Icelandic folk music

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Icelandic folk music includes a number of styles that are together a prominent part of the music of Iceland. When speaking of traditional Icelandic music, there are two very important vocal performance styles, one using the verm kveða and the other syngja. The first is used to perform epic poems, most often the rímur with generally fixed diatonic melodies. The verb kveða is part of a performance practice referred to as kveðskapur or kvæðaskapur. Kveðskapur is also the generic Icelandic term for poetry. The term syngja translates as to sing.

Traditional Icelandic folk music remained widely performed into the last decades of the 19th century, when folk collecting began in the country. However, the advent of Western classical music and other foreign influences in the same period began leading to a decline in traditional music. Later, the arrival of popular music furthered this change; some folk music was recorded between the World Wars, but intense collecting did not begin in earnest until 1958.

[edit] Rímur

Main article: Rímur

Rímur is a kind of epic vocal poem, with fixed diatonic melodies (except in Breiðafjörður, the district where the traditional music is oldest in style, and folk melodies are variable, not based on fixed scales). Rímur melodies (rímnalög, kvæðalög, stemmur) are often standard, and found throughout the country. These epic poems are in a narrative style and use elements of Icelandic literature and folklore; the performers were lauded for their ability to turn a story into verses.

A rímur verse is made up of trochaic lines which use literary techniques like rhyme and alliteration. There are between two and four lines, and a set pattern of syllabic stress and alliteration, which music author Hreinn Steingrímsson describes thusly:

The four-line metres are a combination of two couplets with four stressed syllables in the first line of each, and two such syllables (first and third, second and third, or third and fourth) alliterate with the first stressed syllable of the second line. ^[1]

The earliest known text of a rímur dates to the 14th century; for the subsequent six hundred years, the rímur texts were the most prolifically produced form of Icelandic literature. Rímur melodies date back to publications by folklorist Ólafur Davíðsson and were then collected in the first Icelandic folk music collection, Islenzk Þólög, by Bjarni Þórsteinsson.

[edit] References

• Cronshaw, Andrew (2000). “Waiting for the Thaw”, Broughton, Simon and Ellingham, Mark with McConnachie, James and Duane, Orla (Ed.): World Music, Vol. 1: Africa, Europe and the Middle East. London: Rough Guides, 168-169. ISBN 1-85828-636-0.
• ↑  Steingrímsson, Hreinn. Dorothy Stone and Stephen L. Mosko (eds.): Kvæðaskapur: Icelandic Epic Song.