Thinking about dialects, my personal 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 dialect washed away 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 story-telling can inform musical interpretation.
How much interpretational liberty is allowed to a classical music performer? Leech-Wilkinson forms a critique against the belief among the classical music community where musicians “should be transparent (inaudible) mediums for the composer’s intentions" (Leech-Wilkinson 2023) Expanding his thoughts, “classical musicians are brought up to believe that there is broadly one proper performance of any score, the performance its composer imagined; and that it is their job to produce that” (Leech-Wilkinson 2023). This string of thought is based on a discussion of authenticity that is informing the musical world today. On the other hand, and a bit confusing; an individual performing style is also sought after. Summarizing, the norms of the musical world makes the possible interpretation choices rather narrow.
Accordingly, a performer of contemporary music would typically go to the composer in question to obtain knowledge as to how a score should be authentically rendered in performance. However, the debate of what authenticity in the performance of scored music may entail has also underlined how composers' intentions for performance may be erratic, entirely lacking or, of course, very detailed. But, what about the personal authenticity of the musician, and its consequences for the quality and credibility of the work as performaed?
In this exposition, I explore the notion of story-telling as a fundamental quality in the rendering of a scored composition, and further, that there is a fundamental relation between the rhetorical means in language and in the structuring of music as performed. Further, my artistic PhD project explores the impact of dialect in the formation of an authentic, personal performer's voice. Hence, by learning more about the prosodic patterns in their native dialect, performer's of classical and contemporary music may challenge the norms of fidelity to the composer's intentions, and instead turn to one's own personal experiences of storytelling as a source for artistic experimentation.
This exposition-draft discusses how historical analogue voice recordings of Swedish story-tellers and their dialect have a capacity to inform and inspire musical interpretation, by activating and re-vitalising aspects of a performer's individual dialect. The archival recordings are in many ways marked by time and the archival touch, nevertheless, by returning to them from an artistic research perspective we can bring them to life again, and thus, create new micro-stories.
This exposition will be completed with professional audio-recordings, providing detailed examples of the relation between the prosodic qualities in the archive materials and the musical shaping in the author's flute performances.