This article presents and discusses features of singing style in Swedish folk singing. This also leads to an attempt to describe some aspects of teaching folk-singing style. Also, it proposes a model for describing a singing style by combining particular features into a whole – a “singing style map” – as a compound concept. Individual features may be shared with other styles, allowing them to be combined into yet other singing styles. The paper focuses on describing the features of the singing style from the perspective of the singer, and on their usefulness for singing. It argues that, in folk singing, the singer’s personal voice quality and personality will always shine through even if stylistic features are shared within the style, which in itself implies no contradiction. The features and the model describe both musical and technical aspects of singing, e.g. language as a tool for musical expression, voice mode, articulation, ornamentation, meter and phrasing etc.

The Department of Folk Music, KMH, in Stockholm has used this model, with its methods and feature set, as an aid for teaching Swedish folk singing from a holistic perspective for more than 30 years. Central to the model is the constant interplay between studying, describing and doing, in a fundamentally creative approach.