Dan Lundberg: Swedish folk Music - from village greens to concert platforms
Festivalisation

FESTIVALISATION When summing up the development of Swedish folk music during the latter part of the twentieth century, the first thing one notices is the new ensemble forms and instruments. European folk music groups (Irish, Greek and Hungarian, for example) together with historic ensembles, jazz bands and pop groups have influenced the development of new forms of music-making in groups. In the fiddlers’ tradition, forms of polyphony have developed, partly in the direction of a more advanced harmonic ideal with part-playing and functional harmonic accompaniment, partly towards older types of sound ideals with drones, “coarse and refined” (playing in octaves) and various types of modal harmonisations. As a background to both group music-making and the development of the fiddlers’ tradition, there is an underlying regional specialisation and historicism, alongside a situation where individual musicians more and more obviously become models for new generations. However, the most significant changes in folk music-making concern new performing arenas. The fiddlers’ competitions at the beginning of the century are a part of the transformation of folk music to concert platform music. The fact that folk music has established itself during the latter half of the century among media-based music genres has resulted in a further step in the same direction. Over the years the fiddlers’ competitions have developed into rallies and festivals, and from the 1970s onwards these festivals have become enormously important as a forum for folk music. Folk music festivals vary both in size and in form, but “festivalisation” as a phenomenon is a fairly uniform occurrence throughout the Western world. In Sweden, for instance, the Falun Folk Music Festival has been organised on an annual basis since 1985. The event is marketed as an international folk music festival. At the festival in 1989, musicians from Sweden and the other Nordic countries took part, as well as musicians from Sardinia, Hungary, Estonia, Azerbaijan, Mali, the United States, the Dominican Republic, India etc, etc. The festival’s 34,000 visitors could choose between 103 programme items in four days. More than half the festival audience came from other parts of Sweden and from abroad, and had used part of their holiday to visit the festival. The majority of the visitors had also visited other festivals earlier in the summer. The major festival organisers co-ordinate their festival calendars so that both music groups and visiting audiences can take part in several festivals in succession. The geographical and cultural medley presented at the festival was also reflected in the constellations of the individual groups. The prestigious folk music slogans of the old days — national representation, tradition and authenticity — no longer apply to festivals. Now the emphasis is on modernity, diversity and variation. Festivalisation, concerts and medialisation are all parts of a process where the boundaries between musical genres and categories of musicians become harder and harder to distinguish. Maybe in the not too distant future we will be forced to discard the labels “folk music” and “popular music”, which are already problematical. When what we today call folk music focuses less and less on reproduction and more and more on innovation, then it would seem that we have returned to the order which existed before the term folk music was first introduced at the end of the eighteenth century. Perhaps it is time to dispense with Johann Gottfried von Herder’s prefix folk and simply talk about music.

Festivalisation
Dan Lundberg: Swedish folk Music - from village greens to concert platforms