There really was a Per Spelmann ...

... but I don't know if he had only one cow!

[Click on embedded video below for trad and heavy metal versions of the favorite children's song by Norwegian metal band Glittertind, with lyrics and translation.]



Olav Sæta says in history of North Gudbrandsdalen [search under "Blomstringstid på 1800-tallet"] in his Feletradisjoner i Oppland (1992), that he was named Per Kringelhaugen, and he played with Fel-Jakup (Fiddling Jacob) [see Jakup Lom in Norsk Lexikon] and Else-Lars [Lars Kjørren 1824-1894], celebrated traditional fiddlers. Sæta has this:

... Per Kringelhaugen (1830-1907) fra Bøverdalen, også kalt Per Spelmann. Han lærte først av Per Bergom og Jo Lilleødegard, og etter hvert også av Else-Lars. Per Spelmann var den som f6r mest i lag med Fel-Jakup de var bl.a. 13 ganger i følge til Romsdalsmarten. Det må bety at Jakup verdsatte Per Spelmann høyt, og det var Per som i første rekke førte hans spill videre da Fel-Jakup gikk bort i 1876.

Ola Gjerdet (f. 187 1) hørte Per Spelmann og Gamel-Sjugur spille i lag i 1880-åra (Erling Kjøk etter Hans Wiker). Han sa at de to og Else-Lars spelte likt, men la til at Per Spelmann kunne spelle på mange måter.

Da Jakup var borte, ble Per den ruvende spelemannsskikkelsen i distriktet. Det ser ut til at han på sommerstid stort sett dro bygdimellom med fela, men at han nå for det meste holdt seg i Ottadalen (Flå 1963)..

Google translates:

... Per Kringelhaugen (1830-1907) from Bøverdalen, also called Peter Fiddler. He taught first by Per Bergom and Jo Lilleødegard, and eventually by Else-Lars. Per the Fiddler was the most f6r together with Fel-Jakup, they were such 13 times, according to Romsdalsmarten. This must mean that Jakup valued Per Fiddler high, and it was Peter who primarily brought his game on when Fel-Jakup passed away in 1876.

Ola fence (b. 187 1) heard Per the Fiddler and the Gamel-Sjugur play together in the 1880s (Erling Kjøk after his Wiker). He said that the two and Else-Lars played the same, but added that Peter Fiddler could concertina in many ways.

When Jakup were away, As the fiddler towering figure in the district.It appears that he was in the summer pretty much went built between the fiddle, but he mostly remained in Ottadalen (Flå 1963).

As with so many master fiddlers of the 1800s, there was a body of legend about Peter Fiddler. This from the message board VGDebatt on the Olso newspaper Verdens Gang website, on a thread asking people to name their favorite fiddle player [search Favorittfelespelar - Musik- VG Nett Debatt].

On Aug. 13, 2010 [at 8:51], New_Romatic wrote:

Min favorittfelespiller er helt klart Veslefrikk. Han hadde en helt unik evne til å trollbinde sitt publikum. Jeg har også sansen for Per Spelmann, som var så glad i felen sin at han byttet bort en ku for å få den tilbake. Da snakker vi keep it real.

And Google translates:

My favorite fiddle player is clearly Veslefrikk. He had a unique ability to enchant his audience. I also sense for Peter Fiddler, who was so fond of his fiddle that he traded away a cow to get it back. When we talk keep it real.

Veslefrikk is a fairy tale about a boy who played the fiddle in Asbjørnsen & Moe. To New_Romantic's post, Zinklar replied [at 10:10]:

Eg er òg svak for Per Spelmann, eller Per Kringelhaugen som han eigentleg heitte, i frå Lom. Det var ikkje alle forunt å vera sveinnen hass Fel-Jakup, men det sette sine spor, og Per Spelmann enda som mange andre spelmenn på den tida som ein fordrukken mann. Det er dei som ikkje likar Fel-Jakup som hevder at Per Spelmann var ein mykje gjevare spelmann enn han, og at mykje av Fel-Jakup-tradisjonen eigentleg er Per Spelmann-tradisjon.

Han enda sitt liv då ei avlaus øyk råkte han i hugu med bakføtene sine.

Obviously having a little trouble with the nynorsk, Google translates:

I am also weak for At Fiddler, or Per Kringelhaugen that he actually named, the Lom. It was not all people ever to be Sveinn hass Fel-Jakup, but it put its mark, and Per Fiddler even as many other musicians at the time that a drunken man. There are those who do not like Fel-Jakup claiming that Peter Fiddler was a much gjevare fiddler than he, and that much of the Fel-Jakup tradition actually is Per Fiddler tradition.

He even their lives when a avlaus smoke will be generated råkte he Hugues with his back leg.

There's another legend about Per Spelmann in Aslak 0. Brimi's "Kva skal barnet heite?" posted to Brimi's Blog at Folkemusikk.no:

Per var ein dyktig spelemann og damesjarmør. For dei som ikkje veit det heitte han Per Kringelhaugen, og var frå Bøverdalen i Lom. Han var ein mykje brukt dansespelemann, og ein gong han sat og spelte på ein ball, var det ein gut som vart ståande å sjå på han. I ei pause gjekk guten bort til Per og ville skjenke han ein dram (Merk det i desse kappleikstider: Det var skikk og bruk å skjenke spelemannen). ”Sjå her nå bestefar ska’ du få ein dram hjå me’”, sa guten. Per snudde seg mot han, såg han djupt i augo, og sa: ”Neimen, æ du ein ette’ me du au?”

Google has:

Peter was an accomplished fiddler and lady charmer. For those who do not know it was called Peter Kringelhaugen, and was from Bøverdalen in Lom. He was a very common dance fiddler, and once he sat and played on a ball, it was a boy who stood looking at him. In a break went the boy over to Peter and he would pour a dram (Note that in these times of Major competition: It was the custom to bestow fiddler). "See here now grandfather ska 'you get a nip among me,'" said the boy. Peter turned to him, he looked deep into his eyes and said, "Oh, I'm to continue a 'we can au?"

I'm not sure exactly how to translate his dialect, but it sounds like he was mooching an extra drink from the boy.

Citations in passage from Olav Sæta are in bibliography for Feleverkene in Institut for Musikvitenskap website at University of Oslo [search under "Litteraturliste for feleverkene"].

Flå, L. (1963). "Per Kringelhaugen fra Lom".I: Årbok for Gudbrandsdalen.

Kjøk, J. (1995). A Spelman Saga. Otta.

San Francisco blogger on Natkirken på Strøget

Posted April 10, 2007, on a blog Find and You Shall Seek by "Mystic Seeker" of San Francisco -

"Night Church in Copenhagen" ...

* * *

The first Friday, I attended the 8 PM International Evensong, which was conducted in English. The service consisted of songs, readings, and prayers, with participation by both the clergy and the congregation. There was no Communion. There was a creedal recitation included in the order of service, which I wasn't crazy about, but my reaction to that was simply that I did not participate in that part of it. The reason this service was conducted in English was to accommodate the many tourists who visit Night Church. Of course, late March is not exactly high tourist season in Scandinavia, but to my surprise a steady stream of what I presume to be tourists did come in, watch for a while, and then leave. I was actually rather amazed by all the coming and going--I wouldn't have had enough nerve to just drop in on the middle of a church service and then leave like that. I was sorry to say that the pews were virtually empty of people. Other than the clergy, staff, and choir, and the parade of visitors who came and went, there were only three people who sat through the entire service--myself, my girlfriend, and one other person.

The following Friday, I attended the 10 PM candlelit service. It was conducted in Danish, so I didn't understand much of what was said, but in some ways that might have been a blessing, since I was able to just sit back and enjoy the beauty of the service and the music in the candlelight. The priest, a very tall and slender man with a deep, resonant voice, is the same one who had conducted the International Evensong a week earlier. He may have recognized me from the week before, because after service he asked me where I was from. When I said "San Francisco", he asked me if I lived in Copenhagen now. I said no, and told him I just wanted to check out the service while vacationing. I added that I didn't understand what was said. He laughed and said, "Of course". Danes don't expect foreigners to speak their language.

I really enjoyed the candlelit service a lot. As I left the church walked out into the cold nighttime air, I felt a pleasant glow; I really was glad that I had attended it. If I ever go to Copenhagen again, I will definitely go to the candlelit service at Night Church.

Follows a lengthy post April 9 on the "intellectual failure of orthodox Christianity" and Danish theologians

Vachel Lindsay's meeting with Civil War veteran, old-time fiddle player in west central Illinois

Excerpted from the first of his vignettes in Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (1912). Copied and pasted from Archive.com

[p. 21]

* * * These selections from letters home tell
how I came into Kansas and how I adven-
tured there. The letters were written avow-
edly as a sort of diary of the trip, but their
contents turned out to be something less than
that, something more than that, and some-
thing rather different.

Thursday, May 30, 1912. In the blue
grass by the side of the road. Somewhere
west of Jacksonville, Illinois. Hot sun.



22 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY

Cool wind. Rabbits in the distance. Bum-
blebees near.

At five last evening I sighted my lodging
for the night. It was the other side of a
high worm fence. It was down in the hol-
low of a grove. It was the box of an old
box-car, brought there somehow, without its
wheels. It was far from a railroad. I said
in my heart "Here is the appointed shelter."
I was not mistaken.

As was subsequently revealed, it belonged
to the old gentleman I spied through the
window stemming gooseberries and singing :
"John Brown's body." He puts the car top
on wagon wheels and hauls it from grove to
grove between Jacksonville and the east
bank of the Mississippi. He carries a saw
mill equipment along. He is clearing this
wood for the owner, of all but its walnut
trees. He lives in the box with his son and
two assistants. He is cook, washerwoman
and saw-mill boss. His wife died many
years ago.



I START ON MY WALK 23

The old gentleman let me in with alac-
rity. He allowed me to stem gooseberries
while he made a great supper for the boys.
They soon came in. I was meanwhile as-
sured that my name was going into the pot.
My host looked like his old general, McClel-
lan. He was eloquent on the sins of
preachers, dry voters and pension reformers.
He was full of reminiscences of the string
band at Sherman's headquarters, in which
he learned to perfect himself on his wonder-
ful fiddle. He said, "I can't play slow mu-
sic. I've got to play dance tunes or die."
He did not die. His son took a banjo from
an old trunk and the two of them gave us
every worth while tune on earth: Money
Mush, Hell's Broke Loose in Georgia, The
Year of Jubilee, Sailor's Hornpipe, Baby
on the Block, Lady on the Lake, and The
Irish Washerwoman, while I stemmed goose-
berries, which they protested I did not need
to do. Then I read my own unworthy
verses to the romantic and violin-stirred



24 THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY

company. And there was room for all of
us to sleep in that one repentant and con-
verted box-car.

Friday, May 31, 1912. Half an hour
after a dinner of crackers, cheese and raisins,
provided at my solicitation by the grocer in
the general store and post-office. Valley
City, Illinois. * * *

From Vachel Lindsay. 1914. Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/details/adventureswhilepOOinlind. Italics supplied.

Carolan's Draught - w/links to Pierre Bensusan playing "Shi Bhig Shi Mhor" and a very good tin whistle website

"Carolan's Draught" arranged and played Celtic finger-picking style by Jean Banwarth ... Tablature Trad Magazine n° 120 Tabs book (+ scores) avalaible on line from MusTraDem website.



"Shi Bhig Shi Mhor" played by Pierre Bensusan in a free-form, improvisational style



Wandering Whistler Music Archives has tin whistle lead sheets for both, Carolan's Draught in G and Shi Bhig Shi Mhor in D. This is a great website for sheet music!

"Dagsens auga sloknar ut" - Elias Blix

Find more artists like Torhild Ostad at Myspace Music

Lots of background at Salmebloggen til Leif Haugen - in Norwegian, but w/ a really nice picture of the harbor in Bergen

"Pride of the Springfield Road" - sheet music w/ note on drones and modal harmony

Catchy song from Belfast that I learned from Jim Rainey of the Irish traditional band Craobh Rua (pron. "crave roo-uh") at Common Ground on the Hill. Rainey said Springfield Road is a working-class Catholic neighborhood once dominated by the textile mills, now gone overseas of course; Protestants had a lock on the shipbuilding industry, and Catholics were relegated to working in the mills. This background is reflected in "The Pride of the Springfield Road," but it's a lovely little song about a young couple who hope to get married and work in the mills. Very nice YouTube clip here of Rainey fronting Craobh Rua.

Apparently "The Pride of the Springfield Road" is performed in B dorian in Ireland. At least the sheet music and chord sheet have it so (written as B minor with the 6th - a G - sharped). Music at:

• Sheet music - PDF file of a lead sheet in B dorian on a German website (so H = B natural in the chords above the notes)!
  
• Lyrics and chords - chord progression over the lyrics with a little background below (in English notation so B = B this time) on an Andy Irvine fan site.

The fansite has a link to a very brief, tinny sounding clip of Irvine singing it. It may be the quality of the recording, but I like Craobh Rua's better.

Although the song is sometimes given as traditional, and it's apparently been around Belfast for quite a while, it's usually credited to Andy Irvine of Planxty and the Patrick Street trad supergroup.

Tangent on modes, drones and Irish trad music: Irvine's website has a detailed first-person bio. A couple of extracts follow. One from the early to mid-60s, when he was mostly busking in Dublin and learning traditional music:

But at that time I loved the really old "classic" ballads. Songs like Sir Patrick Spens, The Douglas Tragedy and Edward. Other publications that made a deep impression were Bert Lloyd’s "Penguin Book of English Folk Songs" with lovely modal tunes.

I used to sing them in O’Donoghue’s [pub] in the very early morning in the Men’s toilet, smelling of disinfectant. There was something wrong with the cistern and a drone emanated from somewhere all the years I frequented the place. Singing against a drone is something I love to this day.

I had begun to try to accompany myself on the mandolin some years before and my style was simple. I more or less played along with the tune adding the odd harmony note and half chord as I had learned from records of Old Timey American musicians accompanying themselves on the fiddle. Johnny Moynihan had taught me to tune down the top string of the mandolin—GDAD instead of GDAE which gave echoes of 5-string banjo playing with the top D usually a constant note.

Also Irvine's reason for naming his first duo Sweeney's Men (formed w/ Joe Dolan in Galway in 60s): "... we decided to name ourselves after the pagan king, Suibhne, who was cursed for throwing a pushy cleric’s bell in the lake. We found it quite easy to identify with Sweeney against the power of the clergy in 1960’s Ireland."<

Sinikka Langeland on Bach, drones and 'my mother's Mixmaster'

Min første organist var mammas miksmaster. - Sinikka Langeland

A new way of thinking about Bach in in Norwegian folk-jazz artist Sinikka Langeland's liner notes to her CD Kyriekoral: Norwegian Folk Hymns And Bach Chorales, with Langeland on vocals and Kåre Nordstoga on the organ in Trondheim's Nidaros cathedral. (Click on links to discography and "Kyriekoral," a word that Langeland coined from the Kyrie Eleison [Lord have mercy upon us] and the Norwegian word for a type of Lutheran hymn called a chorale.)

I've been playing a melody-and-drone instrument for 25 years, and I've been listening to organ music since I was a little boy growing up with my father's E. Power Biggs LPs playing in the background, but I never thought of the organ as a dronal instrument.

But that was before I read this from Langeland:

My first organist was my mother’s Mixmaster. At the age of four I discovered how a sustained drone made me hum and sing almost involuntarily. Something similar happened when I started listening to Bach’s chorales: I was inspired to create my own melodic lines. This was my point of departure. I have never made any attempt to “compose my way into” the masterpieces; I have only wanted to play with, and improvise on, the old hymn melodies that are part of Bach’s complex structures. They sometimes emerge distinctly in the melodic lines, and sometimes so slowly that they are barely perceptible…in the pedal, high, low,
inverted, canons – in short, in every method Bach used to create his masterpieces. When I improvise within Bach’s music itself, I feel very close to him, while at the same time I gain a heightened awareness of my own folk song tradition, especially the religious folk songs of Andris Vang, Ragnar Vigdal, Ingebjørg Liestøl and Sondre Bratland, to name my most important sources of inspiration.

And - you know what? - she's right.

Gud Helligånd! o, kom - bios of Johannes Johansen, August Winding and Thomas Laub

At Heligeaandkirken. Hymn for noon service when we were in Copenhagen was Danske Salmebog 523 Min nåde er dig nok, a paraphrase of 2 Cor. 12:9 by Johannes Johansen (1983 and 1995). Mel.: Gud Helligånd! o kom

http://www.dendanskesalmebogonline.dk/salme/302
Gud Helligånd! o, kom
Mel.: August Winding 1861
Thomas Laub 1917

Johannes Johansen
Den Store Danske, Glydendal's open encyclopedia, has this: "Johannes Johansen, f. 1925, dansk præst og salmedigter; biskop over Helsingør Stift 1980-95. Han udgav sin første digtsamling, Thurø-Rim, i 1974 og sine første salmer i 1975; en omfattende samling foreligger i Min egen Salmebog (1996). Det har været Johansens bestræbelse at videreføre det bedste i dansk salmetradition, og han var 1900-t.s betydeligste danske salmedigter efter K.L. Aastrup." The Danske Salmebog bio counts 13 psalms and 2 translations.

August Winding
Not much on him ... what there is comes from liner notes of his recordings ... The Bach Cantatas website has this:

The Danish composer, August Winding, was the son of a clergyman who had a passion for collecting and arranging Danish folk songs. Naturally, August studied with his father. Soon, however, he was to move to greater things; he studied piano with Anton Ree who had known Chopin. This was followed by composition lessons with Carl Reinecke and theory with no less a person than Niels W. Gade, the father of Danish music.

In the first instance August Winding was a pianist. He made quite an impression both in Denmark and in concert halls and recital rooms throughout Europe. His specialities were the concerti of Mozart and Beethoven. He enjoyed playing in chamber ensembles as well as performing as a recitalist. From 1867 he taught at the conservatoire in Copenhagen.

As a composer, August Winding is unfairly remembered only for a few hymn tunes. However, he wrote much other music - including a symphony, Concerto for Piano & Orchestra in A minor, Op.16 (1869); Concert allegro for Piano & Orchestra in C minor, Op.29 (c1875); chamber works; songs; piano pieces.

Source: MusicWeb, from liner notes to the album Piano Concertos by August Winding and Emil Hartmann (Danacord)
Contributed [to the Bach site by its administrator] Aryeh Oron (August 2007)

This review, by blogger John Kersey of a recording of solo piano compositions, adds a couple of details:

August Winding was the son of a pastor, and received his first piano lessons from his parents. In 1847 he studied with Carl Reinecke and from 1848-51 with Anton Rée, also studying composition with Niels Gade. In 1856 he completed his studies in Leipzig and Prague, where he studied with Dreyschock. Returning to Denmark, he became well-known for appearances as a soloist, particularly in Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. In 1864, he married Clara, daughter of J.P.E. Hartmann. From 1867 he taught at the Royal Conservatory, as well as privately. In 1872 he developed a nervous injury to his arm as a result of overwork which forced him to stop concertizing and devote his attention to composition. He resumed teaching at the Conservatory in 1881 and became a member of its board after the death of Gade in 1890. In 1888 he reappeared in public as a soloist and gave a limited number of concerts between then and his death, receiving the accolade of a state professorship and annuity in 1892.

Thomas Laub
Wikipedia's article "Music of Denmark" has this: "Thomas Laub (1852–1927), an organist, was devoted to reintroducing the old Protestant hymn tunes which had been forgotten or altered over the years. He published a number of important works including Kirkemelodier (Church Melodies) (1890), Udvalg af Salme-Melodier i Kirkestil (Selected Hymn Tunes in the Church Style) (1896 and 1902), Dansk Kirkesang (Danish Church Song) (1918) and Musik og Kirke (Music and Church) (1920). Laub also wrote folk song music and together with Carl Nielsen published En Snes danske Viser (A Set of Danish Folk Songs) (1917)." Pix (left) available on Creative Commons license via Wikipedia. But the main bio is a Wikipedia stub.

Laub collaborated with Carl Nielsen on the songbook used for Folk High Schools. See the discussion of Danish songs and hymns" on the Carl Nielsen Society website ... lots of information, summarized in this cutline: "Thomas Laub was one of Nielsen's collaborators on the Folk High School Melody Book and composed two volumes of Danish Songs together with Nielsen." And this:

Carl Nielsen was not religious in the conventional sense of the word. This did not prevent him from writing music for a number of hymns (Salmer og aandelige Sange, composed 1913-1915, published 1919). His friend the organist, composer and reformer of church music, Thomas Laub, had reproached him:

"A composer of hymns must be A Child of the House, by which I do not mean that he has a patent on faith - his faith can be weak, it can be wrong - but he must feel at home, that is to say he must have lived with congregational singing preferably from childhood, he must know it from its uses ...", he wrote to Nielsen.

But there's quite a bit more, including some pretty good atmospherics on Danish folk music.

Buskers - in the free city of Bremen and a story in today's Irish Times - mashed together with a really weak transition

Marktplatz in Bremen
A very informative, well written story on busking in The Irish Times today ... which gives me an opportunity to get some pix up from our trip to Europe ... especially Bremen, a lovely Hanseatic city we visited in northern Germany. Busking is thought of as a typically Irish thing, but it's international. And it was in evidence in Bremen.

In fact, musicians are part of what makes Bremen special.

Statue at left isn't a busker - it's the Town Musicians of Bremen (Stadtmusikanten) on the Market Square downtown. It's shiny in places because people like to rub the statue for good luck. (Sort of like Abraham Lincoln's nose!) It comes from a folktale collected by the Brothers Grimm. Says the summary in Wikipedia, "In the story a donkey, a dog, a cat, and a rooster, all past their prime years in life and usefulness on their respective farms, were soon to be discarded or mistreated by their masters. One by one they leave their homes and set out together. They decide to go to Bremen, known for its freedom, to live without owners and become musicians there." In a word or two, they live by their wits. And the story is delightful. I won't spoil it for you - the rest of their story is in Wikipedia. The city has sort of adopted the animals as mascots, and the statue by Bremen sculptor Gerhard Marcks shows the animals.

Bremen and its port city of Bremerhaven have long enjoyed their common status as a "free city" - i.e. a chartered city pretty much ruled by its burghers, or middle class, rather than the feudal nobility - and even today its formal name is the Freie Hansestadt Bremen (the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen). And the Grimm Brothers folk tale symbolizes that spirit of freedom ... and living by your wits.

---

At right are some real musicians of Bremen, busking on the other side of the Market Square from the statue.

---

Here's how Una Mullally begins her story in the Irish Times:

Some are good, some are bad, some are insufferable: you know it’s summertime when the buskers take over the streets. But what separates the talented from the talentless and how does a busker earn €7,000 in one day? ...

A bare-chested dreadlocked man attempting to limbo underneath a blazing stick, an elderly harpist, two men in full native American garb playing panpipes to a backing CD, teenage boys mangling Damien Rice songs on a duo of barely tuned guitars, an artist rolling out a canvas of a remarkably detailed stained glass painting, a bored looking man constructing the likeness of a dog out of sand, a deft spray-painter making surrealist space-scapes with moons and pyramids, a lone opera singer, a trad group, a tightly honed raucous band, a drumming circle, a tuneless accordion-player, a classical trio. Summertime is when the buskers take over our streets, becoming moveable street furniture that annoy, amuse, distract and pleasure in equal measure.

So what makes a good busker, and what makes a rubbish one? Roger Quail is the label manager of Model Citizen and Rubyworks, founded by Niall Muckian who was promoting the primarily singer-songwriter night The Ruby Sessions in the early 2000s. The weekly gigs in Doyle’s pub in Dublin saw several former buskers such as Glen Hansard and Paddy Casey take the stage.

“A good busker is someone who can hold an audience and make them forget where they are, even if it’s only for five minutes,” Quail says. Rubyworks know all about good buskers.

And this vignette that reminds me of the buskers I heard on Grafton Street last year in Dublin:

SUCH IS IRELAND’S bustling busker scene that some people even temporarily move here to get a slice of the action. Kamila and Magda from Katowice in Poland will stay here for three weeks, playing their viola duets every morning on Henry Street in Dublin and every evening on Grafton Street, before returning to their studies in a music academy back home. “We started at 8am and we’ll play until 10pm,” Magda explains, midweek on Grafton Street.

They were here two years ago, “and it was better, definitely” in terms of earnings. These days, they can make anything from €40 to €100 each. They play a mixture of classical music and the occasional pop curveball, concentrating mainly on Bach and Mozart. While they like being their own bosses and choosing when to play, there are downfalls – “the weather” exclaims Kamilla.

And no transition at all for this one. On the motorways in Sweden, they have fast food resaurants called "Rasta."

So I decided it was the best chance I'll ever have to be a Rasta man.

Here's the picture.

Bellman - Fredmans sånger n:o 5C - MIDI

Cool! Up tempo, and sounds like a harpsichord. Instrumental only, tho'.

Bellman - Fredmans sånger n:o 5C - MIDI file rendered by Kapten Kaos -

• Text
  
• Notes (modern - 4 sharps - E). Click on "Noter."
  
• Notes (original - 2 flats - B flat). Click on "Originalnoter."

Tips for Longer-Lasting Laptop Batteries - link to Yahoo! feature

http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/113310/longer-lasting-laptop-battery-bnet

Excerpt:

* * *

Recondition your battery regularly. Most laptop manufacturers (except Apple) don't generally tell you about this, but a simple process known as reconditioning (or occasionally, recalibrating) can breathe new life into your laptop battery and add capacity back. To do that, turn off your screen saver and any other power management tools which put your PC to sleep. Fully charge the laptop, and then let it run all the way down — right until it powers down due to lack of juice. Then charge it back up again and restore your power management stuff. Do this every few months (such as three times a year).

Remove it when you're not using it. When you leave your laptop plugged in at your desk all day every day, the battery never gets a chance to discharge and recharge — which is critical to its long-term health. Thankfully, there's a simple solution: Remove the battery. As long as your laptop is connected to AC power, the battery isn't necessary; it'll run without it. Just remember to pop it back in before you take your laptop on the go.

* * *

"Samson af hendelse Gasa besøgte"

Catchy tune on Kingoløg CD by jazz artist Kristian Blak of the Faroe Islands called "Samson af Hændelse Gasa Besøgte." The CD is a suite "based on traditional Kingo-hymns afrom the Faroe Islands," but this one doesn't sound like Kingo.

Maybe that's because it isn't.

I haven't tracked it down yet, and it may turn out to be by Kingo. When I Googled it, I found the title by a contemporary of Kingo's named Petter Dass, a parish priest in Nordland, in the north of Norway, who would have attended university in Copenhagen at the same time as Kingo and who wrote songs on the bible and Luther's catechism. This one is pretty racy ... the title means something like "Samson visited the fleshpots of Gaza." Was sung to the tune of another song, "Kommer I cimbriske helte." It's listed in a Swedish data base, the Song and Tune Catalogue of Svenskt visarkiv – The Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research as "Kommer I cimbriske helte med ære" ... the Google translation calls it a "16. og 17. århundredes verldslige danske visesang ... 16th og 17th århundredes worldly wise Danish song" ... no other info

Dagbladet has the text and bio with links in its Kultur diktbasen (culture - poetry) data base. It goes on for quite some length. The first stanza is:

Petter Dass
SAMSONS ANDEN HISTORIE


Mel.: Kommer I Cimbriske Helte etc.


Samson af hendelse Gasa besøgte,
Fandt der en Hore til hvilken hand gaar,
Da de Gesiter fik høre det Rygte
Komme de sammen som Ulven om Faar,
Lader med Krigsfolcket Staden omringe,
Meente de hannem ret visselig finge.

* * *

It's also available on the University of Oslo website at http://www.dokpro.uio.no/litteratur/dass/pd2.txt
[several further pages. Click here for info on the documentation Project of the University of Oslo.

Luther, sermon on the Passion [excerpt]

The following sermon is taken from volume II of, The Sermons of Martin Luther, published by Baker Book House (Grand Rapids, MI). It was originally published in 1906 in english by Lutherans In All Lands (Minneapolis, MN), in a series titled The Precious and Sacred Writings of Martin Luther, vol. 11. The original title of this sermon appears below (preached by Luther approx. 1519-1521). This e-text was scanned and edited by Shane Rosenthal; it is in the public domain and it may be copied and distributed without restriction. Original pagination from the Baker edition has been kept intact for purposes of reference.

THE TRUE AND THE FALSE VIEWS OF CHRIST'S SUFFERINGS


http://www.reformationhappens.com/works/sermons-luther/

* * *

[excerpt from SECTION III. THE COMFORT OF CHRIST'S SUFFERINGS].

* * *

16. Sixteenthly. When your heart is thus established in Christ, and you are an enemy of sin, out of love and not out of fear of punishment, Christ's sufferings should also be an example for your whole life, and you should meditate on the same in a different way. For hitherto we have considered Christ's Passion as a sacrament that works in us and we suffer; now we consider it, that we also work, namely thus: if a day of sorrow or sickness weighs you down, think, how trifling that is, compared with the thorns and nails of Christ. If you must do or leave undone what is distasteful to you: think, how Christ was led hither and thither, bound and a captive. Does pride attack you: behold, how your Lord was mocked and disgraced with murderers. Do unchastity and lust thrust themselves against you: think, how bitter it was for Christ to have his tender flesh torn, pierced and beaten again and again. Do hatred and envy war against you, or do you seek vengeance: remember how Christ with many tears and cries prayed for you and all his enemies, who indeed had more reason to seek revenge. If trouble or whatever adversity of body or soul afflict you, strengthen your heart and say: Ah, why then should I not also suffer a little since my Lord sweat blood in the garden because of anxiety and grief? That would be a lazy, disgraceful servant who would wish to lie in his bed while his lord was compelled to battle with the pangs of death.

Another translation, with notes, at the LutheranMissiology.org website ... with this intro:

On Invocavit Sunday, March 13, 1519, Luther wrote his friend George Spalatin, “I am planning
a treatise dealing with the meditation of Christ’s passion. I do not know, however, whether I
shall have enough leisure to write it out. Yet I shall try hard.”1 In the same letter he cites the
reasons for this lack of leisure: activities directed toward the renewal of the university
curriculum, his work on the Lord’s Prayer,2 a commentary on Galatians, and particularly
pressing and irksome, his intense study of canon law in preparation for the upcoming Leipzig
Debate with John Eck, July 4 to 14. Nevertheless, it was a mere three weeks later, on April 5,
that Luther was able to send a printed copy of his work on the passion to Spalatin.3
By 1524, a total of twenty-four editions had been printed in Wittenberg, Basel, Augsburg,
Zurich, Erfurt, Munich, Nürnberg, and Strassburg. The number of editions testifies to the
widespread response aroused by this writing. A Latin edition, whose translator is unknown,
appeared at Wittenberg in 1521. As the sermon for Good Friday, this treatise was included in the
Church Postil of 1525, which Luther termed his “very best book.”

Malene Bjørnestad Schmidt, Salmernes rolle i den lutherske gudstjeneste - links

Malene Bjørnestad Schmidt. Salmernes rolle i den lutherske gudstjeneste – historisk og ritualteoretisk med særligt henblik på den danske højmesse. Institut for praktisk teologi, Aarhus universitet,
24. januar 2006

LINKS

• In Danish.
  
• Google translation.

Passion hymns of Hallgrímur Pétursson in Iceland

aHallgrímur Pétursson (1614 – October 27, 1674) According to his profile in Wikipedia, "Because of his contributions to Lutheran hymnody, he is sometimes called the Icelandic Paul Gerhardt." He ran away from home, got a scholarship to study in Copenhagen after "an Icelandic priest travelling through Glückstadt (now in Germany but then a part of Denmark), heard Hallgrímur curse his employer in Icelandic." He got one of his students pregnant in Copenhagen, ran off again - this time to Iceland - but when her husband died (the student was married, no doubt another complication for a seminarian), "she and Pétursson promptly married." For all of that, he was a gifted poet.

According to the Wikipedia article on the passon hymns ...

The Passíusálmar or Passion Hymns are a collection of 50 poetic texts written by the Icelandic priest and poet, Hallgrímur Pétursson. The texts explore the Passion narrative, as traditionally presented, from the point where Christ enters the Garden of Gethsemane to his death and burial. Hallgrímur began composing the work in 1656, while serving as priest of Saurbær in Hvalfjörður. It took him three years to complete, the final poem being written in May 1659; the first edition was published seven years later, in 1666. By the end of the century they had become so popular in Iceland that five editions had been published. Since that time, they have been reprinted 65 times, a unique achievement in Icelandic literature.

The Passíusálmar quickly became an important part of Icelandic religious expression, being sung or read during Lent in every Icelandic home; today, they are broadcast on the radio during that time of year. They have been set to music by many composers of Icelandic church music, including Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson and Jón Hlöðver Áskelsson, but use outside Iceland is rare. ...

PDF files of the 1923 translation by Charles Venn Pilcher are available on line. Pilcher "has in every case [but one] preserved the metre and the rhyme-scheme of the original - thus makaing it possible to the music of those stately German Chorales with which the words are associated in Iceland" (vii).

Radio Iceland has a very full website on the Passion Psalms, but it's in Icelandic ... the link Söngur on the left of the page takes you to text, notes and sound files of what appear to be field recordings of the psalms. And, yep, they sound like chorales.

Samples from the oratorio Hallgrímspassía by Sigurdur Saevarsson are available on YouTube. ssía. Performed by Schola cantorum, Caput and Jóhann Smári Sævarsson, conducted by Hörður Áskelsson. Also available on Sigurður Sævarsson's website.

Download of Sacred Music of Iceland - The Hallgrimskirkja Motet Choir - RARE - FLAC has info on a 1989 performance by Mótettukór Hallgrímskirkju (The Hallgrimskirkja Motet Choir) conducted by Hörður Áskelsson.

An English adaptation. On YouTube a trailer for a documentary on the Passion Hymns. Blurb as follows: "This is a trailer for a documentary in progress by Dall Wilson. In 1600 European democrats in Moravia were displaced from their homeland. In those days, Icelandic poet Hallgrimur wrote the Easter Saga to Moravian hymn-tunes. This was adapted for performance in English by Dall Wilson. In the 1700s, three displaced Moravians from Brno settled in Greenland. The documentary looks at the shared musical tradition and its influence. The playbook with music score and chords is available at http://stores.lulu.com/dallwilson."

Wilson has videos of a choir from the Faroe Islands at Dall - Passion-Hymns of Hallgrimur by dallwilson Part 1 and Part 2 Not much about Wilson other than an interview on North Carolina public radio, but apparently he does mixed media projects involving music and cinematography ... he's from Winston-Salem, has Moravian roots there. His arrangements carry notations indicating melodies come from Gerhardt and other composers of the Reformation period. They sound like chorales.

A fun article by Sindri Eldon of The Reykjavík Grapevine headed "Come All Ye Faithful, But Other People Can Totally Come If They Want To" advancing performances of Pétursson's work:

Not all artists are assholes. Some, in fact, can be quite friendly. While the Hallgrímskirkja Friends Of The Arts Society may not befriend artists, they are, as their name suggests, great fans of art, so an appreciation of artists would be implied; indeed, it would kind of be necessary, considering what it is the Friends Of The Arts do. They promote art exhibitions and concerts in Reykjavík’s iconic Hallgrímskirkja church, that pointy edifice that looms over the centre of town like some crazed monolithic seal.

This month, the Friends Of The Arts have organised some kick-ass classical music for us, including a free organ concert, some chamber music although most notable is a celebration of Iceland’s most notorious composer of hymns (and the man who gave Hallgrímskirkja its name), Hallgrímur Pétursson. His hymnody, the ‘Passion Hymns,’ will be read in its 50-psalm entirety on Good Friday, and there will also be a performance of select hymns on Maundy Thursday.

All snark aside, the pictures of the church do look a little bit like a seal balancing a cross on its nose.

Music theory: Want to drive your roommate out of his/her mind?

... or tune your instrument to standard pitch?

Or hear the relationships between the major, Dorian, Mixolydian and natural minor modes?

Use the Flash Piano ap on Benjamin Hollis' website "The Method Behind the Music." Says Hollis, "We have created a virtual piano that you can use to play scales and intervals to help your understanding of these and other topics. You can even play a tune!"

http://method-behind-the-music.com/piano

"Jante laws" and terrorism in Norway

Jante laws (pron. YAN-teh) are a typically Scandinavian code of behavior, from a Danish novel but widely recognized in all the Scandinavia countries ... here's what Wikipedia says: "The Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose in his novel A fugitive crosses his tracks (En flyktning krysser sitt spor, 1933, English translation published in the USA in 1936) identified the Jante Law as a series of rules. Sandemose's novel portrays the small Danish town Jante (modelled upon his native town Nykøbing Mors as it was at the beginning of the 20th century, but typical of all small towns and communities), where nobody is anonymous." The Jante laws are also in force, naturally, in Lake Wobegon. Small towns everywhere, I suspect.

Snippets from July 28 article "In Norway, Consensus Cuts 2 Ways" by Steven Erlanger and Michael Schwirtz in the New York Times, which quotes the Jante laws rather perceptively ...

“When you are confronted with multicultural immigration, something happens,” said Grete Brochmann, a sociologist at the University of Oslo. “That’s the core of the matter right now, and it’s a great challenge to the Norwegian model.”

Norway’s leaders, from the royal family on down, have all praised the country’s solidarity, democracy, equality and tolerance, and all vow that these values will not change. Virtuous, peaceful, generous, consensual — this is the Norwegian self-image, aided by the oil wealth that props up one of the most comprehensive social welfare systems in the world.

xxx

For all its virtues, the emphasis on consensus here can also promote small-mindedness, smugness and political correctness. That is especially true when newcomers have different notions on certain values, including gender equality and secularism, even in an officially Christian country, that Norwegians hold dear.

“We’re a lucky society for many reasons, and not just oil,” said Ms. Brochmann, citing Norway’s distance from both the euro and the American financial crisis and its strong and transparent democracy.

“But many of these aspects of this consensus society have another side,” she said. “This is also a society of conformism,” she said, citing the “Janteloven,” or Jante law, based on small-town Scandinavian norms that govern group behavior, promoting collectivism and discouraging individual initiative and ambition in a world where no one is anonymous.

Text of Jante laws below, in Danish and English, courtesy of my cousin Lise in Copenhagen:

Janteloven

1. Du skal ikke tro, at du er noget.
2. Du skal ikke tro, at du er lige så meget som os.
3. Du skal ikke tro, at du er klogere end os.
4. Du skal ikke bilde dig ind, at du er bedre end os.
5. Du skal ikke tro, at du ved mere end os.
6. Du skal ikke tro, at du er mere end os.
7. Du skal ikke tro, at du duer til noget.
8. Du skal ikke le ad os.
9. Du skal ikke tro, at nogen bryder sig om dig.
10. Du skal ikke tro, at du kan lære os noget.

Jante law

1. Do not think that you are something.
2. Do not think that you are equal to us.
3. Do not think that you are smarter than us.
4. Do not delude yourself into thinking that you're better than us.
5. Do not think that you know more than us.
6. Do not think that you are more than us.
7. Do not believe you are worth something.
8. You must not laugh at us.
9. Do not think that anybody cares about you.
10. Do not think you can teach us something.

Ralph Lee Smith at Common Ground on the Hill, Westminster, Md., July 2011

On the last day of his mountain dulcimer traditions classes during the second week of Common Ground on the Hill, dulcimer historian Ralph Lee Smith brought several antique instruments from his collection. At the end of the session, he was presented with a Common Ground shirt by members of the afternoon class.

Ralph Lee Smith opens gift shirt
Ralph taught two classes at Common Ground, one on the "world of the mountain dulcimer" and one on ballads. Both were heavily, although not exclusively, based on ballad collecting by Cecil Sharp, Maud Karpeles and Olive Dame Campbell between 1907 and 1917. And Ralph brought to Common Ground his knowledge of how the mountain dulcimer developed during the 19th and 20th centuries.

He also brought his collection of dulcimers ...

In photo above, Ralph chats with a member of the class. To the left are several hourglass dulcimers from Kentucky, along with one of similar shape from East Tennessee, all from the 20th century. To the right (mostly obscured by the bottom edge of the photo), are early instruments from West Virginia and Virginia; while the provenance is uncertain on most of the instruments, they most likely date from the early 20th to mid-19th centuries.

Kentucky (and one from Tennessee). From left, a non-traditional early folk revival instrument by Bill Davis of Gatlinburg, Tenn., and hourglass dulcimers by Kentuckians Warren May of Berea; Homer Ledford, of Winchester; Jethro Amburgey (two instruments, one behind the other), of Knott County, and "Uncle Ed" Thomas, also of Knott County. (The Davis, the Ledford and one of the Amburgeys are mine; the others are Ralph's.) Amburgey and Thomas both made instruments for the Hindman Settlement School. Note how similar all the Kentucky instruments are in shape.

Transitional instruments from Virginia. (Others in Ralph's collection are on loan to the Blue Ridge Institute, Ferrum, Va.) From left, an early Galax dulcimer; a home-made instrument that Ralph dates from about 1875; and a "coffin-shaped" dulcimer and a Scheitholt or Pennsylvania German-style folk zither, both dating from the 19th century. Ralph's hypothesis is that the dulcimer evolved by stages from German folk zithers brought to southwestern Virginia by Pennsylvania Dutch settlers.

One from West Virginia and one from North Carolina. To Ralph's right, in lower left foreground, are a dulcimer made in the 1960s by Leonard Glenn of Watauga County, N.C., and in the late 19th-century by Charles Prichard of Huntington, W.Va. As Ralph explains in his books, the pattern was brought to North Carolina by a traveling salesman during the 1880s and copied by artisans in the Glenn family for the next hundred years.

A sweet little tangent. Ralph let us play some of the instruments (i.e. the ones that can be played ... some of the others are long past that point)! I played both the Prichard, which Ralph often plays in concerts, and the boxy little Virginia style dulcimer dated 1875. It's heavy, and it looks like it was slapped together out of barn wood and decorated with house paint. But Ralph has it strung Galax style (to dddd or in unison to D an octave above middle C), and after adjusting the friction pegs a little, I was able to get a clear, sweet ringing tone out of it. I got out one of my floppy yogurt-tub picks and a noter made from the round end of a Starbucks coffee stirrer, and I couldn't keep my hands off it!

"Til ungdomen" [to youth] - song at Oslo cathedral memorial service after July 22 terrorist attack

Our image in America is that the state church of Norway is largely irrelevant to a secular, post-Christian society, but in the aftermath of Friday's terrorist attacks it proved quite relevant.

A memorial service at Oslo's Domkirke Sunday ... and the imprompteau shrine outside the cathedral throughout the weekend ... were communal focal points as Norwegians began coming to terms with what has happened. People traveled hundreds of kilometres to attend the service.

Included was the singing of a choral piece, "To Youth," with words by Norwegian poet Nordahl Grieg set to music by Danish composer Otto Mortensen, at the memorial service. Its text was especially appropriate to the occasion, since more than 80 young people had been shot to death. NRK [Norsk rikskringkasting, the Norwegian state broadcasting service] posted the entire song to its website under headline "Kongen og dronningen gråt av sang i domkirken" [king and queen cry during song in cathedral].



NRK's cutline: "Den sterke teksten 'Til ungdommen' av Nordahl Grieg rørte mange under minnegudstjenesten" [the stark text "To youth" by Nordahl Grieg moved many at the memorial service].

According to Wikipedia, the poem was written in 1936; it is often referred to by its first line, "Kringsatt av Fiender' [surrounded by enemies]. Set to music by Otto Mortensen in 1952, it has been included in the Danish folk high school songbook and covered by choirs and metal bands alike. In a recent translation posted to Wikipedia, it begins:

Surrounded by enemies,
go into your time!
Under a bloody storm -
devote yourself to fight!

Maybe you ask in fear,
uncovered, open:
with what shall I fight
what is my weapon?

Here is your defense against violence
here is your sword:
the belief in our life,
the worth of mankind.

For all our future's sake,
seek it and cultivate it,
die if you must - but:
increase it and strengthen it!

And so on for 10 more verses.

ITN News has footage of the service and Eurovision TV has a 60-second report. By far the best coverage overall is on Storyful, a website that "uses the power of social networks to create an innovative, interactive and socially useful journalism." It appears to be an aggragator that collects from personal blogs and social media as well as mass media content posted to the web. It's headed "Norway mourns its dead" ... Brief English-language accounts incorporated into stories on the guardian.co.uk and Irish Times websites. The Irish Times' report, by Derek Scally, led:

NORWEGIAN MASSACRE: A KING’S tears summed up better than any words the confusion and distress gripping an entire country yesterday.

Norway’s King Harald wept openly at a church service to honour the 93 people killed in Friday’s twin tragedy that has left Norwegians reeling.

Outside the cathedral, near the site of Friday’s bomb blast, Oslo came to a standstill. Survivors gripped each other to fight back tears as they studied the sea of flowers and candles.

“Each and every life lost is a tragedy,” said a solemn prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, addressing the service. “Together the number of people killed amounts to a national tragedy.”

Mark Townsend, reporting Sunday in Oslo:

Thousands of people have gathered outside Oslo cathedral, many travelling hundreds of miles to do so, to insist that Norway's "open" society would not be compromised by Friday's attacks.

As a memorial service dedicated to those killed and injured in the atrocities got underway, a huge crowd assembled on the plaza outside.

Throughout the 90-minute service, most stood in silence, heads bowed, moving only to place flowers on a steadily growing pile of wreaths outside the cathedral. Others wept or held radios, listening intently to the service, which was broadcast live.

Among those present was 15-year-old Sindre Kolberg from Mo i Rana, 700 miles north of Oslo, and home to many of those caught up in the shootings on Utøya island. Kolberg knew 10 children involved in the attacks, but only eight have come home. One is in hospital with gunshot wounds, the other, a girl, is still missing.

"I have talked to two of the survivors and they are shocked. They saw two friends from another city being killed. Norway is such a safe country. You see attacks in the US, London, but never here. I hope it doesn't change," he said.

It was a sentiment replicated throughout the crowd outside the cathedral, a 90-second walk from the police cordons sealing the part of Oslo's government district bombed two days earlier. The cathedral is famous as a place of refuge, often for asylum seekers whose applications have been rejected - the people who Anders Behring Breivik, the 32-year-old who has confessed to the attacks, so despised.

LATER: Posted to the NRK website Tuesday, a story with links about Kjersti Sofie Løvåsdal Halvorsen, 17, who posted a version of "To Youth" to YouTube a couple of years ago (Google translation here). Karina Lystad, arts and entertainment reporter for NRK, has this account:

Nordahl Grieg's poem "To Youth", with music by Otto Mortensen, has been a kind of renaissance after shooting at Utøya .

Sangen ble sunget under minnegudstjenesten i Oslo Domkirke på søndag, og på rosemarkeringen på Rådhusplassen i går kveld, og det siteres hyppig fra teksten på nettsteder som Twitter. The song was sung during the memorial service in Oslo Cathedral on Sunday, and the praise celebration at City Hall last night, and it cited from the text on Web sites like Twitter.

Den økte oppmerksomheten rundt sangen har også fått konsekvenser for 17 år gamle Kjersti Sofie Løvåsdal Halvorsen. The increased attention the song has also had consequences for 17-year-old Kjersti Sofie Løvåsdal Halvorsen. Hun oppdaget plutselig at trafikken på en av YouTube-videoene hennes hadde økt drastisk. She suddenly discovered that the traffic on one of her YouTube videos had increased drastically.

- Tidligere var det rundt ti visninger hver dag, frem til for noen dager siden. - Previously, it was about ten views a day, until a few days ago. I det siste har det vært oppe i 1500, sier hun. In the past there have been up in 1500, she says.

I videoen det er snakk om sitter Kjersti med en kassegitar og synger “Til Ungdommen”. In the video in question is Kjersti an acoustic guitar and sings "The Youth". Og det er ikke bare klikktallene som har gått opp. And it is only then the numbers have gone up.

- Jeg fått veldig mange flere kommentarer. - I received many more comments. Folk sier de liker versjonen min og at de føler diktet er veldig riktig og gir dem mye trøst. People say they like my version and that they feel the poem is very appropriate and gives them much consolation.

Adds Lystad of NRK:

It was more or less a coincidence that Kjersti posted just this video. Hun kom over diktet da hun jobbet med krigslitteratur på ungdomsskolen, og fordypet seg i skriveriene til Nordahl Grieg og Arnulf Øverland. She came across the poem when she was working with war literature in middle school, and immersed herself in the writings of Nordahl Grieg and Arnulf Overland.

- Jeg hørte den først i Herborg Kråkeviks versjon og bestemte meg for at jeg hadde lyst til å lære meg den på gitar, forklarer hun. - I heard it first in [pop singer] Herborg Kråkevik version and decided that I wanted to learn it on guitar, she explains.

- Hva var det for noe med akkurat det diktet? - What was it for something with just the poem?

- Det er et utrolig fint budskap om menneskeverd og solidaritet, som var verdier som Nordahl Grieg var opptatt av. - It is a very good message about human dignity and solidarity, which had values ​​that Nordahl Grieg was concerned. Jeg syns også det er et utrolig godt skrevet dikt med tanke på strofene og rimene. I also think it is an incredibly well-written poems in terms of stanzas and rhymes.

Tutorial, FAQs on Creative Commons licensing

http://theedublogger.com/2011/02/27/everything-you-should-know-about-enhancing-posts-with-images/

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions

How do I properly attribute a Creative Commons licensed work?
All current CC licenses require that you attribute the original author(s). If the copyright holder has not specified any particular way to attribute them, this does not mean that you do not have to give attribution. It simply means that you will have to give attribution to the best of your ability with the information you do have. Generally speaking, this implies five things:

•If the work itself contains any copyright notices placed there by the copyright holder, you must leave those notices intact, or reproduce them in a way that is reasonable to the medium in which you are re-publishing the work.
•Cite the author's name, screen name, user identification, etc. If you are publishing on the Internet, it is nice to link that name to the person's profile page, if such a page exists.
•Cite the work's title or name, if such a thing exists. If you are publishing on the Internet, it is nice to link the name or title directly to the original work.
•Cite the specific CC license the work is under. If you are publishing on the Internet, it is nice if the license citation links to the license on the CC website.
•If you are making a derivative work or adaptation, in addition to the above, you need to identify that your work is a derivative work i.e., “This is a Finnish translation of the [original work] by [author].” or “Screenplay based on [original work] by [author].”
In the case where a copyright holder does choose to specify the manner of attribution, in addition to the requirement of leaving intact existing copyright notices, they are only able to require certain things. Namely:

•They may require that you attribute the work to a certain name, pseudonym or even an organization of some sort.
•They may require you to associate/provide a certain URL (web address) for the work.
If you are interested to see what an actual license ("legalcode") has to say about attribution, you can use the CC Attribution 3.0 Unported license as an example. Please note that this is only an example, and you should always read the appropriate section of the specific license in question ... usually, but perhaps not always, section 4(b) or 4(c):

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode

Songs from Emil i Lönneberga

http://www.pippisworld.com/emil.php Pipi's World fan site

Hujedamej http://www.tsrocks.com/a/astrid_lindgren_texts/hujedamej.html lyrics and

Hör nu på, govänner, så ska jag för er berätta
vad en gosse gjorde, det är nu längesen,
men nog lever minnet kvar i Smålands sköna dalar,
Katthult, Lönneberga, det var den gossens hem.
Hujedamej sånt barn han var,
ej värre tänkas kan,
och Emil var det namn han bar,
ja, Emil hette han.
Sing-dudel-dej sing-dudel-dej
sing-dudel-dudel-dej,
sing-dudel-dej sing-dudel-dej
hu-jeda-jeda-mej

Read

Hujedamej Lyrics

here.

Adas sommarvisa / "Du ska inte tro det blir sommar"
YouTube clip and brief notes at http://www.last.fm/music/Lena+Wisborg/_/Idas+Sommarvisa last.fm

chords and lyrics on http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/a/astrid_lindgren/idas_sommarvisa_crd.htm UltimateGuitar.com website. Lyrics in Swedish:

Du ska inte tro det blir sommar
ifall inte nå´n sätter fart
på sommarn och gör lite somrigt,
då kommer blommorna snart.
Jag gör så att blommorna blommar,
Jag gör hela kohagen grön
och nu har sommaren kommit
för jag har just tagit bort snön

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=sv&u=http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idas_sommarvisa&ei=D0YnTsT7C-j-sQLcuaE7&sa=X&oi=translate&ct=result&resnum=4&sqi=2&ved=0CDkQ7gEwAw&prev=/search%3Fq%3Didas%2Bsommarvisa%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1R2GGLL_en%26biw%3D1132%26bih%3D571%26prmd%3Divns Wikipedia (in translation - Swedish at http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idas_sommarvisa http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idas_sommarvisa)click )

Ida's summer show, or you will not believe it is summer, is a Swedish children's song with a summer theme . Astrid Lindgren wrote while Georg Riedel composed the melody for the film Emil and griseknoen from 1973 , where it was sung by Lena Wisborg who plays Ida.

"Idas sommarvisa" har tre verser och har blivit vanlig på skolavslutningar , där den blivit omtyckt och betraktas som ett icke-religiöst alternativ till " Den blomstertid nu kommer " och " I denna ljuva sommartid ". "Ida's summer show" has three verses and have become common on school closings , where it has become popular and are considered a non-religious alternative to " The blomstertid now "and" In the sweet summertime . " Andra har dock menat att orden "ifall inte nån sätter fart" kan tolkas så att det är Gud som "sätter fart". [1]

IMDb has a http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067047/soundtrack soundtrack list from Emil i Lönneberga (1971) ...

Hujedamej http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPUXcMpd98c the long version of the opening song from Emil i Lönneberga

Natkirken: 'liturgical laboratory' - 2001 report to diocese of Copenhagen

Excerpts from English-language report on Project Night Church covering its first year as a pilot project at Københavns Domkirke, Vor Frue Kirke

By Signe M. Berg, Inger Ravn and Thomas Söderqvist

PROJECT NIGHT CHURCH -

A liturgical laboratory in the Cathedral of Copenhagen.

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In the late summer of 1999 a new project was launched in the Cathedral of Copenhagen. Originally the idea was to open the church to the public in the late evening hours and to give visitors an opportunity for a personal talk with a minister. In the course of the first year several new practices and ideas were introduced which have turned the project into a liturgical laboratory and a place of dialogue.

The first year of the Night Church project (Danish: "Natkirken") has recently been evaluated on behalf of the twelwe founding downtown churches. This article summarises our evaluation report (available in Danish at www.natkirken.dk).

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The ideas and visions for the Night Church project have developed gradually as a result of our practical experiences. Something unexpected may happen in the course of an evening, new perspectives emerge, new reflections and a new practice is born. When the Night Church project started in 1999 the idea was to provide an open and quiet church punctuated by a short service. Today, however, we envisage the entire evening as an extended service. The long stretches of time when "nothing happens" are part - and a most appreciated part - of the service. The Night Church thus becomes a refuge from everyday life with its career pressures and constant demands for personal achievement. Several visitors have expressed their gratitude to this dimension of the Night Church (see below). The message that many a minister tries to convey to his congregation in elaborate ways, namely, that we do not need to perform or do anything to receive the love of Christ, is here replaced by a personal experience that grows out of the simple practice of "doing nothing", just being - in the calm.

The noise generated by today's information and media society has turned people's attention to the blessing of quietness. Similarly, the common experience of a normative vacuum in today's society has contributed to a revival of ritual. We wish to develop credible rituals. Credibility is bound up with resonance and the content and mode of expression in the rituals and the service must therefore resonate with the individual's perception of holiness and sense of the fundamentals of life. That is, the service must resonate with the visitorís need to find a suitable vocabulary, a direction of mind, and a spiritual context for his or her search. Our task is to find modes of expression that are credible to the individual visitor and which provide a space for dialogue - a dialogue that (post)modern man expects to be a natural part of the state of being together, with other human beings as well as with God.

Many of our visitors can be characterised as "seekers", and we consider it one of our primary aims to establish a dialogue with this group of people. In order to enter into a dialogue with "seekers", however, we must meet them on their own terms. A well-known graffiti says that "Jesus is the answer, but what was the question?" In other words, there is no point trying to preach the gospel if we cannot see our visitorsí distress and if we cannot give them an opportunity to articulate their own questions. To "see" somebody does not necessarily imply accepting everything he or she say - to be "seen" also includes being contradicted and corrected. But whether we agree with our visitor or contradict him, his sense of having been seen is a necessary condition for his being affected.

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Berg, Ravn and Söderqvist's report is also incorporated verbatin in a newsletter of the World Council of Churches Ecumenical Letter on Evangelism - Geneva, 2002. Carlos E. Ham, WCC Programme Executive for Evangelism, has a nice summary in his introduction:

... In a quiet setting, right in the middle of the city’s noise, the project provides an opportunity for “outsiders” and for the “seekers” to meet, to have a cup of tea or coffee together, to write, to walk around, or simply to kneel and pray.

Frequently Cathedrals have been used for performing concerts and this is also the case in Copenhagen, but what makes the experience unique is the way that art is used as an instrument to share the good news. Furthermore the regular church activities such as worship, Holy Communion, reading and interpreting the Bible, prayers, etc., are developed in an innovative way, enabling people to feel welcome and embraced. But perhaps the most meaningful characteristic of the project is sharing in the love of Christ “doing nothing”, just being in calm, in silence.

We are very happy to share with our readers this beautiful and meaningful project, which indeed has been a blessing for the people related to it.

There is also a YouTube clip on a NiteKirk program in Scotland. According to the Mission and Discipleship Council of the Church of Scotland, "Following the success of the night church movement in Denmark, the NiteKirk transformed Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh during the Edinburgh Festival of 2008 into a space for reflection, encounter and transformation." Quotes several clergy at length. See the Greyfriars website for ongoing services: "NiteKirk takes place one Friday evening each month and offers a place for stillness, prayer and relection. Come for the evening, or pop in for a quiet moment in our sanctuary of peace and tranquillity. There are occasional services and liturgies, prayer in the style of [Taizé], readings and music. There are volunteers you can chat with over a drink of the famous warm and spicy apple juice, or you can just take time to sit and think. We will publicise NiteKirk here on the site and on the blog, so watch this space."

"The Pride of the Springfield Road"

Learned from Jim Rainey of Craobh Rua in his Irish song class at Common Ground on the Hill on the McDaniel College campus in Westminster, Md.

"The Pride of the Springfield Road"
(I'm learning it in D dorian on the Appalachian dulcimer.)

Lyrics and chords (in B minor) on an Andy Irvine fan page.
The website also has lyrics of "The King of Ballyhooley" - also an Andy Irvine song learned from Jim at Common Ground.

Craobh Rua's website is at http://www.craobhrua.com/ ...

A bagpiper's story

One of those viral emails, courtesy of my cousin on Long Island ...

Very touching story...

As a bagpiper, I play many gigs. Recently I was asked by a funeral director to play at a graveside service for a homeless man. He had no family or friends, so the service was to be at a pauper's cemetery in the Kentucky back country. As I was not familiar with the backwoods, I got lost and, being a typical man, I didn't stop for directions.

I finally arrived an hour late and saw the funeral guy had evidently gone and the hearse was nowhere in sight. There were only the diggers and crew left and they were eating lunch. I felt badly and apologized to the men for being late. I went to the side of the grave and looked down and the vault lid was already in place. didn't know what else to do, so I started to play.

The workers put down their lunches and began to gather around. I played out my heart and soul for this man with no family and friends. I played like I've never played before for this homeless man. And as I played 'Amazing Grace,' the workers began to weep. They wept, I wept, we all wept together. When I finished I packed up my bagpipes and started for my car. Though my head hung low, my heart was full.

As I opened the door to my car, I heard one of the workers say, "I never seen nothin' like that before and I've been putting in septic tanks for twenty years."

Pix - Jenny Lind / Tryggare kan ingen vara

Pix under Creative Commons license ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jenny-lind-chapel.jpg - photo of Jenny Lind Chapel in Andover


http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jenny_Lind_-_JLAsher_1845.jpg - JL seated at piano - 1845 - oil by J.A. Asher

Also:

• more thumbnails @ http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Lind
  
• Wikipedia page in Google translation on Tryggare kan ingen vara

"Å kjøre vatten, og kjøre ved" - a Norwegian children's song with a Caribbean beat

"Å kjøre vatten, og kjøre ved" by a group from Stavanger called Vindrosa recasts a classic Norwegian children's song with a Caribbean steel band rhythm ... "fra VINDROSA´s album "Østenfor sol" som nå er ute (release 15. februar 2011). Se også www.vindrosa.no.

Vindrosa has its ultimate origins in a 1980s ska-reggae band ... two of its members got together in recent years in Stavanger and cut the record, with singer-songwriter Stina Kjeland fronting the band, which also features Moroccan hand drums, a kletzmer-style clarinet and more traditional stringed instruments like a bouzouki. According to the blurb on their website, they are a sort of Norwegian/world music combo:

The songs they chose are all traditional Norwegian folk songs well known to most of the above-forty generation of Norwegians, but maybe lesser known to younger people. These songs have been dressed up in foreign clothes and scented with exotic fragrances so that they now appear new and fresh, but also familiar. Hopefully this new appearance will cause many people to rediscover these wonderful songs and also give them the new audiences that they very well deserve.

Another version. Andy Irvine, an Irish singer, sings same melody to new lyrics ... "I drove to Oslo on a winter's night ..." osv. @ Dent Folk Festival 2009 ... nice, bright bouzouki backing his voice. Cute lyrics.

Lönneberga - tracing Edmund family roots; kroppkakor with lingonberries; and a popular children's story by Astrid Lindgren

By consulting family records and Google maps, we found Lönneberga, the rural district in Småland where Debi's great great-grandfather was born. Our time was limited, so we chose a couple of places mentioned in the records that we could easily reach, one of which was Lönneberga. (The other was Krisdala.) We had to get back on the E4 motorway to Stockholm's Arlanda Airport, where we needed to drop off our rental car that afternoon, but we were able to spend an hour or two driving around.

Postcards, at right and below, show the Småland terrain. It's beautiful, but it doesn't look exactly like good farmland -- the area is now sort of a woodsy resort destination for weekenders from Stockholm, and we were told nobody tries to farm it anymore.

Rural areas (landsbygd) in Lönneberga
Lönneberga (pronounced luna-BERR-ya) is located on a two-lane blacktop (No. 129) in Hultsfred municipality (kommun) -- a local government unit similar to our townships in Illinois -- in Kalmar county (län) near the Jönköping (yon-SHUPP-ing) county line (if you care about such things, its latitude and longitude are are 57° 33' 0" North, 15° 43' 0" East). A pretty little town, with a housing estate, like an American subdivision, on one side of the road and a nice little restaurant -- Lönneberga Boa -- on the other. Surrounded by evergreen forest set in rolling hills. Some pasture fields, but mostly lakes and woods.

The restaurant was open, and it was around lunchtime. So we went in.

Kroppkakor -- meatballs and dumplings

Lönneberga Boa was a smallish restaurant, across the county road from the housing estate. Reminded me of cafes in our resort areas on the East Coast, with wood paneling on the inside, prints on the walls -- including an old (1920s-ish?) group portrait of the Swedish royal family -- and a modest selection of crafts and tourist kitsch on sale.

Lunch was kroppkakor - pork meatballs surrounded by potato dumplings in a white sauce (cf. German Fleisch Knödel) that tasted like a combination of American-style Swedish meatballs and potato baloney. Served with a lingonberry sauce on the side. It was quite good. Filling, though. Very filling. Debi had a fruktkaka dessert that was nothing at all like an American fruitcake.

Turns out kroppkaka is a traditional dish common throughout Småland and other districts (landskaps) in southern Sweden. In fact, the whole meal was traditional.

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Picture at right shows Kroppkakor, fruktkaka and knäckebröd (hardtack or crisp bread) with lingonberry sauce and dill pickles.

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The rural area where the Edmund family lived before coming to America in the 1860s is called Sjoarp (SHOW-arp). Owner of the restaurant said it is no longer occupied year-round, but vacationers from Stockholm have second homes there. The Wikipedia page on Hultsfred kommun indicates the area has been losing population over time: "Much of the geography is taken up with forests, a notability for the entire province of Småland, with some few scattered areas suitable for agriculture."

Local histories, several of which are available on the World Wide Web, also give the picture of an area where people scrabbled for a living on small farms hacked out of the woods.

The Lönneberga Historical Guild (hembygdsgille) hosts a food and craft fair in the fall and maintains a homestead museum (hembygdsgård) near Lönneberga church (for an English translation, Google keywords Lönneberga Mat och Hantverk and click on "Translate this page"). Its website also features a map that shows Sjoarp, which is pretty out-of-the-way. The guild's organizational website has an interesting hodgepodge of information (Google keywords Lönneberga hembygdsgille and click on the link that says "Translate this page") compiled by local historians. Among other things, it mentions historical records going back
to the 1300s, an essay on farming and an account of emigration during the 1800s from another community in Hultsfred commune.

Edmund family records

Lönneberga parish, a district centered on the local parish of the state Church of Sweden, is one of the areas mentioned in family records. The Edmunds farmed land several kilometers northwest (?) of the church building.

Edmund family ancestors from Lönneberga were:

• Petter Admundson, farmer in Sjoarp, Lonneberga Parish, Kalmar County, Sweden. Born Mar. 8, 1805 in Hasselby Parish, Jonkoping County, Sweden. Married Stina Cajsa Jonsdotter, born Mar. 30, 1811, in Lonneberga Parish. Came to America probably in 1870s, after their children came here. (?) Petter died in Woodhull, IL in 1881. Stina died in 1911, in Woodhull, IL.
  

• Anders Johan Admund (Adman), son of Petter and Stina, born Nov. 3, 1833, at Sjoarp farm #2, Lonneberga Parish, Kalmar County, Sweden. Emigrated to America June 26, 1865? 1868? Died 1918 in Orion, IL.

Emil i Lönneberga

Among the touristy items on sale in the restaurant were several black-and-white glossies of a tow-headed little boy. He's Emil of Lönneberga, the title character of several novels by children's author Astrid Lindgren. Better known than Emil in the United States is Pippi Longstocking (Pippi Långstrump in Swedish), another character of Astrid Longren's -- Emil and Pippi are kindred spirits, if not exactly brother and sister.

At any rate, they're proud of their namesake in Lönneberga.

While the Emil books aren't readily available in English, used copies turn up regularly on Amazon.com and other online booksellers. And there's a good synopsis on an Astrid Lindgren fan page called Pippi's World. In 1971 a Swedish-language movie simply titled Emil i Lönneberga came out. It was very popular, and several clips (all in Swedish or Norwegian) have been posted to YouTube from time to time.

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Emil and friend, as portrayed in the movie.

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Wikipedia has this: "Emil of Lönneberga (from Swedish: Emil i Lönneberga) is a series of children's novels by Astrid Lindgren, covering twelve books written from 1963 to 1997. Emil, the title character, is a prankster who lives on a farm in the district of Lönneberga in Småland, Sweden. The books have been published in 44 languages. In most translations, the original illustrations by the Swedish illustrator Björn Berg are used."

Adds the Wikipedia profile, "[Emil] has fair hair and blue eyes and looks like an angel, but is not, as he also has a prodigious knack for getting into trouble. Contrary to what most people around him think, Emil is not malicious, but does not think about the consequences of his actions. He even states at one point that 'you don't make up pranks, they just happen'."

Pippi's World, the Astrid Lindgren fan website, has some perceptive comments:

The fact that Emil of Lönneberga lives in a farmhouse is of great significance! This is where he has unfettered freedom to do his pranks. Most of his pranks are targeted at saving people he love from some problem that he perceives. They are endearing also, like the time when he gives food meant for guests to some poor people because he feels their need is greater. This is labeled a 'prank' in his own home, but the intentions are definitely noble and give him good brownie points for character.

Speaking of character, Emil is really quite good at heart. He also knows to reciprocate goodness, which is seen in his behavior with Alfred, the farmhand, who is one of Emil's best friends. For all Alfred's trust and good faith in him, Emil reciprocates by even saving his life at one point of time.

There's a copy of the 1971 movie version available on YouTube. It's in Swedish, and I didn't watch it all, but a trailer gives a feel for the characters ... and an idyllic -- idealized? -- impression of what a youngster from Småland might remember from the early 20th century when Astrid Lindgren was growing up. There are more YouTube clips, all in Swedish. Details on the 1971 release available on the Swedish Film Database website.