Swedish Folk Music in the Twenty-First Century: On the Nature of Tradition in a Folkless Nation by David Kaminsky (review)

This slender volume is a probing, elegantly written assessment of a more tightly circumscribed topic than the author advertises with the book’s title. Kaminsky’s focus is the verbal articulation of the concept “folk music” by the Swedish musicians he has played alongside for years. It’s been decades since folklorists and ethnomusicologists became wary of the term “folk music,” gun-shy because of the willful naïveté of the term’s inventors and the subsequent forbidding accumulation of associated ideological baggage. But that doesn’t mean that many cultures haven’t inherited oral tradition repertoires cultivated by a population, which—while certainly not “myopically innocent” (p. 2) rural foils for urban, spiritually dislocated populations—are indeed relatively traditional or at least especially interested in tradition for whatever reasons. These not-primarily-urbanites may possess carefully considered opinions about the music they make, and, after some dialogue between country and city, they can call it folk music, no matter how that term fares as an etic category.

If Kaminsky’s title is to be taken literally, none of the middle-class, educated, articulate, media-savvy, modern Swedes who cultivate—and can discuss—their country’s folk music are themselves folk. I wonder if that is meant to be provocative hyperbole. I consider my Norwegian consultants to all be partly “real” folk, partly romanticized folk, and partly informed urbanites. I further believe that the complex nature of Norwegian folk music and of the institutions and events supporting this music issues from how folk, “folk,” and citified factors play out within each individual. Sweden may be more different from Norway than I understand, but I would wager that Kaminsky would be as justified in calling Sweden “folkfull” as “folkless,” with almost everyone harboring parallel complex (and often conflicting) sentiments, even if differently proportioned.

His first chapter is titled “Toward an Insiders’ Definition of Folk Music.” A less catchy but more accurate title for the entire book could have been similar, for instance, “Toward a Twenty-First-Century Insiders’ Definition of Swedish Folk Music.” Sure, Sweden may not house and likely never did have pure “folk,” but there certainly are insiders. There are several thousand avid musicians (a majority of whom are fiddlers, and most but not all of whom are amateurs) who have revived and continue to cultivate inherited traditional repertoires proper to their country, much as in Norway, the United States, and many other countries bordering the North Atlantic.

A majority of individual Scandinavian “folk” musicians seem at first glance to share many attitudes and practices, but below this surface appearance of relative homogeneity lurks a shift of complexity and tensions away from being between groups of individuals (as in the United States) to being within each performer. Also, just as I found in Norway, Kaminsky found that in Sweden, “the connection between theoretical and practical worlds during the revival was reinforced [by many] scholars who were also players, and the number of players who engaged in amateur scholarship and collection work” (p. 3). Nevertheless, these musicians’ approaches to revival fall into differentiable paths. The group intending to be the most literally faithful to the inherited repertoires, whom Kaminsky calls “preservationists,” wish to understand and museumize older repertoires, while two other groups take considerable liberties in contrasting ways. The “neo-medievalists” are required by gaps in the historical record to be creative in their attempts to recreate something like authentic ancient musical culture, while the “innovationists” may actually represent past attitudes. Some of the best of these bounce between tradition and invention and often synthesize the two concepts. But the largest category in Sweden, as in Norway, is the “neo-traditionalists,” who largely cleave to known tradition, but welcome modest change. Since repertoires and practices can never have been completely static...