Another important early event in Danish music history is the establishment of the “stadsmusikant” (“town musician”) system, where musicians were officially appointed by the central government to serve each town. Although the term seems to have originated around 1600, the phenomenon goes back even further, as far as we know, and continued until the introduction of freedom of trade in the mid-1800s. 

Town musicians in each city were granted the licence and exclusive right to perform music by the central government. In the beginning, musicians were even imported into the system from other countries, especially Germany. This system played a crucial role in shaping Danish folk music and local music life, as it centralised the control of music, taking away local communities’ power to define what music was and who could perform it. Although local folk music surely continued to exist, the top-down regulation likely jeopardised the roots of folk traditions.

A third significant event, as addressed elsewhere in these texts, is the emergence of the folk high school movement around the mid-1800s, a time marked by the rise of national romanticism. The movement is based on a vision of educating the common people, including, in retrospect, the important point that education and enlightenment would be essential for a broad representative democracy to function. Although Denmark’s constitution is almost as old as the folk high school movement, democracy remained inaccessible to women, the poor, and servants (etc.), until as late as 1917. (In this light, it is a credit to the folk high school movement that Denmark managed to go through the tumultuous years from 1900 to 1945 without more than a few per cent of the votes going to nondemocratic parties at any time.) Højskolesangbogen (The Folk High School Songbook) was first published in 1894 in response to a growing contemporary interest in communal singing and national cultural identity. Many composers from the generation around Carl Nielsen, Oluf Ring, and others deliberately sought to capture a “Danish” sound in their songs. The “Danish” sound is perceived in the music as being associated with some of the known songs from the Middle Ages (the geographical origins of which remain uncertain). The result is – not unlike what was seen literarily in Finland with the “collection” of the Kalavala epic – that a few artists in a particular generation came to define the sound of Danish (prehistoric) identity, despite the fact that this sound is not specifically closely related to the known Danish folk music at the time. This may sound very polemical, but Carl Nielsen’s songs, which today are perceived as ultra-Danish, have an equally audible kinship with Mozart and Brahms, as with fiddler folk music such as Totur from Vejle. The point here is not that the music is not good, nor that it does not sound ‘Danish’ (whatever that means), but that the sound of “Danish musical identity” is a historical construction, a fabricated prehistory, shaped by the circumstances outlined above, in the period between 1875 and 1925.

A fourth, crucial factor in the cultural history of Danish identity is the way in which the Modern Breakthrough (det moderne gennembrud) unfolded in Denmark. Slightly different from the development for our Scandinavian neighbours, and perhaps influenced by some of the conditions mentioned above, the development of the Modern Breakthrough cemented the perception of a high–low dichotomy in certain Danish circles, where the international, the modern, is perceived as having high rank, while the local, the traditional, is delegitimised. 

Whatever national pride in cultural heritage remained was, from this point, considered culturally unimportant. To put it polemically: positions of authenticity were devalued and gave way to the endeavour to keep up with what was happening in Paris and London.

It seems obvious to me that the seismic rift between, on the one hand, the folk high school movement’s idea of Danish identity as heritage and, on the other hand, the perception of Georg Brandes’ version of the Modern Breakthrough as an international commitment to the present, continues right up to the present day, and that the discussion can still inflame tempers. (I allow myself to consider the controversy surrounding the establishment of the Art Foundation in 1964, with Rindalism as the anti-elitist response – the echoes of which are still felt today – as a highly related, if not entirely parallel, schism.)

Whether the local cultural experience was delegitimised primarily due to the accessibility of the flatlands, or the centralisation of cultural life, or Brandes’ positions, or the artistic/cultural naivety of the folk high school movement, is obviously a question too simplistically posed. My intention is not to take a stance on the conflict outlined above but to point out that the perception of a contradiction between, on the one hand, the concept of Art as practised in, for example, contemporary artistic education, and on the other hand, Højskolesangbogen, can be said to trace its roots back to at least the end of the 19th century, where the Modern Breakthrough and the songbook both emerged as very different responses to the big questions of that era. And that the background outlined above has contributed to the fact that even today we can see how the discourse around Højskolesangbogen, and the whole community singing phenomenon, is quite separate from the conversation about what constitutes art and art music. A mutual blind spot, one could almost say.

To understand Danish identity from a cultural-historical perspective, there are several factors and events that I believe are relevant to consider. While this text does not aim to offer in-depth academic research, I will outline some reflections that I have frequently discussed with professional colleagues in the arts, both in Denmark and abroad, over the past several years.

The first ‘event’ is that the Ice Age created a landscape so open, so accessible, so devoid of physical barriers, that all regions of the country became accessible to external influence centuries earlier than our northern neighbours, who are surrounded by mountains, rivers, and vast forests. This openness meant that Denmark’s cultural fate resembles that of the Netherlands – we became ‘globalised’ 200 years before the term even existed. Trade and information flowed relatively unhindered in and out of the country. Local folklore cultures and traditions thus found themselves in fierce competition with international influences. In 1820, Denmark’s cultural situation was vastly different from places like Norway or Wales.

Danmark nu blunder den lyse nat (lyrics: Thøger Larsen / melody: Oluf Ring) - studio recording, without audience, The Village, September 2022 

Closing (polemic) questions

Wasn’t it only the advent of electric streetlamps, asphalted roads and the welfare society that eradicated the trolls from Danish nature and mythology? Or were they perhaps actually driven to extinction much earlier? Might we simply not have been sufficiently isolated from the world to keep them alive? 

Does Denmark’s early globalisation and the disenchantment of folklore go hand in hand? Are the small country’s extensive connectedness to the world and the preservation of local mythological spirituality just sometimes mutually exclusive?

Could it be argued that the musical approach through which the songs in this project are reconstituted consists of an insistence that music can be spiritual, mystical, potentially life-changing, etc.? And that within the project there is a kind of collision between a Scandinavian welfare society’s perception of cultural consumption (it-would-be-nice-to-sing-a-song) and a contemporary artistic how-about-reconsidering-your-life approach to how and why the material should be transformed?

Could the project be retold as an attempt to decolonise the sound of the Danish community singing tradition – a less schooled, less controlled, more common vocal sound, situated in a more complex, darker soundscape? Is the project’s destabilising approach to the tradition also a critique of the notion of ‘the good old days’? (Good for whom? Good in what way?) Can we thus speak of a listening-expectation discrepancy linked to an art-concept discrepancy? On one hand is the notion in the Højskolesangbogen songbook tradition of a quasi-Christian edification in the popular community, regardless of how modern the society is. On the other hand is a conception of art that asserts it must and should include darkness and pain to provide space for our sadness, freely after Nick Cave.^[1]

And, by the way: Who owns these songs? Are the songs fully handed over to the community when there are still copyright restrictions on how they can be recorded? (In the project, compositions by living composers had to be excluded from the published works because the changes were too extensive for their taste. In other words, legally, these songs do not belong to the people until 70 years after the composer’s death.)^[2] Can we argue that, in this light, it becomes apparent that there is no legal broad permission for the songs in Højskolesangbog to be freely interpreted by all?

^[1]Nick Cave, “Those songs that speak of Love without having within their lines an ache or a sigh are not Love Songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as Love Songs and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our Godgiven right to be sad and the airwaves are littered with them.” “The Secret Life of the Love Song,” in The Complete Lyrics 1978–2007 (London: Penguin, 2007), 7–8. 

^[2]As a parallel example in the domain of fiction: It is generally not allowed to make a school theatre play based on the Star Wars universe, since the story and the characters are the intellectual property of the producers. The same is the case for a lot of fictional universes in the 20th and 21st centuries: Disney, Tolkien, Hunger Games, Harry Potter, etc. In general, these are narratives that a lot of children grow up with, but without the right to re-enact or reinterpret the narratives.