The young guitarist we had met the day before, arranged for us a very special meeting: at 1PM we sat in “Lille Björnen” with one of the most famous fiddler of Sweden! He brought his violin and taught us some Swedish traditional tunes from Dalarna country, the heart of Swedish folk music! We were playing with him, drinking some coffees and talking, it was so fulfilling that the time ran and watching the clock, it was suddenly evening!! We were so keen on learning new things from literally “first hand” about folk music as it is part of our project to find out similarities and differences about music in whole Europe!
And this day we definitely learned a lot! In Rättvik (the neighbour town with the longest wooden bridge in Sweden) is the very heart of folk music and some typical rhythms used in lots of fiddler tunes have its origins here. Also, the most famous fiddlers live there. This “Dalarna” rhythm is quite unusual for our ears. Although in melody and harmony, we found out some similarities between Folk music in other parts of Europe and even in Balkan, this rhythm was unique! He explained it like this: you hang a wire on the wall, when it’s filled with air, you have a “proper” rhythm, when you deflate the wire, you get the “Dalarna rhythm”. This explanation made sense to us and when he played the next song, I could totally imagine this wire! By the way, Kjell had a classical education, he studied Mozart, Tschaikowsky etc like us, was concert master and decided after this career to become a fiddler. His excellent technique and sound combined with the joy and creativity, offered him the best condition to be a fantastic fiddler! He is a very heartful person full of humour and good jokes, we could have stayed with him for many more hours! Apparently, he had been enjoying our company as well and we made some plans to meet again and hopefully playing a concert together one day!