Musical Enactment of Compassion in Moments of Crisis

Musical Enactment of Compassion in Moments of Crisis
The Memorial Ceremony for the 2011 Utøya Massacre

by Jan Sverre Knudsen

My contribution to the anthology «Popular Music in the Nordic Countries» explores the role of popular music in the official memorial ceremony held in Oslo one month after the terrorist attacks on the Government buildings and at Utøya July 22nd 2011. This ceremony had an impressive lineup of some of the most known and beloved Norwegian popular music artists as well as contributors from Denmark and Sweden. Although it responded to a local happening in Norway, it was clearly an event engaging with a transnational Nordic consciousness – broadcast live to all Nordic countries and with invitees including royalty and heads of state from the entire region.

My first notes and chapter drafts mainly dealt with the ceremony in view of politics and the reception history of particular songs. Still, the more I engaged with this material, and not least, the more I talked to people who had attended the ceremony, it became clear that a comprehensive understanding also would need to bring up other aspects. A turning point in this respect was my interview with the producer of the event, Stig Karlsen, at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), department of entertainment. I was told that in the planning process representatives of the Norwegian government had explicitly asked for a ceremony that primarily addressed the needs of the audience in the hall at Oslo Spektrum, which consisted of many of the bereaved families and others affected by the tragedy.

According to Karlsen, who regularly produces the popular “Top-20” shows, this entailed a focus he was unaccustomed to as a producer of mass-mediated music entertainment. He was much more familiar with the idea of constructing a musical product with the potential to “reach out through the television screens”. Instead, the production team had to focus on shaping an atmosphere at the venue itself which could provide an adequate space for sorrow, grief and compassion. This was not about entertainment or about catering to an audience of dedicated fans. As many attending the event could testify, it appears that this approach was successful; they felt that the whole atmosphere was marked by the producers’ respectful and compassionate attitude to them as mourners.

To me, this focus highlights the notion of the live music performance as a tool for affording a relevant space for coping with emotions. Becoming more aware of this aspect also had an influence on my own research approach as I found it essential to deal with accounts of audience responses during the event itself, responses that were not plainly noticeable to the television viewers. This involves the heart-rendering emotional outburst from a bereaved father as well as the spontaneous reaction of large parts of the audience during the final performance, when they rose to their feet and joined in with Sissel Kyrkjebø’s singing of “Til Ungdommen” (To the youth). As I discuss in my chapter, the event obviously had wider connotations – of national consolidation, of transnational Nordic understanding, and of defending policies of multiculturalism and inclusion. Still, these must all be understood in relation to the basic idea shaping the event: the musical enactment of compassion for a grieving audience.

The London gateway

The London Gateway
The business dimension of internationalization in Nordic popular music

by Fabian Holt

last night I interviewed a London-based music professional who manages Nordic artists with global careers. We talked about his twenty-five years of experience in bringing Nordic artists into markets outside the Nordic region. The interview backed up some of my ideas about the music industry and other cultural industries as a dimension of globalization in popular culture. People that write about the internationalization of music scenes tend to write about it from the perspective of experience and media culture. But music industry professionals and their organization of markets have important functions in shaping music cultures in the global era. Also, it was interesting to hear his description of how Scandinavian music scenes have become much more international in less than fifteen years. (Although none of this is controversial, I am not revealing the person's name, primarily to focus on the general perspective rather than this individual situation)

I then started to write this fieldnote about London as a gateway for Nordic music. The city is the most important gateway in Nordic music export. It's the place where many artists from the Nordic countries go when they want to reach audiences outside of their immediate home territories, including neighboring countries. However, London also has other functions. It provides a key to understanding how the Nordic music scene is becoming part of the global village.

A key point is that the London-based professionals specializing in the Nordic market have developed relationships with and influenced the mindsets of Nordic artists. These London professionals are not simply taking Nordic talent out of the region and into British and North American markets. They are not simply curators and gatekeepers. They have gone to shows, talked to musicians, and contributed to the development of new business networks in the Nordic countries. In the words of my interviewee, the current networks are relatively new:

One of the problems with Scandinavia twenty-some years ago was that there was no business infrastructure. There were few managers and a lot of them were bookers who pretended to be a manager who had never done anything outside of Scandinavia. Not for any other reason than they were worried because they had never been beyond that. Even though there had been Abba, arguably one of the biggest acts in the world ever, there was very little experience of international acts.

Sweden and later Iceland developed music scenes with aspirations for international careers before other Nordic countries, but they foster different cultural environments. Whereas the several of the Swedish stars from Abba to Roxette and First Aid Kit play American- and British-style music that blend in with artists coming from the United Kingdom and the United States, the Iceland scene and later the Faroese and Norwegian scenes, but to some extent also the Danish scene have fostered environments in which it is valued to have a slightly more distinct Nordic identity. While Sígur Ros might be perceived as a form of world music, it is generally not marketed as world music, and Teitur's music has subtle elements of American roots aesthetics, but it is not really American-style music like First Aid Kit. Efterklang from Denmark similarly identifies with local natural envirnoments in their videos, but is also neither world music nor American-style music.

De-emphasizing place identity is to some extent a form of de-essentialization that creates new freedoms for Nordic artists not to necessarily be cast in the Orientalist gaze of world music.  Interestingly, international brokers of Nordic music say that they know when to break an artist as national (Danish or Norwegian, for instance), regional (Nordic or Scandinavian) or not to bring up place at all. The Nordic label is increasingly associated with 'quality music', but it is not used in all situations. Place identification in media culture might always have been a little superficial and flexible, but it is clear that the Nordic label is not a dominant one. It is possible for Nordic artists to reach audiences in other parts of the world without a strong element of exoticism (if you are interested, Philip Bohlman is writing a chapter on the concept of Borealism as a form of Orientalist gaze on the Nordic region within the history of the European empire).

Watch this video of a Danish and Icelandic artist that met each other when they were touring in Canada as support acts for the Faroese artist Teitur. A London manager helped organize this tour. The couple is now married, by the way. The video can be watched in HD.

New book

by Josh Green

Perhaps the best way to introduce a new book on popular music in the Faroe Islands is with a brief that story has to do with what I learned about the nature of island life and island music, in particular, while in the Faroes and during the process of writing.

Towards the end of my first month in the Faroes, my “language and culture” class took a trip to the tiny village of Trøllanes, which lies at the northern tip of one of the Faroes' more remote and least populated islands. We took a ferry ride across the fjord from Klaksvík, the Faroes’ second largest town, and arrived on the island of Kalsoy, population about 100. We drove through four or more mountain tunnels, some of which connected to empty and uninhabited valleys. After the last tunnel we emerged above Trøllanes, a town of about 6 houses. Despite my best efforts at steeling myself against romanticizing this seemingly "remote and out of time" place, I couldn't help but feel a bit like I'd reached the end of the world. Here we met Mikkjal Joensen, the famed Faroese blacksmith who runs a shop and museum. After a smithing demonstration, I spoke with Mikkjal in somewhat broken English about my plan to study music in the Faroes and told him that I looked forward to meeting the Faroese country star, Hallur Joensen. He smiled and told me he knew Hallur very well and that I should tell him 'hello from Mikkjal' when I meet him: Mikkjal and Hallur used to play in a rock band together in their younger days.

Amused by the close interconnection of people across the archipelago and how often it is that music connects them, I strolled with our group around the village's few houses. One of them, I learned, stands empty most of the year. A few of us peeked inside and found an enviable and fully equipped jam space. It was starting to seem like it would be quite hard to get away from music anywhere in the Faroes. In some ways, I think my experience at Trøllanes makes for an apt metaphor for the Faroes and the Faroese music scene as a whole. First, it shows how even in some of the world's more ostensibly out-of-the-way places, music flourishes and forges connections between people. Secondly, as anthropologists and others have been cautioning for some time now, it reinforces (for me) the idea that nowhere can we treat cultures as isolates. The discussions of Faroese metal and country in this book attest to this, as well as to some of the ways in which people make music meaningful and useful in their lives as they are making it their own.

My new book, Music-making in the Faroes: The Experience of Music-making in the Faroes and Making Metal Faroese, was published earlier this year. Print version 188kr (DKK), e-book 90kr (DKK).

Marketing a Small North Atlantic Society

Musical Marketing of a Small North Atlantic Society
A New Alliance between Business and Politics in the Faroe Islands

The chapter that I am preparing for the volume Popular Music in the Nordic Countries focuses on the Faroe Islands. It has been fascinating doing field research in a small society that receives little attention in mainstream international media but has a rich cultural life that puts many of the issues that occupy the modern world into perspective. The Faroe Islands are in a remarkable process of creating rethinking its place in the global village.

In a 2008 Faroe Business Report article on “nation branding” in the Faroe Islands, author, entrepreneur, and musician Elin Brimheim Heinesen commented on the marketing of the islands:

Our traditions in arts and crafts are held in high esteem and I believe their continuance is extremely important...There are strong currents driving opportunities in our direction: foreigners see something new, different and unspoiled in our culture. At the same time, we have up and coming Faroese music artists gaining audiences around the world.

The following year, the Faroese Minister of Trade and Industry spoke to the crowd at an event intended to foster and promote the burgeoning music industry in the islands about the importance of “personal branding” for aspiring professional musicians, adding that

One can say of the Faroe Islanders that we are very supportive of the creative and performing arts. Indeed we are very proud of our music which is an expression of who we are and what it means to be Faroese.

In Faroese business and politics, music is valued as a marketable resource and an essential element of national identity. At the time, musicians are making efforts to promote their music for broader international audiences. These developments play into a larger evolution in global cultural tourism over the past several decades. In the original 1976 edition of The Tourist, for instance, Dean MacCannell keenly observed that tourists had already begun pushing their way to the world's more remote locales in anticipation of the forms of authentic difference that they might find there (1976:186). The quest for those experiences and places imagined to be "authentic," or at least sufficiently "other," remains a motivation for many travelers. Jón Tyril, the organizer of the Faroes’ first major music festival called the G! Festival says the Faroese language often acts as one such important marker of authenticity for foreigners. Tyril explained to me in 2011 that “people are very occupied by authenticity and roots and all that, so it works perfectly to sing Faroese songs.”

Music and musicians have indeed begun to play an increasingly important role in the branding of the Faroes as they are repeatedly invoked as signifiers of authentic national distinctiveness. One might argue cynically that music may be made more innocuous and ultimately losing its unique capacity to sustain strong local communities as it becomes mediated as a global commodity, but another view is that those living in distant corners of Europe are motivated to make use of the resources at hand to differentiate themselves in the global market.

Faroese traditional and popular music now make up one of the most well-publicized aspects of the islands’ culture that is currently marketed to tourists. In sharp contrast to earlier touristic material, such as The Faroe Islands: Yours to Discover (Sansir 2010) which barely mentions music, recent brochures are replete with depictions of the islands’ music and musicians. In some cases, pamphlets are even dominated by music advertisement: the 2011 booklet The Faroe Islands: Take a Deep Breath (Sansir 2011a) features pictures and descriptions of the islands musicians on six of its sixteen pages, including the photo of singer Eivør Pálsdóttir on the cover. In other words, nearly 40% of that particular brochure is comprised of exclusively music-related material. Notably, this brochure figures very prominently on the Faroe tourism website (visitfaroeislands.com 2013).

Even in less music-dominated brochures, however, a prevailing concern with the amount of space devoted to Faroese music is clearly evident. For example, in the 2013 booklet, there are four full pages devoted to solely pictures and images of Faroese music, and lesser textual or pictorial references to the islands’ music and musicians appear in some form on at least five additional pages, for instance, in advertising local music festivals (see Sansir 2013). One can find a similarly healthy representation of Faroese music in the touristic promotional films commissioned by the Faroese tourist industry, several of which discuss music exclusively (see Kovboy Films 2009). The tourism website also features music as one of its four main headers on its introductory page: under the banner “Live Music Every Day,” a brief description informs potential tourists that “Music plays a major role in Faroese culture. During the summer you are spoilt for choice as there are live conserts [sic] every day all over the islands” (visitfaroeislands.com 2013).

As hopefully even this brief overview has suggested, entire nations, via their tourism industries, are often engaged in large-scale processes of “impression management” of a sort that are analogous to Erving Goffman’s (1959) discussion of the performance of self. Music and musicians appear to be playing an increasingly important role in this somewhat high-stakes field nation branding and marketing. Music has entered the global marketing of the Faroe Islands, and this is both more powerful and more complicated than many have imagined. The cultural sphere is not just a sensitive sphere; it is also a human resource before it can be an economic one, and the recent evolutions illustrate some of the complexities facing North Atlantic societies today.

References

Dahl, Johan. 2009; “Music Industry Event” (introductory speech). http://www.vmr.fo/Files/Billeder/vinnumalaradid/Music_Industry_Event.pdf

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York:DoubleDay.

Heinesen, Elin Brimheim. 2008. Interview with Búi Tyril. Faroe Business Report.   http://elinbrimheimheinesen.blogspot.ca/2008/11/its-all-in-mix.html

Kovboy Films. 2009. Faroe Islands tourism videos. Accessed 8 April 2013, available at

http://www.youtube.com/kovboyfilm

MacCannell, Dean. 1976. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley:University      

of California Press.

Ritzer, G. and Liska, A. 2003. “McDisenyization and Post-Tourism: Complimentary

Perspectives on Contemporary Tourism”. In C. Rojek and J. Urry (Eds.) Touring Cultures:Transformations of Travel and Theory. London:Routledge.

Thank you!

Thanks to all participants, presenters, and partners of the music conference in Roskilde. This photo was shot on the last day in snowy weather.

Special thanks to
The Nordic Culture Fund
Roskilde University
Jocelyne Guilbaut, Stan Hawkins, and Simon Frith
Anna Hildur, Nordic Music Export
Johan Andersson, Volume
Jan Sneum, The National Broadcasting Corporation of Denmark
Lena Bruun and Jacob W. Madsen, The Danish Museum of Rock Music
Petter Myhr and Vigdis Sjelmo, Rockheim
Ane Carlsen

Roskilde Conference 2012

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

updated November 28, 2012

IASPM Norden 2012 Conference

University of Roskilde, Denmark, 29–30 November 2012

POPULAR MUSIC AND THE NORDIC REGION IN GLOBAL DYNAMICS

Thursday 29 November 2012
Building 41, the auditorium "Cinema"

10:45 Welcome (Antti-Ville Kärjä and Fabian Holt)
11:00 Keynote I: Prof. Jocelyne Guilbault (University of California, Berkeley)

          "Locating Location in Popular Music Studies"

12:00 Lunch

12:45 Parallel sessions 1

          a) Iceland (in the Cinema auditorium)

          b) Territory (in room 42.2.10)

          c) Schlager (in room 42.2.37)
14:15 Break

14:30 Parallel sessions 2

          a) Histories (Cinema auditorium)

          b) Social and Political Issues (room 42.2.10)

          c) Metal (room 42.2.37)

16:00 Coffee
16:30 Keynote II: Prof. Stan Hawkins (University of Oslo)

          "Terror, Masculinity, and Music: Implications for the Nordic Identity"

17:30 IASPM Norden General Meeting

19:30 Dinner at restaurant Bio Mio in Copenhagen's Meatpacking district

Friday 30 November 2012

9:15 Coffee
9:30 Parallel sessions 4

          a) Indigeneity and Cosmopolitanism (in the cinema auditorium)

          b) Business and Institutions (room 42.2.10)

          c) Rap (room 42.2.37)

11:05 Excursion to the Musicon site in Roskilde
Presentations by Jan Sneum, journalist of National Broadcasting Corporation of Denmark; Johannes D. Andersson, president and partner of Volume; Petter Myhr, director of Rockheim, Norway; Lena Bruun, vice director of The Danish Rock Museum; and Anna Hildur, director of Nordic Music Export

14:30 Parallel sessions 3

          a) Caribbean Sounds

          b) Nordic Identity

          c) Mediations

16:00 Coffee

16:30 Keynote III: Prof. Simon Frith (University of Edinburgh)
          "What is Different about Popular Music in the 21st Century?"
17:30 Closing

Roskilde Conference CFP

Call for Proposals

IASPM Norden 2012 Conference
POPULAR MUSIC AND THE NORDIC REGION IN GLOBAL DYNAMICS

A conference to be held at the University of Roskilde in Denmark

November 29-30, 2012

Organized jointly by

--The Nordic branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM)

--"Popular Music in the Nordic Countries in the Early 21st Century," a cross-sector project funded by the Nordic Culture Fund

We are happy to invite proposals for entire sessions as well as for individual presentations for the 2012 IASPM-Norden conference. We welcome all topics related to the study of popular music, yet a specific emphasis in the conference is given to the politics of location of popular music in the Nordic countries.

The keynote presentations will be delivered by professor Simon Frith (University of Edinburgh) on the subject "What is different about popular music in the 21st century?", professor Jocelyne Guilbault (University of California, Berkeley; title TBA) and by professor Stan Hawkins (University of Oslo) on "Terror, Masculinity, and Music: Implications for the Nordic Identity".

Music is intimately tied together with conceptualisations of geographical locations and by extension identities. Differences may be thought of as existing between continents (eg. African, Latin, Western), regions (eg. Middle-Eastern, Balkan, Caribbean, Siberian) and especially nations (eg. all the world). Transnational populations and movements further complicate the issue: questions about Sámi or Kurd music imply their own politics of location, as do the ways in which regional, national or local identities are constructed musically in diasporic communities. To this quagmire one can add also the impact and significance of global mediated representations of given musical locales, regions and civilisations.

Nordic countries—Denmark, Faroe Islands, Greenland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—constitute their own region that is officially maintained through various treaties and organisations. In terms of international politics, the region has been characterised as a buffer zone between the East and the West. Societally, the region has been unified by welfare policies, and culturally the Arctic proximity has yielded speculations of a distinct Nordic mentality and forms of communication. These extend also to music.

Thus, we welcome proposals for example but by no means exclusively on the following topics:

* popular music in the construction of national identity in the Nordic countries

* reception and conceptualisation of Nordic popular musics outside the region

* the transnational flows of popular music in the Nordic region

* indigenous popular music in the Nordic region

* mainstreams of Nordic popular music

* popular music and the linguistic diversity in the Nordic region

The official conference language is English.

The proposal should include the following:

Title(s), name(s) and affiliation(s).

Title of the presentation/session.

Abstract of the presentation/session (max 300 words) and five keywords.

Please deliver the proposals as electronic mail attachments in rtf/doc/pdf format to iaspmnorden2012proposals@gmail.com no later than 1 June 2012. Please label your attachment as surname.xxx (eg. holt.doc).

Please direct all inquiries to iaspmnorden@gmail.com.

Welcome to Roskilde in November 2012!

Fabian Holt, Associate Professor, Roskilde University

Antti-Ville Kärjä, IASPM-Norden Chair