Hoppvals Fra Feragen: A Song History
Egil Bakka traces the runddans, or round dance, family to the southern German-speaking region at the close of the 1700s, where the waltz led the way; its dances came into Norway at different times between the late 1700s and about 1900.[1] He notes that the early waltz could be danced to duple as well as triple meter, and that hoppvals was one of the names given to the duple-time version.[1] Writing about the Røros district in the booklet for an archive-recording release, Bjørn Aksdal says the new dances of the early 1800s soon reached the area, and that the waltz and two early variants of the polka, hoppvals and galoppade, mattered most there.[2]
Johan Christian Dahl, Feige Waterfall (Feigefossen), Lysterfjord, Norway, oil on canvas, 1848. Western Norway rather than Feragen, shown for the Norwegian mountain country of the tune.
Feragen is a lake in Røros municipality, Trøndelag, lying east of the town of Røros near the Swedish border, with a hamlet of the same name at its north end.[3] Aksdal places Feragen, to a degree, within the third of three main stylistic branches of Røros fiddling, centered on Brekken and the eastern parts of the Aursunden area, where two-string playing prevails and older fiddlers mostly sounded open strings as drones.[2] The booklet's tune notes say that Annar Sundt (1919–1991) carried the Feragen tradition forward after his father, Anders K. Sundt, and Nils Jonsa Feragen, though none of the sources consulted here names the fiddler from whom this particular hoppvals comes.[2]
Mark Gilston arranges the tune in Scandinavian Tunes For Dulcimer, a 64-page book he publishes himself that sets Scandinavian music for mountain dulcimer as a change from old-time American repertoire.[4]
Sources
- Store norske leksikon: "runddans" (Egil Bakka).
- Trøndelag Folkemusikklag / Norsk senter for folkemusikk og folkedans: "Kjelde-CD 4: Tradisjonsmusikk i Holtålen og Røros" (booklet, 2009).
- Store norske leksikon: "Feragen" (Svein Askheim).
- Mark Gilston: "Scandinavian Tunes For Dulcimer".
- Image: Johan Christian Dahl, Feige Waterfall (Feigefossen), Lysterfjord, Norway, oil on canvas, 1848. The Cleveland Museum of Art.