Just posted: tunes from
Lena Jonsson workshop in DC, October 2008 and in the San Francisco Bay Area, November 2008

The website has been modernized! Changes include support for Internet Explorer 7 and a great new search engine. Please let me know of any residual problems you encounter.

Statistics as of January, 2009

Tunes: 1984

Full Transcriptions: 910

Workshop Recordings: 273

 

 



   


This site is for musicians who play Scandinavian folk music: the largely traditional music of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark.  See Instructions for how to use it and here for a brief discussion of folk music basics.

It began in answer to the challenge of how to bring new musicians into an existing spelmanslag (band), where the repertoire to be learned can be very large.  Rather than perpetuate a paper culture of binders or even an ad hoc distribution process via email, I decided to bring the repertoire online for some of the groups I play with.

Many people contribute to the tunes played by each group. They organize workshops and teach tunes, they transcribe tunes onto paper and distribute them, and they select the music for Scandinavian dances.  I have gratefully built upon their work in the materials on this site.

Many regions in the U.S. support Scandinavian dance groups and associated musicians, and there are many great sources of information about Scandinavian folk music, including other tune archives: check out the Resources area.

                                                                              -- Karen Myers
                                                                               October, 2005