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Music of Introspection

by Catherine Madsen

The soft, melodic screech of a willow flute. A woman’s voice lilting nonsense syllables like birdsong. The hypnotic phrases of a dance tune on Hardanger fiddle. An atmosphere of security and confidence amid the perils of nature. As an introduction to Norwegian folk music, the 1991 sampler album (Nordic Song) can hardly be bettered. Its selection of fiddle tunes, ballads and lullabies is drawn from recordings by leading performers in the Norwegian folk revival that began in the 1980s. Kirsten Bråten Berg’s landmark recording of the mysterious (Heiemo and the Water Sprite) is a high point, and there are several tracks by the extraordinary soprano . The album notes speak of the “tradition of dark introspection” in Norwegian music—the music of a people accustomed to long winters, dark forests, and a hard life of farming and fishing. (This is not even to mention the Reformation legacy of a brooding Lutheran conscience, which still leaves its traces in the country’s musical culture.) The album not only offers some haunting music but initiates us into a mood.

The Oslo Kammerkor’s 2010 album (Struggle) takes the mood in a particular direction. Conductor Håkon Daniel Nystedt layers classical choral music of Scandinavia and Russia with Norwegian folk tunes and hymns, finding resonances between the two repertoires in their quality of ‘lengsel’, longing. Some of the juxtapositions are striking: one of the finest tracks on the album puts the traditional ballad in harmonic tension with Edvard Grieg’s “Blegnet, Segnet” (Faded, Fallen). Both are songs about the death of a young woman; as the chromatic dissonances build to an excruciating climax, the listener endures the full range of dread, shock and mourning. Other pieces on the album speak of other longings—the longing for God, for integrity in love, for rescue from adversity, for spiritual relief and tranquility. As sometimes happens when a work of art fully comprehends an emotion, the album both expresses and appeases the longing, if only for a little while.

Among the eminent soloists on the ��ٳٰ�����” album is , whose subtle interpretations of old pietist hymns have influenced generations of singers. More recently, Kim Rysstad’s 2023 album (Wayward Child) has recast some of these same hymns for an age that longs—in a human sense if not in a strictly religious one—for unity and reconciliation. Rysstad has become one of the foremost interpreters of Norwegian traditional folksongs, but his first musical passion was for ; on this album he sensitively inflects his own vocal tradition with that of gospel music, with its long historical weight of earthly anguish and spiritual trust. His rendering of (Jesus, to taste your sweet union) is sung in a language that relatively few people speak, but in an idiom that the whole world can recognize. The pietist hymns could luxuriate in sentimentality, threaten hellfire, or be rapt with joy; sometimes they simply disclose the broken and contrite heart.

It seems inevitable that the connoisseurs of dark introspection would eventually be drawn to the songs of Leonard Cohen. The 1993 album ” (If the Moon Had a Sister: Cohen in Norwegian) presents twelve translations of Leonard Cohen songs, all worthy of their originals. Most Norwegians these days speak English perfectly well, but the compulsion to translate a poet’s work into one’s own language signals a high degree of devotion. There are no shortcuts in translating a song: it has to rhyme and scan and be singable, and the labor reveals unexplored potentialities in the original lyrics. When we hear the refrain of as —“Dance me between body and spirit”—we know we’re in good hands.

As A. E. Housman in 1896, melancholy in art is fortifying; if we can handle it in a poem or a song or a play, we’re better equipped to handle it in real life. Even as winter turns toward spring and the days lengthen and we start to dream of the birds’ return, the music of introspection is worth keeping near at hand; it can sustain as nothing else can.

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