Dråm

Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #136 (June/July 2008).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Dråm

The Drones of Swedish Folk Music

by Maureen Brennan

Erik Ask-Upmark brought the Celtic harp to Swedish folk music quite by accident. He had been happily playing his "small cross-string harp" at home in Sweden and abroad, when disaster struck. On a train ride to Basel, in the short time it took to fetch a cup of coffee, the train lurched, and the harp resting in the luggage rack, minding its own business, flew to the ground, breaking into "if not a thousand pieces, at least four or five," Ask-Upmark related. On arrival in Basel, a frantic search ensued, as a harp was needed that very night for his performance with a medieval folk ensemble. An elderly music teacher came to the rescue with a Celtic harp. The harp was one of 10 "left by a wealthy American patron of the arts as a donation to promising young musicians." Ask-Upmark was able not only to play the instrument at the concert, but also to take it back home to Sweden with him. And the rest, as they say, is history -- or at least part of the history of the folk duo Dråm.

The other half of this Swedish duo, Anna Rynefors, was well on her way to becoming a research chemist when she put away her test tubes and picked up the nyckelharpa, a three-row, 16-string, 37-keyed instrument belonging to the same musical family as the English hurdy-gurdy and the French vielle. Learning to play this complex instrument must have made memorizing the Periodic Table of Elements seem like show-and-tell. The nyckelharpa, like its musical relatives, is known for its droning sound, i.e., a sustained note or chord that accompanies the melody of a tune. The instrument dates back to the Middle Ages. It had almost disappeared in Sweden until the folk music revival hit Scandinavia, as it did elsewhere, in the 1960s and 70s. Rynefors also plays another medieval instrument, the rebec, a pear-shaped, three-string fiddle; and both members of Dråm play the sackpipa, or Swedish bagpipe. It's often a surprise that other countries than Scotland and Ireland have bagpipes, but in fact, the instrument has a longer musical tradition in Sweden than either of those countries.

The duo takes the name Dråm from a word meaning "drone" in the Western Swedish dialect. Ask-Upmark and Rynefors certainly play a number of instruments that incorporate the droning sound, which at times gives a haunting, yet resonant quality to the music. The pair are equally adept in folk and medieval tunes. Recently, they played with three medieval vocalists and musicians (Shira Kammen, Tim Rayborn, and Lily Storm from the San Francisco Bay area).

[cover #136]