Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
FOLK SONG LAB Deconstructing folk song as a tool for improvisation
Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Department of Folk Music.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-0200-3144
2016 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Other academic) [Artistic work]
Abstract [en]

In my artistic research, “Kurbits-ReBoot, Swedish traditional singing in new artistic contexts” (Rosenberg, 2013), I experimented with developing artistic methods and concepts relating to variation and improvisation from the perspective of the folk singer as a creative performer (performer-composer) and the song as an imaginary entity that only exists in the interpretation of a singer.  This implies that a song is viewed as a container for ideas, a framework, a starting point for creating something - the song - every time you sing – a musical work being created by the singer, rather than a musical work in the sense of a composition that is interpreted by a singer.

My inspiration to this idea came from my own experiences as being part of an oral tradition in folk singing and learning by ear from singers “in the moment”, but also from testimony from collectors and performers about the art of folk singing, such as about the English ballad singer Mrs Brown: “What was it she had carried in her memory? Not a text, but a ballad: a entity soluble in the mind, to be concretely realized at will in words and music.”(Bronson, 1969). This concept, that the song only takes a concrete form through the act of singing, is realized in its interpreted form only, could be just as relevant for today’s traditional singers as it was for Mrs Brown, since it points to the possibility of empowering the performative momentum and performative power of the folk singer as an interpreter of ‘here and now’, creating presence. But this concept also gives rise to the interesting question on how to use this idea of “the song” as a ‘framework’ for a musical performance in a our present time where everything can be recorded, logged, saved and listened to again and again, where increasingly less and less things really happens “now”.  

In my work I have experimented with using parameter from the concept of “Flow” (Csikszentmihaly, 1990) and the ideas of using the dynamic between orality and literacy (Ong, 1982) in order to address this complex issue. In Folk Song Lab I’ve experimented with using the language of Folk Song by deconstructing and with an artistic investigation with the perspective of Folk Song as a framework for musical expression in the moment.

This is a presentation of an on-going project called Folk Song Lab which addresses different approaches or methods for this deconstruction, and moreover reflection of my findings. The idea is to present the findings, the methods, and result with recordings and images from the experimental sessions as well as with sessions in it self. I myself is both part of the setting and participating in this experiment as well as the reflecting part.

[1] In the Project ”Contemporary Folk Songs” 2014

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2016.
National Category
Music
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kmh:diva-3286OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kmh-3286DiVA, id: diva2:1368324
Conference
Arts Without Borders? Perspectives on Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity in and through the Arts, An international conference hosted by the University of the Arts Helsinki and CERADA, Finland October 19-22, 2016
Available from: 2019-11-06 Created: 2019-11-06 Last updated: 2020-12-30Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

No full text in DiVA

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Rosenberg, Susanne
By organisation
Department of Folk Music
Music

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar

urn-nbn

Altmetric score

urn-nbn
Total: 522 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf