Exposition-draft:


Ann Elkjär, Musikhögskolan Ingesund

PhD student LTU

 

Thinking about dialects, my experience is always a feeling of loss: As a child I spoke in Fryksdalsmål, a dialect from the region of Värmland. The dialect is renowned for its singing, musical qualities, which is sometimes stated as one of the reasons for the very strong oral storytelling tradition within Värmland. Today, as a professional flautist living in Gothenburg, some of my dialectal speech disappeared over the years. However, I do believe that my playing and musicianship is influenced by the dialect and story-telling from Värmland in several ways. With this exposition-draft, I would like to address the question on how dialectal speech can create new musical material. 

(And affect musical gestures?)


This exposition-draft presents a collaboration between me and composer Ida Lundén. In a series of workshops starting in August 2022, we set out to explore how historical analogue voice recordings of Swedish story-tellers and their dialect, in so many ways marked by time and the archival touch, have the capacity to bring forth new musical material, and thus, create new micro-stories. 


Furthermore, the overarching aim with this exposition is to discuss how performer-composer collaboration through artistic research may provide novel perspectives on the use of archival audio recordings, and by that bringing them to life. 


The collaboration is an ongoing project, where the new work by Ida Lundén will be premiered at Atalante, Göteborg, the 24th of February 2024. After the premier concert, a possible exposition for VIS will be completed with video documentation from the concert as well as the full analysis and results of the project. 


Follow this link to see the a preliminary documentation of the process:

The process: From archival recordings to new musical material

 

Background


Ann Elkjär and composer Ida Lundén met regularly for exploratory workshops during a full year, for a thorough investigation into old archival voice recordings from Värmland. The aim of their explorations was to create a joint understanding of the musical gestures in dialectal storytelling, and thus to create a library for musical material, from where a new work for flute could be derived.

 

The new work for flute and objects will be performed for the first time in Feb. 2024. It builds on the voice of Karin Turesson, recorded in Gunnarskog, Värmland, in 1958.

About ISOF's archival voice recordings

 

The Institute for Language and Folklore (Isof) is a government authority that builds and collects knowledge about Swedish language and culture (2023). In their archives, they have a rich collection of voice recordings of Swedish dialects. Whereas the first recordings were made in the late 19th century, the major part of the collection was recorded in the 40s and 50s, with the clear ambition to save the Swedish dialects for the future. The recordings were made in a mobile studio, built in a re-made Volvo. The recordings are now digitalized and open-access. 


Even at the time the recordings were made, they were in a kind of retro-perspective, as the interviewers often are asking questions about former times. In each village they traveled to, they always asked for the best local story-tellers. This has made the archive of Isof full of stories from the past, that today can unwrap the hidden fragments of history.

Above: Saving the dialects for the future, memory from recording session (ISOF xxxx)

To the left: The mobile recording studio in 1947 (ISOF 2023)

Choosing the right voice from the archives


During the workshop process, we decided to choose one voice recording to center our experimenting process around. This had to be a person that seemed to be enjoying the perhaps stressful situation, so that the voice could bring out the musical gestures.


After listening to many files from the ISOF archives, we chose the voice of Karin Turesson (ISOF, 2023) Karin has got a voice with characteristic sonority, she is a confident story teller, and speaks in the melodic dialect of the western parts of Värmland. 


In the audio file below, a short part of the archival recordings with Karin Turesson from ISOF:

About story-telling


Story-telling is one of the fundamental forms for communication between human beings. This oral tradition gives us guidance to “describe our self, our family, our ancestors, our history, and our place in the living world” (Isof 2023, my translation). For many researchers, storytelling is such an important part of our social networking, that they refer to our human race as a “homo narrans” (Ranke 1965/1978; Niles 1999; Jackson 2002; Frank 2010; Cruikshank 1998, in Alf Arvidsson & Katarzyna Wolanik Boström 2022, 7). 


Story-telling in Värmland:

Värmland is often described as the promised land of poetry and stories. (xxxx xxx) Prominent Swedish authors as Selma Lagerlöf, Gustav Fröding and Göran Tunström not only sometimes wrote in dialect, but their authorship is also heavily built upon the story-telling tradition.

The pilot study of Wilhelm Larsson's musical rhetorics

 

In the pilot study "Wilhelm Larsson's musical rhetorics", I analyzed an archival dialect recording with teacher Wilhelm Larsson from Sunne, made around 1940.

The aim was to search for how a good story teller uses musical qualities to convey his story in a convincing way. The results showed that Wilhelm Larsson uses musical qualities in several ways as a storyteller:  


  • He uses short pauses just before the most important part of a sentence
  • He uses different pitches to sound imitate others
  • He has got special "thinking-notes" that often are centered around a certain pitch
  • When telling stories about something humorous, he uses bigger intervals within the sentence

All his different tools related to musical gestures, made sense to me as a flautist, and I recorded the French flute solo by Euguene Bozza using Wilhelm Larsson's musical rhetorics.

 

The pilot study was presented on a digital seminar by Karlstad university in autumn 2021, and later recorded on Youtube.

 

By starting our exploratory process by implementing the results from the pilot study, Ida Lundén and I could create a joint understanding on the relation between musical gestures and dialectal speech. 

 

 

 

 

 

Aims and Research Questions

 

The artistic research project within my doctoral studies at LTU, aims to explore the hidden musical elements in speech, prosody, and dialects, and thus to form a deepened understanding of musical interpretation and creation. The preliminary research questions that inform my research project are

 

  • What musical elements can be found in dialectal story-telling, and how can they best be identified and described?
  • How can such musical elements be used in collaborative compositions?
  • How can such musical elements inform performative interpretation of scored music?
  • How can methods for teaching music performance in HME be derived from these artistic practices?

 

 

Results 


The analysis of the material, builds on reflective journal writings and video documentation from the workshops. The analysis process will be completed by the end of February 2024.


The preliminary findings show that 

  • collaborations...
  • the affordances of the flute as a storyteller...
  • the Fryksdalen dialect is capable of carrying musical gestures...

References:

CV and contact information Ann Elkjär