lots of surprises.

I'm not sure how many people pick up the violin because of Swedish folk music. Outside of Sweden, and possibly Minnesota, probably not many. I'm actually not sure there's many inside of Sweden, either: tons of people (possibly most) spending their time performing folk fiddling traditions have music degrees and/or started playing as children, and after mastering the classical tradition, either returned again to the music of their childhoods, or learned it for the first time and found it more satisfying.

Don't get me wrong: I like Irish and Scottish fiddling, and Cape Breton, and bluegrass, and old-time. And Quèbecois, although I think you have to be able to dance while playing, so it will probably remain beyond me: the percussion in this track is the fiddler chair-clogging.

I don't really care for Cajun or zydeco fiddling, except in moderation, but I won't claim there's any logic to that, because it all sounds repetitive and similar to me, which is equally well said of most fiddle music I do like, to say nothing of lots of other music I enjoy.

Of course, all those fiddle traditions (and more!) are one family, carried from France and Ireland and Scotland over to Canada and Appalachia and Louisiana, mixing with everything they encountered, like Spaniards, enslaved Africans, and each other. Like any instrument unconstrained by the tyrannies of fixed pitch, the violin is tailor-made for musical syncretism. Want to play music with quarter-tones? If you can hear the difference, and remember where you put your fingers, the violin will play it for you.

Owing to Scandinavia's failure to thoroughly colonize the Americas, Scandinavian fiddle music is...something else. And then within Scandinavia, as far as I can tell, Swedish music is weird. The thing that grabbed me about Swedish music is the same thing that makes it hard: everything about it is just unexpected. I have all these decades of listening to classical and Irish music (and Cajun, until admitting I didn't like it), but I listen to Swedish music, and I constantly feel like I had NO IDEA that note was coming. To say nothing of the rhythms: a Swedish polka is the Polish polka we're used to, in 2/4 time, but the Swedes have a polska, which sounds like this:

Notwithstanding that the band is a supergroup of Swedish Folk Revival ninjas, this is a Christmas concert for normal people, and this is the kind of music the audience is expecting. The musician Lena Jonsson (not in that concert) described the polska as "in 3/4, but the second beat comes sooner," which is enough to make most of us ordinary (and non-jazz) musicians cry out to the heavens. "WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT EVEN MEAN, THAT IS NOT WHAT A BEAT IS."

It's more of a pulse, and it's part of why the email from the local Nordic music ensemble told me to use the sheet music as a starting point, but not to invest too much time in it, since the band plays whatever it plays and mostly uses the music to remember how songs start.

I highly recommend watching the whole concert. It's so different, but so damn catchy.