Julian Thanksgiving Weekend - November 23-26, 2000 by Ted Martin and friends

We almost gave up our Festival this year because the teachers who had agreed to come canceled - and then a miracle happened. Two young Finns arrived in Los Angeles late in September and performed at the Turlock, CA Scandinavian Festival. They sang and they danced a polka suite and a hambo suite that was one of the most gorgeous dances many of us had seen. The miracle is that they have agreed to teach at our Festival, doing waltz, schottis and hambo variations as well as some small couple dances from Karelia. And who knows what else, possibly western Finland style polskas.

We know that our Nordic dance community has had limited exposure to the dance heritage of Finland. This year's SCSF provides a rich opportunity to sample the wealth of those traditions. We will make available to participants a video tape of Milla and Petri demonstrating the dances and a cassette or CD of music for the dances taught.

Finnish Teachers and Musicians

Milla Korja and Petri Kauppinen are both graduates of a four year university level course at Oulu Conservatory for folk dance teachers. They are superb dancers and professionally trained choreographers and teachers. Milla is artistic director of Matit Ja Maijat, one of Finland's top performing groups, and Petri is choreographer and dancer for Folkdance Theater Rimpparemmi, and teaches at the Kaustinen Folkarts Center. Both have taught extensively all over Finland and abroad. As a spenal bonus, they also sing. We will have a musician from Finland, probably an accordionist, to teach and play for us. This arrangement is being made as we write this flyer. This is a First, to have a teacher for accordion, so we especially encourage accordion players to join us.

Musicians from the USA

Kriss Larson and his gammaldans band have played many years in Southern California for the Finnish group Katirilli, the Scandia Dancers, and for recreational Nordic dancing. Kriss and friends will play for some of the classes and for the dance parties. Peter Michaelson from Seattle has developed over the past several years into one of the best all around Scandinavian dance fiddlers in the USA. He plays extensively for dancing in the Seattle area and at many folk dance camps and weekends. This September he and Chris Gruber were the Swedish fiddlers for Leif and Margareta Virtanen's Norberg, Sweden group tour of the USA. Peter will be available for teaching and of course will liven the evening parties with his music. Paul Johnson and Anne Grace will coordinate music classes, entertainment, and music for dance parties.

Location, location, location

Cedar Glen Camp is located near the small town Julian, in the mountains above San Diego. It was a gold mining area in the 19th century but is now mostly agricultural, predominantly apple orchards. Driving time is approximately 1* hours inland from Oceanside and 1 hour north from San Diego. The camp facilities include cabins that house varying numbers of people as well as a large dining and dance hall with a very nice wood floor. Most people arrive Thursday aftemoon or evening to get situated. There is no meal service on Thursday. Workshops begin Friday moming after breakfast and conclude Sunday aftemoon after lunch. Please try to make ride arrangements with people from your area. We will attempt to help coordinate transportation from airports but we cannot guarantee rides for any campers. Please provide transportation requests early.

Workshop Fees: Dancers $220 Musicians $140 (check payable to SCSF) Send with form and one SASE to: Darlene Martin, 5140 Keynote Ave., Long Beach, CA 90808. (562) 494-1665. E-mail questions or comments to Ted Martin tedmartjuno.com. A registration form is available from the above address, from your local dance group, or the NCS Webpage: <members.aol.com/jglittle/ncs.html>.
 

Great Christrnas Dance Switch Caper
Mill Valley  South Bay's Nordic Footnotes Trade Dates for Christmas Dances

Just to keep us all on our toes, the powers that be of Park School in Mill Valley have scheduled a conflicting event there on the 2nd Saturday of December. (Dec. 9th). So the Mill Valley dancers and the Nordic Footnotes folks have traded dates for the month of December. Here's the important stuff.

The Mill Valley Christmas dance will meet on the 3rd Saturday, Dec. 16th at Park School in Mill Valley from 7:30 pm - midnight. As usual for December, there will be no teaching that evening. Cost will be $10.

The Nordic Footnotes South Bay holiday dance will meet on Dec. 9th at the 1st United Methodist Church in Palo Alto from 8 pm til whenever.

Note that the changes involve a trade in which week the two groups meet. All other details for the two dances are as usual for a December party time. The trade is for the month of December ONLY. §
 

NCS Board Meeting Oct. 21st

The annual NCS board meeting will be held in Redwood City on the afternoon of Saturday, Oct. 21. A11 interested parties are invited to attend. For more informffion, contact Jeanne Sawyer: (408) 929-5602, email: qsawyer@SawyerPartnership.com>. §
 

SKOHÖ - Sveriges växter 3
by Wes Ludemann
illustrations by Ginnie Lee

When Carolyn Hunt and I attended the live-in Swedish language course given by the Swedish Institute at the folk high school in Storuman in southem Lappland, we made the acquaintance of the rector of the school. He told us that when he was growing up, the custom in that area was to use the so-called skohö, or "shoe hay" in their boots as insulation rather than knitted stockings. He told us that the skohö was both warmer and softer than stockings.

In his book Lapplandsresa, Linnaeus, Karl von Linné, wrote of skohö: "In their shoes the Lapps lay Carex, Lapp shoe grass, combed with an iron comb or a horn comb and twisted between their hands so that it becomes soft, which is then dried and laid in the shoes, which protects in the strongest cold, those who go without stockings." . . .

In all probability grasses and sedges were used to line footwear long before knitted stockings came on the scene.

Skohö is not really hay (dried grass) as we think of it. Rather it is made from several varieties of sedge, Carex rostrale, C. vesicana or C. inpaha. Not just any sedge suffices. To be useful for siahö it must have long, round but narrow blades that contain strong fibers. Along with birches and osiers, (the willows used for basketry and wickerwork), such sedges grow only in moors and slash and-burn clearings. Sedges that grow along a lakeshore or pool are quite unsuitable for skohö, for they have such a brittle fiber that it breaks into short stubs during combing. The quantity of skohö needed to see a family through the winter was very large.

In late summer, during the last weeks of haying, pairs of women would go out to cut sedge. They took their lunches in a birchbark rucksack, and a kettle in which to cook coffee. They would go to a mor, a marshy valley, or to a raning, a swampy stream side, where the skohö sedges grew between small birches and osiers. They left their lunch and coffee kettle on solid ground by a large landmark such as a spruce tree, and went out into the marsh. Each woman would take her knife from its sheath and start cutting. She took a tuft of sedge stems in her left hand, and cut the stems close to the ground. She laid the tuft on the ground, then cut more tufts, laying them together with the first until they formed a bundle that she could just hold in one hand. Holding the bundle at the top, she would hit the root end of the bundle several times against a birch trunk to shake out the short straws. Then she twisted the top and tied a knot in it to hold the bunch together. She had now cut and knotted a skohöbunt, or "shoe hay sheaf."  The women continued cutting and knotting, leaving the sheaves Iying on the damp  ground. At noon they gathered up all the sheaves and carried them back to their lunch place. They lit a fire, boiled coffee, and ate their dry food. They didn't rest long at the fire, but were soon back cutting. When night drew near, they carried the remaining sheaves to the lunch area. Each woman then cut a long osier, twisted the top into an eye, and threaded the free end through the eye to make a long loop, called a svega. She then loaded all her sheaves into her svega, and swung the load over her shoulder by the free end. They hurried home, silent and a little damp. Their clothing was both wet and foul. During the day it had poured rain a couple of times, and in the marsh they had goffen muddy, and their shoes full of water. At the gård they went through the stable door and emptied their svegor, throwing all the sheaves in a heap on the stable floor. The women then went into the stuga to start the evening's work. The gathering went on for several more days to get enough skohö to last a year.

After the skohö sedges had cured for a week or more, processing began in the afternoons. The first step was to hackle the sedge, that is, to separate the fibers from the membrane binding them together by drawing the stems through the teeth of a hackle. The tool for this step was a skohöhäckle, or a "shoe hay hackle." It  consisted of a board having a breadth of a harter, an old measure equal to 14.8 cm, and long enough to reach across the legs of an overturned chair. A long oval plate of cross-grained or curly birch was fastened to the middle of one side. From this oval of tough wood protruded a number of round, iron nails two to three tummar (a tum = 2.47 cm, or about 1 inch) long. The nails, called tinnar or pinnacles, were pointed at the top.

A bundle of sedges was brought into the kitchen and dumped on the floor. The hackle was laid across two of the legs of an overturned chair and tied firmly to them. The worker sat on a stool in front of the hackle, picked up a bunch of sedge and hit the root ends of the bundle against the nails of the hackle, then drew the bunch through the nails. This combing action was performed many times. As the sedge straws were drawn through the hackle, they were ripped apart, and the membrane which enclosed them was tom to pieces and fell to the floor. This process removed most of the green membrane from the lighter colored fibers. Then the bunch was turned, and the tops hackled. After a bunch was hackled, its top was tied in a loose knot. Evening after evening one of the household would work hackling bunch after bunch of sedge.

After all the sedge was hackled, the bundles needed to be combed.

The skohö comb consisted of a shaft of tough dry birch long enough to be held in the hand. The lower end of the shaft was cut crossways. It needed to be a good three tum broad and as thick as a finger. Two or three rows of tnnar were securely fastened into this end of the shaft. There was a hole in the upper end to hang the comb from a spike in the wall. One household usually had a large number of combs, but only one hackle. All of the house's able-bodied members were kept busy combing skohö in the evenings. Sitting on a chair or a bench, the comber took a hackled bunch, laid it on his knee, and ran the comb rapidly through the bunch. The straw fibers became divided into thin threads, light green in color. After the bunch was combed, he took it between his hands and rubbed it vigorously to soften it, then tied a knot in the upper end. A second bunch was combed, and the two bunches were laid together and tied into a larger bundle with a band of twisted fibers. The top ends of the two small bunches were twisted together in a spiral. This set of two bunches formed half of a skohö pair. After another halfpair was combed, the tops of the two half-pairs were tied together to form a skohöpar, or "shoe hay pair." At the end of the evening, the completed pairs are carried to the shed and hung below the roof ridge. When the bundles stretched from wall to wall there was enough skohö to last until the next summer, when the whole process would be repeated.

A large quantity of waste skohö fell to the floor during combing. It was of much poorer quality, but it could be used in shoes during the fall when the ground was bare. After the ground became snowcovered, it didn't suffice, and the good hay from a skohöpar was needed. §
 

The Huldra and the Gentleman
— a retelling by Sarah Kirton, from Tommy Runesson, illustrated by Ginnie Lee

Many tunes in the folk tradition have stories knit to them. These stories are an important part of tradition, and are often told when the tune is taught or played for an appreciative audience. The following story is associated with the tune "Orbergs Kerstin," a polska played in various forms in eastern Dalarna in Sweden. It was told us by Tommy Runeson on one of his trips to the Bay Area.

There's a hill or perhaps a mountain, called Orberg in the Rättvik area. On (or perhaps in??) Orberg there live huldra folk. These folk are very much like us, but form a completely separate society. They also have otherworldly powers and can bring us humans good or bad luck, depending on how we treat them. Despite their extra powers, they seem a bit envious of us, and occasionally steal our children, or exchange an infant for one of theirs. Sometimes their young women try to lure our young men into marriage. And one more thing, they look just like us, but they have tails. Long, cow-like tails!

The farmers near Orberg used to hold Saturday night dances, and Kerstin, of the huldra women, was very fond of dancing. She would wrap her tail up around her waist, hiding it under her skirts. I suppose she hoped no one would notice that she wasn't human. But of course everyone knew. When she came to the dance of a Saturday night, folks would point at her when they thought she wasn't looking, whispering and snickering nervously behind their hands. Since she was a huldra, they were a bit afraid of making comments they thought she  would overhear, but since she was a huldra, she knew exactly what was going on. There was one farrner who never snickered or gossiped or acted nervous around her. In fact, he was unfailingly and genuinely nice to her, always. He was also a very good dancer, and the two often danced together.

One evening, the unthinkable happened. Her tail slipped loose from its moorings, and peeped from beneath her skirts. If you think there were comments and nervous laughter at her expense before, you can imagine what happened when foLk noticed her wayward tail! The farrner, however, only sud, "I think you're losing something." He led her to a corner and stood there, shielding her from view, while she pinned her tail up out of sight again.

That fall the gentlemanly farmer had the best harvest anyone had seen in years, while his neighbors had al1 kinds of bad luck with their crops. And in the spring, his cattle and goats and sheep were extraordinarily fruitful, while those of his neighbors were plagued with both infertility und odd diseases.

And that is the end of this story.

Fiddle Tips - by Sarah Kirton

Well, here we are again. Last time I promised to talk a bit about intonation and tone production. Good technique, in general, helps to produce a good tone. And good tone and good intonation are intertwined. You can't have the best possible tone unless you have good intonation, and good tone quality helps you to hear when your intonation is off so that you can improve it. Bad tone quality can even make good intonation sound bad. So like much of fiddle playing, improving these two things is a frustratingly iterative process. Every time you improve your intonation, your tone quality will automatically improve, but you'll also become more aware of how much more you need to work on it. So then you work on tone quality for awhile, only to realize that your intonation sure could be better. This can be pretty discouraging. Look at it this way. If you hadn't been making improvements in your playing, you'd never have been able to grasp that there was a next step to take, let alone what it might be.

In general, a good tone has to do with the relationship of bow pressure to bow speed. The harder you press, the faster you need to draw the bow in order to get a good tone. The lighter your bow pressure, the slower you must draw the bow to avoid getting that airy whistling sound. And then there are those points at either end of the pressure spectrum, where no bow speed will help correct the effect of too much or too little pressure. Experimenting with bow pressure vs. bow speed is a valuable exercise.

The angle of the flat of your hair to the string is another factor, but not quite as important. At the tip of the bow, the flat of the hair is usually flat against the string, and as the bow comes up to the frog, the flat of the hair rotates a bit to begin face you as the bow stick tips away from you. Other things factor into this bowing equation, but are not as easily controllable when you're standing there playing:

rosin (how much is used & what quality it is), the state and quality of your bow hair,
the state and quality of your strings,
the state and quality of your fiddle (!) and bow (!), the weather - it affects both bow hair and rosirv
tightness & springiness of the bow,
how good the initial attack of the bow into the string was when you started the bowstroke, and amount of nervous shaking in your bow hand.

The left hand has a lot to do with creating a good tone, too. You must set your left hand fingers down at a near perpendicular angle to the fingerboard, press hard enough with the tips, not the pads, of your fingers, and BE IN TUNE.

One reason intonation affects tone quality is that when your fiddle is in tune with itself, and is anywhere near standard pitch, it will resonate most strongly when you play notes that are a fifth, a fourth, or a third above any of the open strings. One reason we play so much in the keys of D, A, and G is not just that the fingerings are more comfortable, but that the fiddle sounds better in these keys. It has to do with the strength of the overtones of an open string and is pure physics. I'm not going to go any further into it here, but we can certainly take advantage of this without making a study of the physics behind it.

Get your fiddle in tune. VERY WELL IN TUNE. Now play (a well in tune) third finger G on the D string as loudly as you can, and watch the untouched G string also vibrate. Try the same thing with third finger D on the A string, watching the untouched D string. Sometimes, if you're really well in tune with the third finger, you can also see a "node" on the open string. To do this, play the third finger G again - loudly - and see if you can see a place on the G string, halfway along its length, where the string isn't moving - it's forming the crossing of a figure 8. (See figure 1.) This is a visible reminder of the harmonics that sound whenever we play a note. (Sorry, more physics. Again, I'm not going to go into it here.) These harmonics are the reason we sound so much better when we play in tune. They are produced by every note we play (or sing, or whistle, or...), and by using the physics of the violin construction and tuning, we magnify any note we play in tune, and partially cancel out, or fuzz up, to use an important technical term, any note that isn't in tune. We can't see most of the harmonics we create like we can on the G string, because they aren't usually strong enough to cause our strings to swing in a way to be easily visible to us. But believe me, they're there.

Now play a second finger F# on the D string or a second finger C# on the A. Wiggle or rock your finger very slightly and VERY slowly - taking time to listen very carefully to each tiny, tiny, incremental change in finger position - until you're really in tune. One way to tell you're really in tune is that (if your fiddle's in tune) the tone will sound much purer in that position. Play that pitch, enjoy the sound. Oh yes - you have to play loudly enough, with enough courage, pressure, and bow speed, to hear yourself well. No air tones or scrunches. Try this with an F natural and a C natural. Harder to hear, isn't it? That's because these tones are fairly low in importance in the range of harmonics naturally produced/magnified by the fiddle in its standard tuning. Now try it again with the third fingers on the D and A. They fairly leap out at you when they're in tune, don't they? These are just more reasons why we like to play in keys with at least 2 sharps. If you can't hear what I'm talking about, be sure you're playing nice and loud, without getting scrunchy noises. If you're scrunching (another technical term), lighten up on the bow pressure or increase the bow speed, or both. If you still can't hear it, concentrate on bowing (while playing as well in tune as you can) for a few months and then try again. It is an iterative process, after all.

So here's your first exercise. Tune your fiddle well. Play scales and arpeggios in the keys of D, A, G, F, and Bb. These are the most common fiddle keys. Listen to all the notes as you play them, just as you did to the third and second fingers on the D and A strings. Play with painful slowness at first, allowing plenty of time to wiggle and rock to find that perfectly in tune spot, speeding up as you become more skilled and confident. You'll probably notice that the keys of A, D, and G sound more vibrant, while the keys of F and Bb sound more muted. This is another effect of violin physics. You don't need to understand it to take advantage of it. Knowing this, and feeling the notes you play through the violin as much as hearing them can help you stay in tune. This is true whether you're playing alone and can hear yourself all too well, or playing in a group, and can't hear yourself at all. You should still be able to feel the vibrations of the fiddle. Granted, this takes some practice of the type we're doing here. When you're playing alone, don't just listen, but feel the vibrations produced by your fiddle. In this way, you can learn which sensations to hone in one when you're in a big group and trying to "hear." Sometimes you have to rely on feel as much or more than on hearing. And on another subject, which key would you rather play in at a noisy dance with no microphone? Which ones will carry best to the dancers, and which ones will be easy for you to keep in tune if you can't hear well in the room? (Not that the other keys aren't beautiful, and possible to use at noisy dances.)

Arpeggios in common fiddle keys
I've written these out in a way to ensure that one doesn't leave out the "extra" notes at the bottom and top of the fiddle's range in first position. Don't play these like jigs, even though I've used triplet notation. Keep them staid and boring, at least at first.
 

Now try playing a five note scale on the D string, sounding the open G along with it as a double stop. You need to have enough bow control to put equal pressure on both strings. If this means you have to stare cross-eyed at the place where your bow crosses the strings, so be it. Listen to how nice it sounds when you're perfectly in tune. Now try it, playing the scale on the D string along with the open A. Even the third finger G should sound nice with the open A in its own odd way. To me, at least, it has an exciting tension to it, while an out of tune G with the A just sounds muddy. Do this on all strings, sounding the open adjacent string(s) at the same time.

Last, try playing a beautiful, slow, tune. One I especially like for this exercise is the Slow Waltz from Boda, the Boda waltz after Soling Anders, but you can use any slow tune with long held notes. Play your chosen tune slowly too slowly to dance to. Put your fingers down just hard enough, and use the finger tips, not the pads. Draw the bow at the speed/pressure combination that is best for you. Use the combination of bow speed and pres-sure, finger pressure and angle to the string, and good intonation to make this tune become vibrant and alive. Try it again, not using good finger pressure, or a without that good bow speed/pressure combination, or with not quite good intonation, and listen to the difference. Boring, isn't it. Go back to your good habits and make it vibrant again. Play it well again, this time at a slow dance tempo. Play * at the same tempo with all the bad habits we're trying to get rid of. Notice that although the tempo is the same, it's lost its motion, and doesn't exactly invite anyone to dance. Resume your good habits, and Happy Fiddling Till Next Time. §
 

Special Event Announcements

American Scandinavian Music Sites:

The Northern California Spelmanslag:<members.aol.com/jglittle/ncs.html>

Nordahl Grieg Leikarring & Spelemannslag<home.att.net/~williamlikens/ngls/ngls.html>

The American Nyckelharpa Association:<www.nyckelharpa.org>

Bruce Sagan’s Scandinavian Web Site:<www.math.msu.edu/~sagan/Folk/sources.html>

The Hardangar Fiddle Association of America<www.hfaa.org/>

The Skandia Folkdance Society (Seattle):<www.Skandia-Folkdance.org>

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About the Calendar

A (somewhat) more detailed and up-to-date calendar can be found on the NCS Webpage at <members.aol.com/jglittle/ncs.html>.

Web and Newsletter calendar submissions should be sent to Jim Little at 321 McKendry, Menlo Park, CA, 94025, email: < jlittle@unix.sri.com>, phone: (650) 323-2256 or Sarah Kirton at 330 Sierra Vista Ave. #1, Mt. View, CA, 94043, email: <sekirton@ix.netcom.com>, phone: (650) 968-3126. Suggestions for what to include in a calendar submission are found below and will eventually be on our web page. The web page calendar is updated when new material is received. §

_____________________________________________________________

Submission of Newsletter and Web Page Calendar Items

The following are suggestions for those submitting calendar items for publication in the Newsletter or on the NCS Web Page. In general, the web page may contain more details than the newsletter, because of space/mailing weight considerations. For those without email - no, we're not putting less in the newsletter calendar, we're just expanding it on the web page. (Jim and Sarah’s addresses can be found above.)

1) if we ask for a contact method, always include a phone number, not everyone has email.
2) time & place of the event.
3) location of event, directions to get there if needed, or how to obtain directions (who to phone, email, etc).
4) cost of event - we haven't always been including this, we hope to begin to.
5) special schedules around holidays, summertime, etc.
6) tell us if there’s a change in time (or location, price, etc) - for two reasons - so that we don’t say - “oh yes, that’s the same group as before” and miss changing the time, and so we can put in in bold to alert our readers to a change.
7) registration deadline, where to get registration forms, etc, if applicable.
8) if it's a special event, include a brief description, or a even a paragraph we could publish if the timing's right and space allows. Our primary emphasis is folk music and dance, but paragraphs (or very occasionally whole stories!) on other Scandinavian cultural events are more than welcome depending on space and timing. (see below for publication schedule)
9) contact people for info for those reading calendar (eg, phone #, address, regularly read email - if you read it only every 2-4 days, warn folks, if only once every week or so - probably best to forget it!)
10) Contact people for we who create the calendar - you can specify not to publish this particular information - it's just for us to check to see that our info is ok or if you want to update anything when the next publication date rolls around. Again - specify phone #, email, etc.
11) Any other pertinent information.

We hope to publish on the following rough schedule:
Vol. 11, No. 2 early or mid June 2000.
Vol. 11, No. 3 late August, very early September 2000
Vol. 11, No. 4 Thanksgiving - early December 2000
Vol. 12, No. 1 late February - early March 2001 §