Some more Scandanavian stuff

Whistle
1

Yesterday I sent in the address of a web site with some videos of Scandanavian musicians. http://www.tvfolk.net/video.html
I’ve been looking around there and sampling some more stuff. You can find a couple of videos by the band Bask by clicking on the Swedish flag at the top of the page. This is a really exciting group. On the tune Hebyhalling the flute player plays a flute with no finger holes. Does anyone know how this thing works? He is blowing in one end and has his other hand over the other end. Amazing!. The band Frifot is also interesting. In the Agram/Polska set, Ale Moller leads off the song with a solo on a cow’s horn. After that he switches to his great bass drone mandola made by Adin and Ekvall.

Steve

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The flute you mention is an overtone (not Overton) flute made of birch. You get different tones by blowing at different strengths. I’ve never seen or played one but from what I’ve read they have a fipple kind of like a quena. There’s some really exciting Nordic music out there. These bands are doing for Nordic music what folks like Danu, Kila, and Dervish are doing for Irish music. A great way to hear these bands is on the Nordic Roots Collections. The CDs are only $4. They’re available on Amazon and on http://www.NoSide.com/ . Last fall I saw a Karelian band (Finnish Russia). The lead singer played 6-hole whistles made of pine. They weren’t very big, maybe in E or F.
Cheers,
Aaron

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Thanks, Aaron. I managed to find a bit of information about it earlier. It’s called a salgflojt. The page here gives some information in Swedish. The writing doesn’t show up well in Netscape but is OK in IE.
http://www.visarkiv.se/ordlista/S/salgflojt.htm

In the Estonian section there’s a video of someone playing one along with a talharpa. (Janne Tamm & Jago Catlin). That’s pretty interesting. There’s some other talharpa music too.

Steve

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I made one out of a long (about 3 foot)length of garden hose and an old tin whistle mouthpiece. You blow harder, but also block or half block the end hole to get a lot of different notes.

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Det traditionella materialet är bark.

That, I could understand.

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Wow, I hadn’t seen this thread till now… :boggle:
Interesting. I’m not that much into Swetrad but I have been able to pick some stuff up. As the Swedish article mentions, “sälg flöjter” sometimes has one tone hole. (wow, the word order seems mixed up when you mix Swedish and English :laughing: If the Swedish were to blend well the “has” would have to be placed before the “sometimes” but that wouldn’t work now would it? :stuck_out_tongue: ) The tonehole is purely to increase the range. Otherwise you use different blowing techniques and a cupped hand over the end to change pitch. It’s often like when you play the flute (for you flute geezers) when we place ourself right in between the octaves, we get a sound were the overtones are almost stronger than the mother-note. This way we might get a tone than rings like an A with a D fingering. That’s called playing with overtones and that’s pretty much what sälgflöjt playing is about.

Re Ale Möller: That man is mad :boggle: (though in a nice way :slight_smile: ). He plays pretty much anything and everything that gets in his way. He is a true genious and the only thing revolving in his head is music…