if I could hear any sound inside. I was unprepared for the fullness and resonance of the sound that came from the instrument when Sören started to play it. I had waited nearly 5 years to hear a noise from this instrument; it was very moving to hear the first notes from it. The movie below is the first tune. The buzz in the background wasn't there in real life; Sören's camera battery was almost out of juice.
Sören's partner Eva teaches school in the small town of Ilsbo. She had asked me earlier in the week if I would come and speak to her 5th and 6th grade English classes. So on Friday, Sören and I took nyckelharpas to school. When Eva introduced me, she did it in such a way that all the students assumed I didn't speak any Swedish. I explained where I am from and why I happened to be in Ilsbo on this particular week. Sören and I played a tune for her students, and then Sören went to play some more tunes for a different class while Eva's students asked me some questions which they had prepared. Then I asked them some simple questions such as what pets they have and what they like to eat. I enjoyed interacting with the students, and we had a funny moment where I almost fell out of my role of not understanding Swedish. One of the students said something funny (in Swedish) about the animals at her house, and everybody laughed, including me (oops!). I remembered some of my first interactions with Swedes included people laughing, but I did not understand what was funny. So I think my language learning has come full-circle -- now I get to laugh too.
Sören and I had spent the better part of the week in the workshop, and we needed some fresh air. The new nyckelharpa was basically done, except for a few fine adjustments. We thought it might like to get out of the house too. On Saturday, we drove about an hour to an animal park that has all the animals found in Sweden. (The nyckelharpa stayed in the car here.) We spent several hours at the park, stopping in front of each enclosure until we saw the animal(s) in it. The park is built on a hill (think downhill ski slope), so even though the enclosures are fairly large, the animals are still quite visible for visitors. I found it interesting that the lynx population in Sweden is much healthier than ours in Minnesota due to a prey species that looks like a miniature white-tailed deer. The lynx easily brings down these small deer which are about the size of a medium-sized dog. Some of the owls were so well-camouflaged that we had to search the enclosure for a while before we found them. We went into the children's area where they had the usual goats and chickens which we passed quickly to get to the moose calves. As I scratched one of the two on the head, he looked at me with a docile gaze. I still can't believe I petted a moose.
After a pizza dinner, we went to see Peter Hedlund and his family. Peter is a world-class nyckelharpa player who has visited Minneapolis several times to give concerts, workshops, and lessons. He plays one of Sören's nyckelharpas. We had coffee with Peter and his wife Karin and son Jonas. Peter played a few tunes on the new harpa and he said he thought it sounded great. He also commented, unprompted, that he thought it looked nice too; it wasn't over-decorated.
Okay, I know this one is getting rather long, and I hope you have time for one more story. A very interesting thing was going on outside of Ilsbo during the week I was there. A group of folks had set up a charcoal "mila" or mound in a clearing in the forest outside of town. They burn a charcoal mound there every four years as a historical re-enactment to educate thmeselves and the public about this piece of Swedish history. Interestingly enough, the history of charcoal and iron production is also directly related to the history of the nyckelharpa. The manor where the annual nyckelharpa world championships are held was developed as an iron forge community in the 1700's and 1800's. If it had not been for the culture of these iron-forging manor communities, the nyckelharpa might not exist today. This website includes a very interesting concise history in english: http://web.vallonbruken.nu/osterbybruk/ Click on the British flag and look for the "History" link.
So the second evening I was in Ilsbo, Sören and I went to see the "mila." His grandfather had been a charcoal maker, so this was of special interest for him. The mound was about fifteen feet high and twenty feet around. It looked like a huge pile of sand that was smoking from several vents near the bottom. Inside, however, the wood was slowly burning in the absence of oxygen. The "mila" caretakers would watch the smoke coming from the vents to let them know if the vents needed to be opened or closed. They had a long rod that they use to prod the pile; if they can poke the rod through, that means the charcoal is done. If they hit something solid, the wood needs to burn more. They determined that part of the mound was done, and one of the guys got on top of the mound with a huge wooden mallet. He pounded on the pile so it compacted there. Sören said sometimes grave (pardon the pun) accidents could happen at this moment if the mound didn't support the weight of the guy and it collapsed. Another bad thing that could happen was if the fire got too much oxygen and actually started to burn up the wood. A lot of work went up in smoke, and Sweden did not have a welfare system or workers' comp in place back then. The mila took about a week to finish, and on the last evening I was there, they had closed down the pile, which was only a little smaller than on the first night. They would let it cool off for three days before they would take it apart and get the charcoal which they sell as grill-charcoal in area stores.
After a wonderful week with Sören and Eva, my new nyckelharpa (no, it doesn't have a name!) and I continued our travels to Finland to join Eli at the Folk Music Institute in Kaustinen.
So the second evening I was in Ilsbo, Sören and I went to see the "mila." His grandfather had been a charcoal maker, so this was of special interest for him. The mound was about fifteen feet high and twenty feet around. It looked like a huge pile of sand that was smoking from several vents near the bottom. Inside, however, the wood was slowly burning in the absence of oxygen. The "mila" caretakers would watch the smoke coming from the vents to let them know if the vents needed to be opened or closed. They had a long rod that they use to prod the pile; if they can poke the rod through, that means the charcoal is done. If they hit something solid, the wood needs to burn more. They determined that part of the mound was done, and one of the guys got on top of the mound with a huge wooden mallet. He pounded on the pile so it compacted there. Sören said sometimes grave (pardon the pun) accidents could happen at this moment if the mound didn't support the weight of the guy and it collapsed. Another bad thing that could happen was if the fire got too much oxygen and actually started to burn up the wood. A lot of work went up in smoke, and Sweden did not have a welfare system or workers' comp in place back then. The mila took about a week to finish, and on the last evening I was there, they had closed down the pile, which was only a little smaller than on the first night. They would let it cool off for three days before they would take it apart and get the charcoal which they sell as grill-charcoal in area stores.
After a wonderful week with Sören and Eva, my new nyckelharpa (no, it doesn't have a name!) and I continued our travels to Finland to join Eli at the Folk Music Institute in Kaustinen.
Take care and have fun!
LynnAnne
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