Andreas Aase: Improvisation in Scandinavian Guitar Tradition
Research Fellow at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Dept of Music
Traditional music, or folk music, shares a common feature all over northern Europe, Scandinavia, the U.S.A. and many other areas: The melody is the main force to be reckoned with. This contrasts sharply with for example jazz music, where the composition is usually treated as a harmonic launchpad for improvising musicians to expand and elaborate.
In Norway, modernization of folk music usually takes the route of creating new surroundings for traditional instruments and playing techniques. One example is the nu-metal/techno environments created around fiddles and chanting by GÃ¥te, a young rock band from my own region.
Very few folk musicians are ever heard to improvise, although some do so to create introductions or transitions in concerts.
No folk musicians I have heard in Norway "take solos" in the jazz sense of improvising organically within their genre, over a given composition, as one of several ensemble soloists.
I try to suggest an improvisational style for guitar, based on typical phrases, playing techniques and rhythmic vehicles taken from the traditional music in the Trøndelag and Jämtland areas of Norway and Sweden. At the same time, I´m learning to play improvisationally in fiddle tuning on my purpose-built guitar bouzouki. The raw material is taken from traditional tunes I learn from my secondary supervisor Geir Egil Larsen, a renowned traditional musician, plus a handful of other performers who play various instruments. The transformational treatment of this raw material is methodically worked through by myself and my main supervisor, saxophone player John Pål Inderberg.
The outcome will be an expanded repertoire of traditional tunes, a set of arrangements for solo guitar bouzouki of these tunes, a palette of phrases from this music that is modulated and reworked, a deepened sense of possibilities for rhythmic expansion of traditional music, a handful of original compositions based on what I learn along the way, and an understanding of a fiddle.tuned instrument that wasn´t there before.
My goal is to one day be able to improvise from within the traditional music of my native region.