root salad
Rydvall Mjelva Pioneering the combination of nyckelharpa and
hardanger fiddle. Andrew Cronshaw hears how.
n my fR 369 piece about the Eric Sahlström Institute in Tobo, Sweden, I mentioned that while I was there the nyckelharpa and hardanger fiddle duo of Swede Eric Rydvall and Norwegian Olav Luksengård Mjelva were teaching, giving a concert and playing for dancing. Indeed Eric himself studied at the ESI and at Stockholm’s Royal College of Music.
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There’s a magnetic brilliance about their interaction, and with the release of their second album Värdroppar, reviewed and Playlisted in fR 396, it’s time for a bit more about them.
We chatted in the Västerås Concert Hall during the days of the Nordic Showcase, at which Rydvall/Mjelva were performing, and Swedish Folk and World Music Awards Gala where Eric was playing in the band Nordic. Olav, from Røros, is also in several other leading bands and projects including Nor- wegian/Swedish SVER and the Nordic Fid- dlers Bloc, and the duo’s first CD, Isbrytaren, was Album of the Year in the 2013 Awards.
“We started about five or six years ago”, begins Olav. “It was kind of my idea to bring the two instruments together, because I’d never heard them in a duo set- ting before. I didn’t know if it would work, or if it would be an interesting project to do, but I contacted Eric and he was eager to try. My idea was that it should focus on tra- ditional music, not contemporary, and I play music from the area of Hallingdal, so that was my main option.”
From Eric’s side came Swedish material, naturally largely from the nyckelharpa tra- dition. The new CD opens with a dazzling version of Eric Sahlström’s Akademipolska, composed not all that long ago. “It was very natural to bring in music from Eric Sahlström”, Olav explains, “because for me that’s one of the strongest sources of tradi- tional nyckelharpa music, even though it’s quite new-composed. Nyckelharpa players play his music, so therefore I find it like a new tradition. The idea is to take a tradi- tional song and some small things happen with it. We’re not looking for changing, we’re just playing the tunes, but since we are musicians of our time we put our time into it. Often, though, when we try to arrange a tune we find that putting in too many new things takes something away.”
Eric concurs. “I play with other bands, where the arrangement is the main goal, not the tune. Here the tune is the thing. It’s not that one approach is better than the other; it’s just that in this project our focus is on the traditional tune.”
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more difficult tunes – at least they’re more difficult for us! On the first album they were good tunes, but not the hardest, not high-ranking tunes among fiddlers, where- as now it’s getting up into the top rank.”
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“I think one very good thing with this duo is that I have no respect for hardanger fiddle tradition!” laughs Eric. “Because I don’t know anything about it. I’m a musician from another tradition; when I hear Olav’s music I don’t know what I shouldn’t do. And that’s very good, because… I still don’t know much about it, but I think there are a lot of rules as to what to do with the music, and that’s also why the music is so pure, so virtu- osic, because people are so serious about what they should do with it. When you pre- sent this fantastic music to a musician who doesn’t know the rules you suddenly get a second voice, on a tune which has been played for ever in another way.”
We talk about the microtones that are in the hardanger fiddle tradition but hard to achieve on a nyckelharpa. “Unfortunate- ly they’re not a big part of many of the tra-
or the second album,” adds Olav, “we really tried to chal- lenge ourselves a bit more than on the first; playing
ditions any more”, explains Olav. “Most of my teachers, modern teachers, don’t play much on quarter-tones, so I never learned then. But on the tunes I learn from record- ings, I play like the old fiddlers, and then I play quarter-tones. I can’t imagine them without; I wouldn’t know which note to pick – the lower or the higher – if I didn’t play the quarter-tone.”
“But it’s not really an issue for us in the duo”, adds Eric. “And I think what takes the music away from sounding samey is the micro-ornaments, the grace-notes.”
“One thing is, before a concert we spend fifteen minutes tuning, tuning, tuning. It takes so much time to tune the instruments together until it feels right. And it’s also a way to get prepared for the concert.”
Both have performed a fair bit outside Sweden and Norway in other line-ups, but so far the duo hasn’t. “But we’re at the time when we’re trying to change that and play more outside. We’re going to the States in November for two weeks; that’s kind of the start for what we want to do, more touring in other places.”
You heard Storebráten on fRoots 59.
www.rydvallmjelva.com
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Photo: Andrew Cronshaw
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