Music and history of my home place as starting point

Recollection: It is mid-July and I am alone at the Stjärnsund mansion to make a recording for Liza. Just across the yard from here is Päronbo, the house where I grew up. I see the window of my childhood room between the trees in the park. The fountain, the gravel walks, the park, they all live inside me. I have set up my recording devices and am ready to start. Listening to the room through my headphones gives me shivers. I think of the histories of this old building and its past residents. Some of them are commonly acknowledged as ‘ghosts’ by the village’s inhabitants. I expect to hear the eighteenth-century Lady Emerentia’s steps on the stairs, water running in the old pipes, and noises from the kitchen downstairs. Still as a grown-up, I feel uneasy being alone in the building and my senses stay alert until I step out in the sunshine again, closing the heavy door behind me. Stories about the mansion influenced my view of my homeplace and shaped my understanding of my time here as one unit in a long chain of lives. The chain is not only centred around stories of ghosts, it also includes music, love, sorrow, and death. Back at Päronbo, I write to Liza about my experiences, about the portraits on the wall and the trembling feeling of listening to the past. From her reply, I know she understands what I want to tell her through those recordings. ‘Enchanted, finely spun stuff’, she writes. ‘You are really inside this music I think. […] I look forward to listening again and dreaming with this music […] You know very well that I like stories’. (Lim, email to the author, July 27^th, 2021)

I grew up in the small ironworks village of Stjärnsund in the region of Dalarna, Sweden, in one of the houses adjoining the eighteenth-century Stjärnsund mansion. In Dalarna, a central place in traditional Swedish folk culture, the polska dance is at the core of the traditional music in ceremonies and everyday life. I did not experience the cultural bloom of the traditional music I learnt as a young violinist; it happened the nineteenth century. By then, tunes were collected and notated by enthusiasts, to be preserved and passed on as cultural heritage to coming generations of players, dancers and audiences. The music’s main vehicle of generational transfer, however, was oral transmission. As an effect, the identity and dialect of a specific polska came to depend on the local village it originated from, as well as on the practices of the fiddlers playing it.

In my adolescence, I engaged with traditional music by playing with local carriers of the tradition, listening to tape cassette recordings and exploring collections of notated tunes from the region. Traditional music was an important part of my music making. It acted as a complement to the classical music I studied and became a connection to a tradition I was geographically situated in. I engaged in the folk music tradition especially together with my younger sister, Stina. From a young age, we actively performed together in various contexts: at church concerts in our village, at parties, to dance, at weddings, business conferences, in the extended setting of a folk-rock band, in music competitions, and on tour in the Swedish settlements of America. We both played classical music and studied the canonised classical repertoire along with the traditional music, often mixing in elements of classical music, tango, or jazz into our concert programmes. I left Stjärnsund and Dalarna to study classical violin in Stockholm when I was in my twenties. I never moved back, but frequently visit Stjärnsund.

Fiddler Näktergal, or Kers Erik Ersson, from the village of Dalsbyn, Säter, was a local carrier of tradition, born in the early nineteenth century (Norman 1977). The tunes Näktergal played were passed on to younger generations of fiddlers and have always served as great inspiration for me. Some of them figure in the recordings I made for Liza on that summer’s day. As we will see, one specific polska played by Näktergal would come to influence aspects of the work, especially present in an abstracted way in the third movement. It does not figure as a direct musical quote in the piece and is not meant to be detected as a specific melody. Rather, recalling the tune acts as a way to access embodied patterns of ornaments and playing techniques.

Following my suggestion to Liza, the framework of the shared work on Speculative Polskas is my background of playing traditional music from my home region in Dalarna. As a starting point, in July 2021, I decided to record some polskas at the Stjärnsund mansion and send them to Liza. Not only did the eighteenth-century building close to where I grew up provide a beautiful acoustic and atmosphere. For me, it also carried significance as a place of connection to my past, to the folk music tradition and to histories of lives before mine.