1 ‘Nordicness’ in Scandinavian music

A complex question
Michael Fjeldsøe and Sanne Krogh Groth

The question of what makes ‘Nordic’ music distinctive is a contentious matter. One
could even ask: does it actually exist? Or, if so: how does it manifest itself? Like
‘nationness’ (as in Danishness or Finnishness) it is a construction of identity that
reveals itself in discourses on both music and Nordicness. To a large extent it is an
open signifier, as concepts of Nordicness can be associated with either something
dark, cold and obscure or something related to light, brightness and the aurora
borealis. In recent years concepts of Nordic cool and Nordic noir, derived from
popular Scandinavian design and TV series, have also emerged. In order to estab-
lish how specific musical features can be regarded as Nordic, one must first estab-
lish in what sense the notion of Nordicness can be understood.
Firstly, Nordicness is not something that is just there, waiting to be found.
Rather, it is something people do: a cultural practice. As a result, it is what many
people choose to identify with, and through this act of identification – through
listening, singing, playing, composing, thinking, talking or writing (about) it –
‘Nordicness’ becomes and remains real. If people stop doing it, it will disappear.
Secondly, it works like nationalism. Since the late eighteenth century, the concept
of a ‘Nordic tone’ has been established through an idea of Nordicness formed by
a group of mainly intellectuals. It was disseminated through society by means of
printed and later mass media and subsequently defined through acts of passive or
active identification: through discourse, private and public activities and, at times,
large, highly publicised and symbolic events.
By accepting Nordicness as a construction that comes into existence through dis-
cursive acts, we also alter the way we understand the process through which music
is perceived and received by its audience and critics. It is not possible to uphold the
idea that a specific musical feature, whether in a score or in sound, is the origin of a
perceived imagination; instead, we must have some idea of what to look for in
advance. If music does display features that correspond to a certain notion of being
Nordic and they are perceived as doing so, then Nordicness becomes real. Musical
characteristics that become iconic or commonly accepted examples of Nordic music
can, in turn, contribute to the specificity of the notion of Nordicness.
However, this is not a fixed relationship that can be pinpointed by way of spe-
cific stylistic features that differ from non-Nordic music. On the one hand, both
music and discourses change over time; on the other, as Dahlhaus has remarked,
such distinctive features tend to share common traits with music from other nations
4 Michael Fjeldsøe and Sanne Krogh Groth
or larger regions, at least within the same part of the world (Dahlhaus, 1980, p. 95).
A drone fifth is no more Norwegian than Polish; it is through the act of interpreta-
tion and identification with Nordic sound that it becomes a Nordic feature, and it
is through the strength of the narrative attached to it that it gains authenticity and
authority. Thus, in order to discuss what makes Nordic music distinctive, it is
necessary to analyse how particular musical features interact with notions of being
Nordic, and how they may be articulated in music, in programmes or introductions
to the work of the artist and in the reception and contextualisation of music.

‘Norden’ as an imagined community

Being Nordic is, just like being Swedish or Icelandic, to be part of an ‘imagined
community’, to quote Benedict Anderson. As he observes, all societies that are
larger than the traditional community of a village or local neighbourhood are,
indeed, imagined (Anderson, 2006 [1983], p. 6). Another point, which can be
drawn from modern theory of nations and nationalism, is that ‘nationalism is an
ideology of the nation, not the state’ (Smith, 1991, p. 74). Nationalism is a set of
ideas based on the assumption that each individual belongs to a nation defined by
a shared language, history, traditions and culture, and that this is the basic unit
which ought to have cultural autonomy and political jurisdiction in its own affairs.
States can, and often do, adopt and support this ideology. But it is crucial, if one
wants to be able to analyse such complex lived imaginations and their transforma-
tions, to uphold the distinction between the nation, based in society and carried by
a national movement of people believing in and living out this idea, and the acts
of the state, supporting, neglecting or opposing such a movement.
As children, we stated our addresses as first name, family name, street, city,
region or landscape, country, ‘Norden’, Europe, the Earth, the Solar System, the
Milky Way, the Universe. Today, if we adopt a long historical perspective, there is
no doubt the nation has obtained the hegemonic position in this hierarchy. The
default setting in the hegemonic discourse is belonging (or not belonging) to a
nation and a common understanding that this is the most important level of identity.
Of course this view is not uncontested, but since World War I, when large European
empires disappeared and social-democratic visions of an international proletarian
movement claiming class as the primary means of identification dissolved as well,
nations and nation states have been the prevailing ideology governing European
societies. This does not mean, however, that other levels of identification, such as
gender, age or subcultural preferences, are not still of importance.
In the present context, an interesting question is how the hierarchy of the levels
‘country’, ‘Norden’ and ‘Europe’ works and interacts. In some respects region or
landscape is also of relevance, as narratives of folk culture are most often localised
within a specific region (a folk melody is identified as ‘from Dalarna’ in Sweden)
and indigenous Sami people live across national borders. How these levels relate
to each other is a complex question: our childhood hierarchy of Denmark, Norden,
Europe may be the cultural ideology installed by the common discourse of the
1970s–1980s, but it may not be accurate today. One question concerns how Nordic
identity can link the idea of national identity to the notion of being European. Were
 ‘Nordicness’ in Scandinavian music 5
we first Danish, then Nordic and finally, mediated through our Nordicness, Euro-
pean? Or did being Nordic run parallel to our being European?
The first notion is the expressed ideology of Nordicness and Scandinavianism.
Due to a common history, related languages originating from the same Old Norse
(although this is ideology as well) and a common culture, being ‘Nordic’ is a com-
mon layer of identity shared by the people of Scandinavia. On the other hand,
specific studies of music history in the Nordic countries since the nineteenth cen-
tury point to the fact that most often Scandinavian composers studied in the Euro-
pean centres of musical education independently of developments in other Nordic
countries. In the nineteenth century, Leipzig was the centre and model of musical
education, where composers from all over Northern and Eastern Europe learned
how to write national Romantic music. Later, in the twentieth century, the assimila-
tion of European modernism was obtained in similar ways by independent and
parallel stories of going to Berlin, Vienna, Paris or Darmstadt. They may have met
Scandinavian colleagues there, but they rarely planned to do so.

Recognising a ‘Nordic tone’

The first time a significant ‘Nordic tone’ was recognised in symphonic music was
when Niels W. Gade’s early work Overture: Reminiscences of Ossian, Op. 1, pre-
miered in Leipzig in 1842. It had been premiered in Copenhagen on 19 November
1841, where no one had noticed its ‘Nordic’ tone (Sørensen, 2002, p. 43). Ossian was
allegedly a Scottish bard from the third century whose poetry was translated by James
Macpherson in the 1760s – at least that was what Macpherson claimed. At the time
he was widely believed. When Gade’s Symphony No. 1 (after Kjæmpeviser) was
performed in Leipzig in early 1843, Gade was enthusiastically greeted as a ‘Nordic’
composer by German critics, with Robert Schumann being the most prominent. Two
things made this unexpected success possible: first, a discourse of ‘the North’ had
been installed in German intellectual life through literature and philosophy; and sec-
ond, the idea of national music was strongly favoured (Matter, 2015, pp. 25–97). In
fact, it seemed as though they were just waiting for someone like Gade to appear.
These works had, on the one hand, affinities with Mendelssohn’s Hebrides (or
Fingal’s Cave) overture (1830) and his Scottish Symphony (sketched in 1830 and
finished in 1842) and with the Lied-based beginning of Schubert’s C Major Sym-
phony, which was first performed in 1839. On the other hand, Gade used folksong-
like themes: the second theme in the overture very much resembles an actual folksong,
Ramund var sig en bedre mand, and Gade claimed to have based the symphony upon
‘Kjæmpeviser’, songs of ancient giants. Actually, what he used as his main theme was
a folk-like melody that he himself had composed a few years earlier called Kong
Valdemar’s Jagt (På Sjølunds fagre sletter). The ‘Nordic’ tone was perceived to exist
in ‘the dark, misty tone [which] vividly resembles the Nordic legends and ballads’
(Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 1842, p. 68, in Matter, 2015, p. 26), in the character of
folksong and especially in examples where brass scoring combined with arpeggio
figures reminded the critics of bards striking their harps before battle.
It was not simply by luck that Gade struck a Nordic tone. He had, in fact, studied
in Copenhagen with Andreas Peter Berggreen, a composer as well as a collector
6 Michael Fjeldsøe and Sanne Krogh Groth
and editor of folk songs. In 1842, in the preface to the first volume of his monu-
mental Folke-Sange og Melodier: Fædrelandske og Fremmede (Folksongs and
melodies: native and from abroad), containing approximately 2,000 melodies from
30 countries, Berggreen gives a statement of his view on Nordic music:

The melodies, more than the texts, bear the impression of the individual char-
acter of the nation in which they originated. It seems to me that grace and a
deep erotic feeling is more common in Swedish than in Danish melodies of
which most have a quality of greater seriousness. In Norwegian melodies an
idyllic cheerfulness prevails along with a feature of melancholy which is com-
mon in all Nordic songs.
(Koudal, 2005, p. 107)

Berggreen treats the music of each nation as a subcategory of Nordic music. He

even provided a kind of basic recipe for how to compose a Nordic melody, an
idea of how it should sound, to which Gade, as his pupil, had access. His specific
remarks are quite open, mentioning ‘seriousness’ as a reference to the common
use of minor modes, a melodic movement from the third to the first degree of the
scale and a steady, even flow in the melodic lines. The latter was often associated
with the 6/8 metre. It could be claimed that Kong Valdemar’s Jagt, which was
originally composed for a collection of songs to texts from Danish national his-
tory, also edited by Berggreen (1840, p. 25), fits Berggreen’s programme well (see
Example 1.1). The point is that the idea of national music was already present in

Example 1.1 Niels W. Gade, Kong Valdemars Jagt (Berggreen, 1840, p. 25).
 ‘Nordicness’ in Scandinavian music 7
the musical culture before the works of classical music that would come to
embody this idea were composed.

The Leipzig model

Although modern ideas of the nation and the people were established as early as
the late eighteenth century by Herder and others, the 1840s was the decade that
saw the national movements in Europe gain wide support, a development that led
to the bourgeois revolutions in 1848–49 (Hroch, 2005, pp. 109–234). When it
came to music, Leipzig was at the centre of these developments and became in
particular a kind of model for organising musical life in Northern Europe. Leipzig
had, as a town with no residential court (Dresden being the residence of the kings
of Saxony), based its reputation on trade and printing and publishing houses, not
least within the field of music. It was a town with a rich musical tradition going
back to Telemann and Bach in the eighteenth century. In 1835 Mendelssohn took
over the position as director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra and turned it into one
of the leading symphonic orchestras in the world, and in 1843 he founded the
Leipzig Conservatory, which became the model for a large number of European
conservatories (Wasserloos, 2004, pp. 21–28).
The Leipzig model of a high-ranking symphony orchestra and a first-class
conservatory would be highly influential in the years to come. The scope of
influence of this model is evident from the fact that in the years from 1843 to
1880, 41 per cent of the students in Leipzig came from outside Germany, amount-
ing to some 1,359 foreign students. Of those, 413 came from the United States,
337 from Great Britain and 140 from Scandinavia. Edvard Grieg, for example,
spent four years as a student in Leipzig, from 1858 to 1861. Russia, Switzerland,
the Netherlands, Poland and Austria were next, with only 90 students coming
from other European countries (Wasserloos, 2004, pp. 66–69). One should add
that these numbers include only students officially enrolled at the Leipzig Con-
servatory. A large number of musicians and composers went on study trips to
Leipzig as private pupils of teachers employed there (see Larsen, 2005). There
seems to be a fairly strict dividing line of influence between a Leipzig-influenced
Northern, Eastern and Central Europe (including the United States), and a West-
ern and Southern European sphere, where France and Italy provided the model
for the organisation of musical life and teaching. Thus, Scandinavia became, and
stayed, part of a common musical culture in Northern Europe. What is significant
about the many foreign students in Leipzig is that they eventually returned to
their home countries and, by virtue of their experience and education, often
became leading figures in local musical life. In Germany a large number of stu-
dents educated in Leipzig obtained similar positions in other German cities.
From 1865 onwards at least 40 former students from Leipzig became founders
of conservatories in Central and Northern Europe and the United States, and a
similar number of former students established orchestras and music societies
(Wasserloos, 2004, pp. 79–81).
This meant that musical life in a large part of Europe was structured in similar
ways. And another significant aspect was that the curriculum at the Leipzig
8 Michael Fjeldsøe and Sanne Krogh Groth
Conservatory with its emphasis on music theory (with the contrapuntal approach
of Bach held in high esteem) joined ranks with the aesthetics of the followers of
Mendelssohn and Schumann into what is referred to as the Leipzig School. In these
terms, the emphasis on the characteristic national sound was propagated from the
1840s onwards: Leipzig became the place to learn how to compose like a national
composer.

Nordic cooperation
In line with the view of Nordicness as a cultural practice, those supportive struc-
tures that make Nordic cooperation more likely to happen are of great importance.
Again the distinction between nation and state may be relevant: if the combined
societies of the Nordic countries equate to the nation in theories of nationalism,
then the formal cooperation of the Nordic countries may be identified as the equiv-
alent of the state.
Originally, Scandinavianism was a nineteenth-century movement that combined
the geographic notion of the Scandinavian Peninsula (including Denmark) with
the cultural region of Nordic languages, mythology and shared history. Today, the
common definition comprises the states in the Nordic Council – Denmark, Finland,
Iceland, Norway and Sweden – and is symbolised by the ‘five swans’; it includes
the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland Islands.
The once Scandinavianist dream of a political union has never materialised, and
the post–World War II negotiations of a military union were crushed under Cold
War conditions that resulted in Norway, Denmark and Iceland joining NATO.
Sweden and Finland, meanwhile, remained neutral, the former strongly milita-
rised, the later in a precarious relationship with the Soviet Union. In 1873 a mon-
etary union based on the gold standard with kroner as the new currency was
established in Denmark and Sweden and joined by Norway in 1875. The fixed rate
of 1:1 was cancelled in 1924, de facto abolishing the agreement. What remains is
a Nordic passport union from 1954 permitting citizens of the Nordic countries to
travel freely within Scandinavia without showing their passports, an agreement
that was provisionally suspended in 2016 to prevent refugees from reaching Swe-
den. Thus, culture became the main domain of Scandinavian cooperation. As a
consequence, a core question in this book concerns the exchange of cultural
knowledge among the Nordic countries and to what degree this is articulated as
being Nordic.
The official Nordic infrastructure on a state level is organised via the Nordic
Council (established in 1952 with 87 parliament members) and the Nordic Coun-
cil of Ministers (established in 1971 and comprising the various Nordic ministers
according to fields of responsibility). On their joint webpage, norden.org, the
cooperation is presented as ‘one of the most comprehensive regional partner-
ships anywhere in the world’. These organisations are financed by regulated tax
revenues from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden corresponding
to the number of inhabitants, and they serve as official and financial frameworks
for various Nordic collaborations and political issues, dealing with topics such
 ‘Nordicness’ in Scandinavian music 9
as culture, research, education, environment, health, agriculture and labour.
Meanwhile they also actively support the idea of the Nordic countries as a joint
cultural community, the North (‘Norden’). It is in this regard more than the
geographical area of the Nordic countries, it is also an ideological construct based
on the idea of a common Nordic identity and culture. In this sense, ‘Norden’ is,
for example, represented at the annual ceremony on the occasion of the presenta-
tion of the Nordic Council prizes in, respectively, literature, music, children and
young people’s literature, environment and film. Also of relevance in this context
are a number of contemporary music journals shared between Nordic countries.
An early example was Nordisk Musik-Tidende: Maanedsskrift for Musikere og
Musikvenner (Nordic music journal: monthly for musicians and music lovers),
which was published in Kristiania (Oslo) in 1880–1892. Another was Nordisk
Musikkultur (Nordic music culture), established in 1952 as a common journal
for Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Although Sweden withdrew after the first
year, it continued until 1962 as a quarterly journal for Norway and Denmark,
alternating in Denmark with issues of Dansk Musik Tidsskrift (Danish music
review). Another was Nordic Sounds, which ran from 1982 to 2006 and was
directly supported by NOMUS, the Nordic Music Committee, an organisation
under the Nordic Council of Ministers dealing with musical collaborations, such
as the Nordic Music Prize.
As a sub-organisation to the Nordic Council of Ministers we find the Nordic
Culture Point, which has existed since 2007 and, among other things, manages
Nordic funding programmes of up to a total of €4.6 million (2016) (Kulturkontakt
Nord, 2016, p. 7). The aim of such programmes is to ‘promote cooperation between
the Nordic countries and/or between Nordic countries and the rest of the world’,
enhancing a ‘Nordic dimension in cultural life in the Nordic countries and the rest
of the world’ (nordiskkulturkontakt.org). To be a successful applicant in these
programmes today the project must include parties from at least three countries,
two of which must be Nordic. But cultural cooperation predates these official
structures by more than a century. Joint Nordic musical events have for more than
150 years offered a frequent way to promote the idea of the North as a shared
cultural community. Nordic student singers were already gathering in the 1850s,
and in May 2017 more than 1,000 student singers met in Oulu in Finland for a
Nordic Student Singers’ Summit (nsss2017.fi). Since post-war times, many of
these events have been supported financially either by the countries’ own Depart-
ment of Culture or by the strong Nordic political infrastructure.

Nordic music days

Within the field of contemporary classical music the most important and consecu-
tively shared Nordic events are the annual ‘Ung Nordisk Musik’ (Young Nordic
Music) dating back to 1946 and the festival ‘Nordiske Musikdage’ (Nordic Music
Days), which dates back to 1888. The following discussion analyses examples
from Nordic Music Days, where larger events include a significant number of
Nordic composers and their music; under consideration is how and to what extent
10 Michael Fjeldsøe and Sanne Krogh Groth
Nordicness is represented or claimed to exist, and how it is regarded by partici-
pants and recipients.

Pre-war Nordic festivals

The Nordic Music Days festival was first celebrated under the title ‘Nordisk Musik-
fest’ in 1888 and was originally inspired by the great choral event ‘Nordiske Sang-
fester’, which originated in 1851. ‘Nordiske Sangfester’ was an outcome of the
Nordic tradition of choral singing, originally performed and organised by students,
while ‘Nordiske Musikfester’ aimed to programme mainly chamber and orchestral
music. The first Nordiske Musikfest was planned in connection with ‘Den Nordiske
Industri-, Landbrugs- og Kunstudstilling i Kjøbenhavn’ (The Nordic industrial,
agricultural and art exhibition in Copenhagen), a prestigious international exhibi-
tion that also took place in Copenhagen in 1888. There had been discussions about
Nordiske Musikfester for several years, but it was with the establishment of the
music society ‘Fermaten’ in 1887 that the actual preparations began. An official
invitation, published in Nordisk Musik-Tidende and signed by J.P.E. Hartmann and
Niels W. Gade, was received positively, and a committee comprising various
Copenhagen-based music and choral societies as well as a financial partner was
established with Hartmann as president, Gade as vice-president and the executive
director of the Danish National Bank Rasmus Strøm as secretary general (Bucht,
1988, p. 109). The Danish queen Lovisa was patron of the festival, and ‘a great deal
of social life developed around the six concerts’ (ibid., p. 111). In connection with
the festival, a Nordic Composers’ Association was set up to raise funds and thus
ensure that these Nordic festivals could take place on a regular basis. ‘No further
trace can be found of this association, however’ (ibid., p. 112), and it took another
nine years before the second festival was held in Stockholm in 1897.
Nordiske Sangfester culminated in Copenhagen in 1929 with an audience of
6,000 people and a choir of 1,000 participants singing the cantata Sangen i Norden
(The Song in the North), which has been described as ‘one of the strongest expres-
sions during the first decades of the twentieth century of the “joint-Nordic” sense
of community and the ideology in the Nordic music’ (Salmenhaara, 1998, p. 292).
It is a large orchestral and choral piece in ten movements composed as a joint work
by five composers from Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The first
four movements begin with the biblical myth of Jubal, the father of all who play
harps and flutes, and continue by describing how singing and instruments are
distributed throughout the world. In the fourth movement, the word of the Nordic
tribes of blond and blue-eyed warriors has reached Rome, being illustrated in the
music by four ancient bronze horns known as lures, accompanying the choir and
orchestra. This section (as well as the final movement) was composed by Fini
Henriques, while the next five movements depict the individual Nordic countries.
‘Island’ by Sigfus Einarsson strikes the tone of the Eddas, while ‘Finland’ (Leevi
Madetoja) tells the story of how the spirit of the oppressed people was stored and
kept alive in the traditional instrument kantele until freedom was achieved. ‘Norge’
(Johan Halvorsen) contrasts the harsh conditions where the sea hammers into the
 ‘Nordicness’ in Scandinavian music 11
cliffs with the fjords in the inland, ‘Sverige’ (Kurt Atterberg) invokes the tradi-
tional fiddlers’ music and ‘Danmark’ (Henriques) is a strophic song praising the
friendly landscape and mindset of the Danes. In the final movement, Nordic broth-
erhood and sense of belonging together are called upon and brass scoring provides
a reminiscence of the sound of the lures (Henriques, Atterberg, Einarsson,
Halvorsen, & Madetoja, 1929).
Nordiske Musikfester has continued along the way, subject to various concepts
and constellations, while the core value of the festival has persisted: to programme
music mainly written by Nordic composers and to facilitate an event where they
can network, exchange ideas and present their music. This all sounds very simple
and seems like a homogeneous series of events but, going through reviews, pro-
grammes and articles, the narrative becomes rather more complex and diverse. The
idea of being Nordic and acting as part of a Nordic community is challenging: it
often raises more questions than it provides answers.
The first festivals were curated in such a way that each concert presented music
from one country at a time – often one symphonic and one chamber music concert.
In addition to contemporary music, the programme also included more traditional
and older classical music. The events were not celebrated on a regular basis, but
took place more or less randomly in Copenhagen in 1888, 1919 and 1938, in
Stockholm in 1897 and 1927, in Oslo in 1934 and in Helsinki in 1921 and 1932
(Hanson, 1988, pp. 131–158).
Several of the early festivals have been widely discussed, and questions con-
cerning how an event can be perceived as ‘Nordic’ have been touched upon in
several contexts. On a structural level the gatherings have served as an institutional
framework, where music by Nordic composers has been performed continuously.
Swedish musicologist Bo Wallner writes about the 1919 festival: ‘Here the first
steps of modern Nordic musical cooperation could be studied; here – as through a
magnifying lens – the stylistic and aesthetic positions of the Nordic music of the
day could be analysed’ (Wallner quoted in Nyström, 1995, p. 22). The idea of a
common Nordicness in these first festivals was soon to be questioned in a review
by the Dane Richard Hove (1932) to such a degree that he implicitly excludes
Finland from Scandinavia:

The Scandinavianism which, like a stalk, appeared one hundred years ago has
unfolded its leaves, and they appear to be pretty far from each other, even
though one can sense a common root; however, the ‘actual Finnish’ has noth-
ing to do with Scandinavia. The deepest characteristics of the Finnish music
are almost so different from us that they appear exotic.
(Hove, 1932, p. 162)

With such an utterance, the idea of Nordic music began to distance itself from the
early national Romantic ideas and in Hove’s later report, from the 1934 festival,
he referred to a Norwegian colleague’s questioning of the North as a joint com-
munity. Hove, still supportive of the idea, proposed an alternative gathering: an
‘annual work meeting in casual dress and then maybe a “fest” every tenth year. We
12 Michael Fjeldsøe and Sanne Krogh Groth
have common qualities and differences worth studying’, he wrote (Hove, 1934,
p. 172). The question of what constitutes this Nordicness keeps returning in the
debates concerning these events. After all, their organisation was structured around
countries belonging to the North.

Post-war Nordic festivals

In 1946 Nordiska Musikfesterna changed its name to ‘Nordiske Musikdage’ (Nor-
dic Music Days) and from 1947 onwards it was organised by the Council of Nordic
Composers, which had been founded in the same year. The Council of Nordic
Composers was represented by the chairmen of the various Nordic composers’
unions, which were established, respectively, in Denmark (in 1913), Norway
(1917), Sweden (1918) and Iceland and Finland (1945). At the festival in Stock-
holm in 1947 it was decided that the Nordic Music Days from 1948 onwards would
be a biannual festival and that the various Nordic countries would take turns host-
ing the event. They also agreed to reduce the costs of social gatherings and official
ceremonies to a higher degree than previously, to let the music speak for itself
(Schandorf, 1948, p. 251).
In a review of the 1948 festival in Dansk Musiktidsskrift the critic Frede Schan-
dorf is loyal to the overall idea of the event, in which he even finds some degree of
certainty: ‘of course the Nordic countries must also unite musically and meet during
musical days’ (Schandorf, 1948, p. 255). Meanwhile, we also find criticism of the
festival programme, which was considered too conservative: ‘Instead of leaving
Oslo with the idea that sonorous tones can still be played on Nordic horns, one left
the Music Days with the impression that stagnation and narrow-mindedness char-
acterised many – too many – of the performed works’ (ibid., p. 251). The writer
questioned the organising committee’s conservative programming and called for a
focus on newer works from the contemporary scenes in the Nordic countries.
Over the years, the 1948 agreement to downsize the event resulted in a trans-
formation of the festival to an almost internal gathering of composers with a very
small audience and very little focus on public dissemination. ‘Composers’ Event
or “Musikfest”?’ was the headline of a critical review of the 1952 Copenhagen-
based festival, noting that there were ‘no “civil” participants from non-Danish
countries’ present (Balzer, 1952, p. 187). This issue, the lack of audience and
public engagements, has until recently been a recurrent topic in discussions of the
festival. Lately, though, cultural political issues, such as ‘audience development’,
have also encompassed Nordic Music Days, and audience development was the
main focus at the 2010 festival in Copenhagen. We will touch upon its significance
towards the end of this section.
In 1956 another critical voice was raised, this time from one of the composers.
After a visit to the festival in Helsinki 24-year-old Per Nørgård asked where the
interest in the Nordic as such was to be found:

[The festival] was characterised by a gracious indifference towards each other,

both on the part of the composers, the practitioners, the press and perhaps even
 ‘Nordicness’ in Scandinavian music 13
the audience; the many words about ‘Nordic collaboration’ did not have a
counterpart in existing, active attempts to find among each other the kinship,
which not only an old, grounded culture could provide, but which also, and
maybe especially, the common climate and unique nature of the northern
hemisphere is characterised by.
(Nørgård, 1956, p. 1)

Instead of performing one concert after another, joining ceremonies, receptions

and dinners, Nørgård called for interaction and dialogue between the compos-
ers, executive directors and critics in order to explore and develop a Nordic
identity – one that was rooted in the Nordic countries and in what he defined as
the mindset of the Nordic universe:

[D]o we not have any resources ourselves? Is it not time to dare to establish
more independence on a broad Nordic basis? Is the music scene in the south
and towards the east really that flourishing and seductive that we need to
consider this before considering ourselves?
(Nørgård, 1956, p. 2)

The article was published in Nordisk Musikkultur on request from the editor Frede
Schandorf Petersen. As probably foreseen by the editor, it caused vivid debate in
the following issue with invited comments from prominent Nordic composers.
They all seemed to agree that the dialogue and interaction among the festival
participants could and should be improved, while Nørgård’s thoughts on the uni-
verse of the Nordic mind caused great outrage and resistance from several compos-
ers. This was especially true for the Swedish composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl, who
wrote:

What he [Nørgård] writes in this context is pure nonsense and testifies to his
incompetence and lack of intellectual thought. Eclecticism is boring, whether
‘Nordic’ or ‘continental’. Great art is created by individual artists who are
great personalities, and they get their nutrition from all aspects of the sur-
rounding ‘universum’.
(Blomdahl, 1956, p. 7)

The harsh tone and his positioning of the artist in the ‘universum’ were widely
discussed, ending with Per Nørgård commenting ironically on Blomdahl’s
writings:

Meanwhile, the sense of being a stranger will gradually come to dominate the
illusion of being in contact with everything ([quoting Blomdahl] to ‘get their
nutrition from all aspects of the surrounding universum’, as if one was a spirit
floating in space).
(Nørgård, 1957, p. 15)
14 Michael Fjeldsøe and Sanne Krogh Groth
Such debate not only established positions of defining one in a Nordic versus
(Central) European context but also spurred a debate about ‘provincialism’. Obvi-
ously, no one wanted this label, so the term itself came under scrutiny. Everyone
strived for a larger context, whether Nordic, European or universal. Meanwhile,
what was not questioned was whether the Nordic community should meet at all.

Recent Nordic Music Days

Despite this continuous critique and frustrated utterances and analysis from critics
as well as composers, Nordic Music Days is still celebrated today; from 2002 it
has even become an annual event. An overview of the range of festival themes and
designs reveals the various organisational boards’ attempts to accommodate criti-
cism and questioning: from 1974 to 1982 the event responded to ‘provincialism’
by including non-Nordic countries as guests (Poland in 1974, Canada in 1976,
GDR in 1978, the United Kingdom in 1980 and France in 1982); in 1988 an inter-
national jury was established in an attempt to preserve internal conflicts and biased
programming; in 1998 a seminar was organised with international speakers; in
2002 the festival took place in Berlin and in 2017 in London, the aim being to
expose Nordic music to an international audience; in 2010, as already mentioned,
the festival had ‘audience development’ on its agenda; and in 2015 in Copenhagen
‘site specificity’ was the overall theme, with parallel concerts in the Royal Danish
Library’s modernistic atrium and neoclassicist study halls, in the nearby temporary
glass dome and in the 400-year-old ‘Lapidarum of Kings’ across the street. Such
curatorial approaches and developments have resulted in recent festivals which no
longer come across as internal composer meetings, but instead attract a large and
diverse audience to the concerts.
Concert programmers have even utilised humour and irony in order to comment
on the concept of the ‘Nordic’; in 2009 in Oslo the title was Nordic Luxury. The
festival was organised in collaboration with the ongoing festival ‘Happy Days’
(established in 2005), joining its focus on music’s relations to society explored by
concerts in public spaces (like a shopping mall) and by bus trips to the homes of
contemporary Norwegian composers (mainly small apartments). Celebrating Nor-
dic Music Days within this framework raised new questions about the Nordic
music community:

The Nordic countries are among the richest in the world. We are interested in
exploring how these surroundings are reflected in the music, and what kind of
position contemporary music occupies in the welfare state. Is the social demo-
cratic avant-garde a product of luxury, or can music continue to occupy a
position as a critical force in society?
(Reinholdtsen & Hagen, 2009, p. 2)

Such questions pave the way for another characterisation of the North as also
defined by economy, politics and social structures. In an interview, the curators of
the festival explained that the idea was based on a sincere interest in the North, its
 ‘Nordicness’ in Scandinavian music 15
official history, various ideas about it and how they influence contemporary music
(Paasche, 2009). The festival’s final event therefore took place at the Norsk Folke-
museum (Norwegian folk museum) surrounded by peculiar symbols of tradition
in order to problematise these collective conceptions. The 2016 festival in Reykja-
vik continued the idea of adding an element of social awareness; this time ‘gender’
was on the agenda, manifested, among other things, by a strict 50/50 gender policy
throughout the programme.
At the 2017 festival Nordicness was emphasised once again. This festival,
arranged by the Swedish Composer’s Union, took place in London, which may
have contributed to the need to present the Nordic countries to the surrounding
world as a united entity. In the rich programme book the festival organisers pro-
claimed, ‘Nordic Music Days 2017 is here to explore liberated traditions, relaxed
encounters, Nordic magic and mystery’ (Larsson & Arbman, 2017, p. 3). This
statement was implemented through a series of events entitled ‘The Northern
Lights Sculpture’, ‘The Northern Lights Lounge’ and ‘Nordic Forests’ in a layout
with photos of picturesque sceneries of Northern lights, Northern hemisphere
mountains, quiet mountain lakes, volcanoes and colourful forests. Only one text
in the programme book briefly addressed Nordicness as a contested term:

A clear tendency in the artistic outlook of composers whose work is being

performed at Nordic Music Days is to reject the idea of there being a unifying
‘Nordic’ sound in contemporary music. . . The reception of music by Scandi-
navian composers today is in many ways often subject – albeit sometimes
unintentionally – to a pre-existing idea of ‘Nordicness’, a kind of ‘otherness’
that is perceived as connoting landscape, nature and natural elements from the
north even in cases where no such intentions have crossed the mind of the
composer and performer.
(Lundberg, 2017, p. 7)

A review in the Norwegian journal Ballade addressed the foregoing contradiction

as a difficult paradox – not only in the reception of the pieces but also in the 2017
curation:

How does one present something ‘Nordic’ when that which is being presented
often explicitly does not want to be categorised as such? It is not an easy ques-
tion to answer, but I would have liked to see the festival challenge the category
a bit more – especially in a time characterised by a problematic and increasing
focus on national identity and culture.
(Ørstavik, 2017)

By adopting such approaches, Nordic Music Days has over the years developed
into a festival where the representation of the Nordic is more divided than ever.
The festival in itself represents Nordic cooperation and is supported financially by
both Nordic and national sources. Regarding the music, hardly any composer at
the Copenhagen festival in 2015 presented his or her works as having a specific
16 Michael Fjeldsøe and Sanne Krogh Groth
Nordic tone, and the press releases played down ‘Nordicness’ as a specific quality.
On the other hand, and not least when the festival moves out of Scandinavia as it
did in 2017, it is promoted as Nordic, and Nordic features are taken for granted.

Nordika – a Nordic hymn

On 1 November 2016 a remarkable case study for this book was presented in the
concert hall of the Danish National Radio: the ‘Nordic hymn’ Nordika. It is written
for forces suitable for a large-scale occasion: symphony orchestra, solo soprano
and choir. On the project website, it is described as a ‘signature tune for the Nordic
cooperation which all Northerners can sing and play at common Nordic occasions
such as Nordic prize awards, state visits from other Nordic countries, festivals,
Nordic sports events etc.’ (nordiskhymne.org). As such it seems to be the equiva-
lent of a national anthem, similar to the use of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as a
hymn for the European Union. The text is written by Kim Leine, a Norwegian
writer living in Copenhagen, and the music is by the Faroese composer Sunleif
Rasmussen. It is emphasised that they both have received prizes from the Nordic
Council: the Literature Prize in 2013 and the Music Prize in 2002, respectively.
Both authors state that they want to strengthen the awareness of ‘our’ Nordic
identity without excluding other levels of identification. It seems to be as Nordic
as it comes.
The project was initiated by ‘Norden uden grænser’ (the North without
borders), a society facilitating cooperation between musicians and artists from
the Nordic countries, which started as a grass-roots movement in 2013. Fund-
ing came from both the Danish Composer’s Union and KODA, the Danish
music copyright organisation, as well as from official Nordic bodies, such as
the Nordic Cultural Foundation. The idea was to create a hymn that can be
sung together across borders, and thus the text has been translated into all
languages of the Nordic region. It was published in an arrangement for mixed
choir as well.
It is interesting to look more closely into how the project of composing a Nordic
hymn has been handled in 2016. To a large extent, it uses all the stockpile features
you would expect; so it should, as it is a piece of music meant to be useful within
recognisable frameworks. Several of Kim Leine’s previous writings –
autobiographical as well as historical novels – address the Danish colonisation of
Greenland through strikingly powerful narratives carrying both dreadfulness and
fascination. Leine’s text in Nordika consists of three stanzas and does what many
national songs do: in the first stanza the geographical scope is laid out, in the sec-
ond the identification with the mentality and beliefs is stressed and in the final
strophe nature and identity come together. But it stands at a distance from any
national Romantic example, as the powerful vision of ice and coasts and nature is
contrasted with ‘Karasjok and Tunnelbanan’s crypts and Amager Fælled and Sog-
nefjord’; the landscape has been urbanised and places like the metro in Stockholm
and the very flat and un-striking Amager Common are quite mundane, everyday
locations.
 ‘Nordicness’ in Scandinavian music 17
Rasmussen has a long-standing record of composing music that has clear refer-
ences to Nordic nature and cultural heritage. In earlier works like Landid (1993)
he uses a Faroese melody as an encrypted gene from which he extracts all the
musical material through manipulations of intervals. The original melody is never
heard (Fjeldsøe, 1994, p. 234). In his First Symphony, Oceanic Days (1997), he
openly refers to the sea around the Faroe Islands, and his Second Symphony, The
Earth Anew (2015), uses the Nordic mythology of the Yggdrasil, the tree of life,
sung in Old Norse. In Nordika, Sunleif Rasmussen refers to two well-known mod-
els, the so-called folkelige (folk-like) songs, meaning songs meant as popular
songs for common singing in the tradition of Carl Nielsen and the folk high
schools, and the model of national hymns. In the first half of each stanza he uses
the mode of G minor, but masks it by starting with a G-major chord before reach-
ing the minor at the end of the first bar (see Example 1.2).

Example 1.2 Nordika: The verse is in G minor but starts out in G major until the minor
mode is reached at the end of the first bar.
Source: © Edition Wilhelm Hansen with kind permission.

This alternation between minor and major is one of those features that critics
from the 1840s would have recognised as ‘Nordic’. Another characteristic is the
way that the melody continues from the first bar in a simple, logical movement,
giving you the feeling that you know this tune already, and the harmonies are quite
subtle, almost passing by unnoticed. This is the technique Carl Nielsen used in the
best of his songs for community singing. In the second half of Nordika, Rasmussen
shifts into the major mode and a hymnic tone, where the melody slowly rises to a
climax in the penultimate bar and returns to the starting point using a descending
scale with a small, folksong-like twist (see Example 1.3).

Example 1.3 Nordika: The last two bars of the refrain in G major end with a small twist in
the melody, a reminiscence of folksong style.
Source: © Edition Wilhelm Hansen with kind permission.
18 Michael Fjeldsøe and Sanne Krogh Groth
To what extent a Nordic identity is still vigorous is not determined by the exis-
tence of a new Nordic hymn. What may prove decisive is whether it will be used
as a marker of Nordic identity in the future. At the beginning of 2018, the copyright
organisation KODA reports that it has been broadcasted on Danish Radio on some
five occasions and three times on Faroese television but accounts for just one
public performance after the premiere. This does not preclude the possibility that
it has been used in choral societies on occasions without being publically per-
formed, or even at concerts open to the public; indeed not all concerts may have
been reported yet. But it suggests a slow start. Of significance, though, is the fact
that a version for community singing accompanied by a piano or a guitar – here
called Nordisk Hymne – was published at the end of 2017 in a popular songbook
(Sangbogen 5, 2017, pp. 26–27). According to the publisher, it has sold more than
4,000 copies within the first couple of months.
As in the case of Nordic Music Days, there seems to be a notion that Nordicness
is still an important issue worth celebrating on certain occasions, either at formal
celebrations of a Nordic (institutional) sense of community, or when it is presented
outside of Scandinavia. After all, it is uncertain to what extent the majority of
people in Scandinavia still identify strongly with a common Nordic layer of iden-
tity, whether they consciously play it down or simply find it unimportant. How this
develops in the future only time will tell.

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