Book review on Scandinavian folk hymns

Spiritual Folk Singing. Nordic and Baltic Protestant
Traditions. Kristen Sass Bak, Svend Nielsen
(eds.). Denmark, Forlaget Kragen 2006, 284 pp.

In Vol 36 - Electronic Journal of Folklore, edited by Mare Kõiva & Andres Kuperjanov and published by: FB and Media Group of Estonian Literary Museum.

Home page is at http://www.folklore.ee/

Money grafs. This:

A collection of articles this extensive and of this
quality on the Nordic and Baltic spiritual folk song
has been long expected. The nearly 300-page volume
features articles by ten authors on spiritual
folk singing in Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark,
Norway, the Faeroe Islands, Island and Lithuania.
Two attached CDs of audio samples of the spiritual
folk song repertoire of all the countries discussed
in the collection contribute to the high value
of the publication.

And this:

In the collection, two layers of the spiritual folk singing tradition are discussed. Firstly, scholars have taken interest in the popular variations of Lutheran hymn tunes, disseminated in Protestant European countries, such as the melismatic style, tonality, rhythms, etc. of folk hymns. Secondly, the articles focus on the newer spiritual folk singing tradition, mostly created in the course of the pietistic revival in Northern Europe, particularly in the 17th–18th century in Denmark and Norway. Regardless of historical and social idiosyncrasies, the tradition of all the Baltic and Nordic countries share similarities in the folklorisation of hymns.

Two articles relate to Norway:

Ingrid Gjertsen, Norwegian ethnomusicologist, takes an in-depth look at the musical
tradition of a specific pietistic religious movement, the Hauge movement, which
emerged within the framework of the Lutheran State Church. The revelatory movement,
founded in the early 19th century and still active, has considerably influenced
the traditions and repertoire of Norwegian spiritual singing. The main research focus
of the article is singing as an expressive medium within a particular religious practice,
and an inseparable part of the lives of the given pietistic sect. The main emphasis of
the approach is on the function of singing in different religious, historical and social
contexts.
Irene Bergheim, Norwegian musicologist, has taken interest in the influence of
published hymn tunes on the folk singing tradition in a rural region in Norway. The
author explores a 19th-century collection of hymn tune transcriptions by an amateur
Norwegian musician Knut D. Stafset. This is an interesting collection of more popular
hymn and folk songs of the period. By analysing the compiler’s choice of repertoire, the
principles of notation and the style of variation, the author seeks to answer questions
about the hymn singing tradition, popular among the rural population in the late 19th
century.