GLAM/Newsletter/July 2020/Contents/Sweden report

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue VII, July 2020

Sweden report

More Swedish music – of all sorts

In the 1950's and 60', folklorist Matts Arnberg traveled all around Sweden and Swedish-speaking Finland to document the beauty and diversity of our folk music. The recordings – several thousands of them – are now part of the collections of the Swedish Performing Arts Agency. And this summer the Agency made the decision to release them as CC0 to make sharing and spreading them as easy as possible.

Some of the recordings are now up on Wikimedia Commons! We have uploaded the first batch of some 700 songs from Finland, Dalarna, Jämtland, Hälsingland and Gästrikland. We are going to continue the work after the summer to bring more of this invaluable collection to Wikimedians.

Mamsell Lina ägde bara sin kissa – a song from Nagu, Finland, about a lady and her cat, performed by Xenia Rönnblom.
Gössa Anders Andersson plays a wedding song from Orsa on the violin.
Svea Jansson, one of the most famous folk singers in the Nordic countries, sings about a lady who traveled to Denmark.

Also from the Swedish Performing Arts Agency comes the collection of music manuscripts by Johan Helmich Roman, an 18th century composer who has been called "the father of Swedish music". They have been scanned in very high resolution, making them interesting to researchers. We have uploaded one of them to Wikimedia Commons and will evaluate the workflow after the summer – and upload more of the collection. The manuscript is titled Sinfonia in F.♮. : a 6 voci and represents the musical work Symfoni BeRI 10. Because the individual page scans are very large, we decided to upload them separately, so that the quality of the archival scans is preserved. For the sake of convenience, we also uploaded a djvu file with the whole document in a smaller resolution.