On not striking on the stomp

Anders Røine has studied what he calls phrasing practice for four different traditional music instruments, including the Jew’s Harp. Photo: Lena Knutli.

Anders Røine has written a doctoral dissertation about striking formulas and traditional tune types.

By Veronika Søum
Translated by Lucy Moffatt

‘If you listen to Jew’s harp playing from before the 1990s, like the old Jew’s harp recordings, you’ll hear that the performers don’t strike the lamella strictly on the stomp. After working with this kind of music for a while, I started to get the sense that there was a repertoire of striking formulas for the different tune types,’ writes Anders Røine.

The Jew’s harp player, who lives in Bø, Telemark county, has made an in-depth study of what he calls phrasing practice for four different traditional music instruments. Phrasing practice refers to the way notes/rhythmic components are connected through combinations of onsets. The onset is the beginning of a musical note, produced by striking (in the case of the Jew’s harp), bowing changes (fiddle), consonant onsets (lilting) and plucking with the plectrum (Norwegian dulcimer).

But when are you actually supposed to strike the Jew’s harp lamella? After the older Jew’s harp traditions died out, it became common practice to strike in time with the stomping. But Anders found out that this hasn’t always been the case.

Rhythmic Grammar

The idea that ultimately developed into his doctoral thesis, Rytmiske strukturer i norsk slåttemusikk. En sammenliknende studie av ansatspraksis på munnharpe, tralling, langeleik og hardingfele [Rhythmic structures in Norwegian traditional tunes: A comparative study of phrasing practice on the Jew’s harp, the Norwegian dulcimer, in lilting and on the Hardanger fiddle), was first sparked when Anders started to learn these instruments.

He chose the Jew’s harp as his main instrument when he was studying traditional music at Rauland ‘to make life easier for himself,’ and started to learn the fiddle later on. But it wasn’t until he took up the Norwegian dulcimer that his initial suspicions were confirmed.

‘When I transferred tunes from Jew’s harp and fiddle to Norwegian dulcimer I discovered that in Norwegian dulcimer playing, the plucking was also synchronous with the foot stomp. How could that be possible with such an old instrument? Especially since it seems to be so interwoven with the traditions in the other two instruments and lilting. I was sure that something else was missing.’

Although onset is an important element of rhythm in traditional tunes, no one had ever articulated the practice across different instruments until Anders started looking for answers.

‘I thought at first that there might be some building blocks out there, but no one had put their finger on this particular issue. There are Hardanger fiddle players who can play maybe 300 tunes and are incredibly good, but they can’t necessarily talk about their phrasing practice in isolation from the melodies.’

After listening to hundreds of traditional tunes on the instruments, Anders formulated a hypothesis: that each type of traditional tune had its own set of onset formulas. The musician refers to this as rhythmic grammar.

‘There are standards like 6/8 gangars (e.g. ‘Bestelanden’) which you can find across geographical traditions, such as Valdres, Setesdal and Telemark,’ he says.

The Core of Traditional Tunes

He has included an overview of the different phrasing formulas as an appendix to his doctoral dissertation. But Anders says you don’t necessarily have to study the formulas to play with asynchronous phrasing.

‘Your body already knows a lot of the rhythm. If you learnt the tunes from old recordings from Setesdal, you’ll know a lot of this.’

‘I visited Tarjei Eldhuset in Setesdal before he died and if you grew up in a place like that, where everyone could play a bit of Jew’s harp, the music is in your blood, as he put it. He learned Jew’s harp by doing what his father told him: Just ‘sing and play.’ People growing up today aren’t surrounded by the music in the same way. So this is a shortcut to talking about this issue in absolutely concrete terms. It’s the core of traditional tunes.’

Mass Production and Synchronous Phrasing

Anders has also identified a link between rhythmic technique and Jew’s harp players who use the opening/closing technique. Most of the recordings where the opening/closing technique is used are played with asynchronous phrasing, whereas synchronous phrasing is used in the recordings where players use the blowing technique.

There are a hundred Jew’s harp recordings from Valdres. Of these, 95% are played on cast Jew’s harps, which makes it difficult to hear the melody. But 5% – the recordings of Olav Hauge and Embrik Beitohaugen – are played on forged instruments. These two players use both the opening/closing technique and asynchronous phrasing.

So what about the Norwegian dulcimer? Anders found that when Øystein Rudi began mass- producing them in Valdres after 1870, all the instruments became identical, with the same appearance and scale. There is much to suggest that this is when phrasing formulas shifted from asynchronous to synchronous.

‘There’s another similarity between the Norwegian dulcimer and the Jew’s harp: playing style is linked to instrument type. Rudi’s mass production ensured that the Norwegian dulcimer survived and enjoyed a genuine boom, a bit like the Jew’s harp boom of the 1960s that followed the mass-production of cast Jew’s harps. At the same time, the phrasing practice in both instruments changed.