In this article series, together with Sustainable EEEMERGING and its partners, we explore Early music across Europe – and the challenges faced by young artists in various countries across the continent. What is the condition of Early music today?
This article was supported by Helsinki Baroque Orchestra.
Talking with Baroque violinist and folk fiddler Ida Meidell about the freedom offered by Early music repertoire, she expresses some hesitancy around that particular word. “It’s so interesting that you use the word freedom. I’m not sure that I used it, because I’m cautious about it, but I think that’s what it is ultimately,” she says. “Not afraid of it but afraid to say it!” While she is scrupulous in her choice of words, Meidell’s caution also seems curious, since the wide range of instruments she has hanging on her wall attest to a career that could well be defined by freedom.
The first instrument is a riti, a single-stringed fiddle she acquired while on a research scholarship studying with griots – the West African poet-musicians and educators – in Senegal. The second, a nyckelharpa, comes from closer to home, but the geographical spread of its distant relatives, including the Japanese taishogoto, the South Asian bulbul tarang and the American autoharp, attests to its fringe status as a keyed (and, additionally, bowed) string instrument. Meidell mainly used her nyckelharpa for busking in Newcastle city centre – earning her five times more money, she says, than fiddle-playing – during her enrolment on the university’s Folk and Traditional Music degree. In the midst of a busy Messiah season performing with a range of local ensembles, Meidell’s free-ranging pursuits are thrown into relief by the name of the currently-gentrifying district of Malmö where she lives: Sorgenfri, which translates as ‘free of sorrows’.
“I’ve had my musical adventures in terms of travel and exploring,” she tells me. “I’m collecting musical influences or dialects.” If freedom is something of an unstable concept, diversity and versatility are ones which Meidell is more comfortable working with, seeing them as central to her main instrument. “Fiddle or violin is a bit like garlic. It goes with many different foods and still tastes of garlic. With violin, it can adjust to so many different sounds and take on so many roles, at the forefront, in the background, accompanying, playing melody. It’s present in so many traditions and in art music. The appetite is there and doesn’t go away. Different musical languages or dialects can speak with this instrument.”
Meidell’s violin practice was polylingual from the beginning; her childhood classical violin teacher was also a folk musician and would run through traditional tunes with her at the end of lessons. But it wasn’t until she got to grips with a historically accurate Baroque violin and its associated repertoire in her late teens that its exploratory potential was truly unlocked. “I found Early music and immediately I felt like I could breathe. The instrument itself, and the music itself, just spoke to me. I felt like I was able to express myself more truly.”
Stereotypically, Early music’s indebtedness to academic research and its associated rigours can project a sense of restriction to the historical record. For Meidell, contrastingly, the compositions of the era license an ability to follow the ear that is more in keeping with folk practice. “I’ve always related to music primarily through my ear rather than visually, through scores. Scores are a natural part of it too and something that you need. But for me, my ear is the primary means, and I feel that Early music accommodates that, and has this quality of “ear”. It feels like I’m given a mandate by the composer to have my own voice. Even though there are specificities, to make choices based on either a level of research or on the oral tradition, it still holds space for the performer.”
Meidell estimates that her current schedule splits 50:50 between straight Baroque concerts and trad folk gigs, but it also includes a significant proportion of performances which explore the confluences of these concerns, including her work with François Lazarevitch’s Musiciens de Saint-Julien and her duo with nyckelharpist Johan Hedin. They first crossed paths while performing on a Stockholm Early Music Festival programme placing Bach in dialogue with Nordic folk. Some years later, they came together to plough a similar furrow, using the particular auditory correspondence between the gut-strung Baroque violin and the sympathetic strings of the nyckelharpa to explore comparable historical resonances across Baroque composition and Swedish traditional tunes of the 1700s, lacing in elements from pan-European folk lineages and rotating their respective instruments through melodic, harmonic and continuo roles.
This spry movement between responsibilities is, according to Meidell, part of the pair’s mission to serve the sound itself rather than engage in arbitrary fusion projects. “For me doing these crossover things, it’s not so much about merging genres for the sake of it. That can be interesting and cool, just to experiment. But when I work with my duo, we come to the music with our knowledge in these two backgrounds (folk and Baroque), and we look at the music and say, ‘how can we make this music sound the best? How can we use different elements from these different genres or traditions to benefit the music the most? What can phrasing from Baroque add to a traditional dance tune, or how can we use Baroque ornamentation and improvisational elements in a folk tune? Or even, in what ways can we make Baroque benefit from the groove and rhythm in traditional tunes?’”
You can hear the fruition of these questions in the strong rhythmic pulses of their latest CD, Prowinciale, a commission by the regional music archive of Sweden’s Småland province. The brief, at first, seemed somewhat baffling: interpret suitable pieces deriving from the Småland town of Växjö, specifically from the last three decades of the 1700s. With the help of the archive’s librarian, however, they uncovered hundreds of tunes, culling the best for the arrangements on the album. As well as providing a wealth of material for recording and playing live, the project brought some unexpected discoveries that spoke strongly to Meidell’s interest in border-spanning folk music: a Welsh fiddle tune aptly named ‘Tom Jones’, remembered from her time at a youth folk camp, surfacing among the Scandinavian sheet music. “In these books from the 1700s we found all kinds of tunes because musicians were travelling of course, as they are always. And then I found this tune that I had heard from Welsh musicians in this Swedish manuscript, and it’s a good example of how music travels across generations and centuries and borders.”
To British ears, the commission sounds like an enviable example of Scandinavia’s apparently well-funded public arts sector in action. However, according to Meidell, such opportunities have been getting rarer in Sweden since Covid, which she attributes to waning will in higher echelons of government. “I’m making a living out of music, freelancing for all my income, but I would say it’s getting harder by the year… I would like for politicians to fund culture more, so that the audience can have more concerts to go to and for us musicians to feel like this is a viable way to make a living, and then that will spark more engagement and more projects. But at the moment, cultural politics is so difficult.”
The state of Scandinavia’s Early music scene is, she says, relative to select factors: the region’s rich church choir tradition which provides reliable employment for period instrument specialists through programming oratorios; the distance between major cities relative to southern and central Europe, making it impracticable for players to travel around for opportunities; and the activities of certain advocates and organisers who make it their business to wide Early music’s reach. “There are some people that we call ‘fire-spirits’, or ‘fire-souls’ is the direct translation,” she says. “They put their heart into working for a cause, and we need those for the scene to flourish. And we’re really thankful to them, because the government in general doesn’t take this seriously enough.”
To get a greater sense of how this plays out across the region, I put Meidell’s comments to arguably one of the foremost ‘fire-souls’ in Finland, Helsinki Baroque Orchestra’s Artistic Director Aapo Häkkinen. For Häkkinen, the obstacles in governance are perhaps more deep-seated: “On the political front, Nordic countries are conservative in the sense that changes always take time. For the better and for the worse. When the right-wing wins, taxes go 1% down; when the left wins, they go 1% up – you get the picture. In culture, this can be a problem for the young and the new. For us, it took 15 years to get any serious public funding while most of our concerts were abroad, and I imagine it hasn’t become easier. That’s an obvious waste of potential.”
While stating that Early music as a genre has ceased to be a leader of musical diversity, Häkkinen concedes that it can still have something to say in the matter, since it involves “musicians looking at different ways of approaching our art, sometimes even as a quest for its sense and meaning. This is especially true of less-explored repertoires and styles, whether in dialogue with traditional music or exploring 19th-century performance practices.”
One could call Meidell, whose upcoming projects involve a new Baroque trio for viol, lute and violin, and a CD and Swedish tour with octogenarian melodeon player Frank Lee from her Newcastle pub session days, an outlier in this regard. “It’s becoming a thing, exploring the borderlands between trad music and Baroque music, and I think the scene is quite diverse already. But I’m sure it’s going to be even more so, because people are people, and they’re creative, and ideas rise in people’s minds all over the place, sometimes at similar points in time. Musicians are being creative, so I think it’s not about to stop expanding.”
See upcoming performances of Early music in Scandinavia.
Sustainable EEEMERGING is funded by the European Union.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
This article was sponsored by Centre culturel de rencontre d’Ambronay.
