Quest for the Harpa

          Nyckelharpa played the traditional Swedish way, with the strap over the neck                                                                                      Photo: Aaron Winton NB!   Huom!  The title of this post is a playful reference to the famous Milton Babbit essay "Who Cares if you Listen?" It is not meant in any way to be disrespectful of Sweden's national instrument the nyckelharpa, but to explore the versatility of this beautiful instrument and deconstruct social bias.  Recently, I have been thinking about what it means to be a non-Swedish heritage nyckelharpa player and the history of the nyckelharpa and what the nyckelharpa has come to represent. I get the question a lot: ...

      Fast forward to September 11th, 2021 and I scooter along the canal through a foggy Turku, Finland. I can't fathom today is the day I get my new harpa, that day I've been dreaming of for over two years since I fell in love with the nyckleharpa at NFF 2019. Not only do I get to pick up my brand new instrument, I get to meet its builder, Bosse Nilsson!  Bo generously met me and a Fulbright friend in Turku, Finland as a halfway point between Helsinki, where I am researching Nordic Music and String Pedagogy at the Sibelius Academy for my Fulbright grant, and Bo's residence north of Stockholm, Sweden. He and a friend took a long ferry just to hand deliver my new instrument to me, and I am so thankful! He gave me a tutorial on how to take the key box apart to do repair work if a key sticks (this happens a lot in New York humidity especially!), and I was thrilled to do a demonstration and play the harpa for him. He lit up with joy when I warmed up on Spelmansglädje, an...

So where does one start when trying to buy a Swedish nyckelharpa from the US? Probably a quick Google search will take you to the American Nyckelharpa Association's page http://www.nyckelharpa.org/buy/buying-a-new-nyckelharpa/. And what a wealth of information there is there! Not only do you have to consider the location of the nyckelharpa builder and price, but the length of time it takes for the maker to build one. Yes, there's a wait list. It's very different from buying a fiddle where you walk into a shop and try one and pick one out to take home. For nyckelharpas, you commission a builder and hope you like what's built!  As someone who plays music for a living, I wasn't keen on purchasing a nyckelharpa without trying it. And I didn't want the cheapest possible one - I wanted one I would enjoy playing for many years. Neither did I want to wait 7 years, as is the case with some of the most recognized nyckelharpa builders in Sweden. Yes, I had my heart set on ...

A lot of people ask me, "how did you get into playing the nyckelharpa?" I usually tell them I already played a lot of Swedish fiddle tunes on the fiddle, and I wanted to learn to play them where I presumed they were originally written -- on the nyckelharpa. Little did I know when I asked to borrow a nyckelharpa for the week long Nordic Fiddles and Feet festival in 2019 I would be embarking on an epic journey to find the ideal nyckelharpa of my own from Sweden.  I fell in love with the rich, mellow, resonant sound of 16 strings and a curved wooden bow made by Sören Åhker I borrowed at NFF 2019. Bronwyn Bird, who taught at camp that year, said, "Hey, I used to have that exact model harpa!" And so did a lot of prominent players. So I e-mailed Sören several times about a commission and even had a friend contact him for me to no avail. There are very few nyckelharpa makers in the US who are experienced builders or even make traditional C-G-C-A tuned models, so I began th...