För Alltid Svenska

Music of the Pastures

And Music Exclusively

for a Female Voice

Kulning Practice

Susanne Rosenberg is one of Swedens experts in kulning. She has both revitalised this old tradition as a singer and through her artistry brought kulning together with contemporary music and theathre.

Susanne has performed KULNING both as a soloist and in polyphonic setting at such different places as on the Catwalk at departmentstore NK in Stockholm, on the Wasa ship at Wasamuseet, at Riksdagshuset, on islets in the arciphelago, around small lakes all over Sweden. But she also performed KULNING in Reyjkavik, on Broadway in New York, in Rome, in San Diego, at Budokan in Tokyo, Cathedral of York in England, Irland, Russia etc.

On communication between women and cattle in Scandinavian pastures by Anna Ivarsdotter

The following is the most thorough description of kulning I have ever come across.  It is a paper presented by Anna Ivansdotter, Professor, Department of Musicology, Uppsala University at the PECUS conference at the Swedish Institute in Rome, September 9-12, 2002.

anna.ivarsdotter@musik@musik.uu.se

The music of the recurrent ceremonies and festivities in rural life were - in accordance with these gender roles - the task of male musicians with fiddle, bag-pipe,keyed fiddle and accordian, the special male instruments.  The fiddlers assisted at weddings and funerals, at feasts and dances.  They were the official musicians of the village. "Professional" in that they were the trained music specialists of their community and usually received some sort of compensation for their performances.

In contrast to this, the pastoral music was closely connected to daily labor, music with  practical functions.  It was not a music for individual specialists, but music for every woman in the mountain shielings.  The basic function of herding songs is that of communication over long distances between the woman and her animals, but also between human beings.  During the daily wandering over the expanses of the grazing grounds, the voice and the special instruments of the summer farm -- the horn of cows, oxen or goats, and long lurs of wood or birch bark -- were the womans most important working tools.  Sound signals were effective means of communication in dense forest terrain.  "The plain land has eyes, the forest has ears", says an old proverb.

Through the centuries, a very special singing technique has been developed in the Scandinavian summer farms - a calling song with an instrumental timbre, a sharp attack and a piercing, almost vibrato-free sound in a high register.  If the cattle were far away, the woman coaxed them in long-drawn out phrases - producing an arc of sound with a few strong notes, embellish with whatever rich ornamentation tradition and her own musical fantasy offered.  This vocal technique - kula, köla, köula, there are many dialect terms--gives a sound which carries up to 3 - 4 kilometers through the forest.

Small animals - goats in particular - are often lively, obstinate and difficult to control.  For them special calls are needed; highly distinctive phrases, playfully taunting and sometimes imitating the sounds of the animals themselves.

Relations with supernatural beings were an inevitable, exciting and sometime frightening part in the life of the old agarian community.  Quite understandably, super-normal  experiences were intensified in the seclusion of the sheilings.  The forest were supposed to be populated with troll, who lived in the mountains, vittror, a small subterranean people, and by the beautiful skogrå,  a siren of the woods.  In the sheiling regions these supernatural beings were often imagined as cattle owners, whose cows were unually fine, with large milk yields.  Like human beings they migrated every summer to the shielings, where they grazed their animals on the same pastures as humans.  Myths tell about the sound of their wondorously beautiful hearding calls and about the bells of invisible flocks of cattle.  About unusually ornate herding calls is sometimes said, that women had learnt them from the siren of the woods, or the small subterraneans.  The relationship between human and supernatural beings was ambivalent.  They could very well be good neighbors, helping each other.  But the amity was fragile and people tried to protect their cattle by certain magical signs and prophylactic rites.

It is interesting to see that in such ecological system the herding music of human beings had the same basic functions as the sounds of animals.  Acoustic signals are to be found among most species for calling their flock, their partner or their young, or for chasing off rivals or attacking predators.  In just the same way the women of the summer farms marked out the territory of the grazing cattle with their sound signals.

All these practical functions do not, however, exclude aesthetic values for listeners as well as singers.  Just as the everyday working tools - churns, cheese tubs, rakes, etc - are decorated with beautiful ornaments, so th women adorned their labor music with rich embellishments.  To hear at a great distance their singing and horn signals resounding between the mountains was an experience of rare beauty: She kulade so beautifully that men would lean on their scythe handles and women on their rakes -- just listening.  They were so enchanted by the grace of her trills that they couldn't work."

The last century has been a period of great decline of for the shieling system.  ...Very few summer farms are still in use.  An indeed, the dissolution of the shieling system has changed the music.  As predatory animals were exterminated at the end of the nineteenth century, the herding instruments became less common.  Everywhere they disappeared before the singing which can still be heard resounding between the mountains around a few summer farms.

The vocal pastoral music -- so strongly adapted to the female voice--is however still women's music and has during the last decades undergone a manifold almost explosive revival.  Young girls are eager to learn the particular kulning techinique and thereby enrich their means of vocal expression.  With its unique timbre it gives a characteristic sound to Scandinavian folk music and jazz groups on tours all over the world.  The once so secluded pastoral music of the Nordic mountains has truly crossed both geographic and genre borders.  But in this process it has totally lost its basic function as communication between human beings and animals.

These summer farms could be relatively large ag-glomerates and herding was a common concern of all household of the shieling.  The animals were kept together in one flock, which was grazed all day and taken home to the byre every evening for milking, but also to be protected from predatory animals.  The women took it in turn to escort the cattle.  Usually two women would go together, the most experienced or the one with the most beautiful voice going ahead of the animals, calling them, while the other would drive them from behind, keeping them together.  The task of driving was often given to the young girls and was excellent training for them.  By listening and imitating, they learned the music, the special vocal technique and the use of the instruments.  In this way the music was handed down from one generation to the other over the centuries.  And with the tending work organized like this, herding song was something every women had to master.

During the summer months the forests resounded with the women's herding calls.  The sounds of the forest itself--the rustle of the wind in the trees, the bubbling of streams, the birdsong and the persistent whine of the mosquitoes--mostly constitute a subdued soundscape.  Against this background the sharp noises of the shielings-horn and herding calls, lur signals, cow bells, the lowing of cattle and the bleating of goats--stood out in prominent relief.

Herding might therefore be seen as an all-day musical event, where the singing was varied according to the different situations occurring in the course of the herding.  Usually the animals grazed peacefully and a few short calling notes were enough to keep them together.  But sometimes they went wandering off on their own and the women called them back by fast, shrill calls or by names -- just as Jesus said in his parable, "he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out".  These were the times when the domestic animals were members of the family and given indivual names to which they reacted.  Not as today, just a number with a label in the ears.

The most difficult and critical of the women's duties was that of defending the cattle from the assaults of predatory animals.  Right down to the end of the 19th century there were large numbers of predators and the danger of attack was ever-present.  An encounter with a bear or wolf could mean economic disaster.  The animals were the most precious possessions of the farms and it was the womans duty to return the entire flock intact to the village in autumn.  The loss of a cow often led to starvation of a family.  In the Scandinavian forests the women had no support of shepherd's dogs, nor did they carry arms.  Their sole weapon against predators were the wind instruments.  By making as fearful noises as possible with their horns and lurs they tried to frighten off attackers.  In situations like this sound instruments were literally in importance a matter of life or death.

During the cold and snowy winters cattle were kept in doors in byres down inthe village.  Before the grazing season began, certain magical rites were performed to protect the cattle from evil forces.  Early in spring, before the aniimals were let out to grass, the pastures were cleansed by the lighting of huge bonfires, and predators and evil spirits were chased off by the noise of lurs, horns and cow-bells.  Thereby the summer grazing lands were blessed and the animals protected.

Voices and instruments were furthermore used for signals between human beings.  The distances were long in the road-less forests and the women were extremely cut off in difficult situations.  The lurs and horns were the only efficient means of communication they had to send messages betweens pastures and shielings.  It might be a veritable SOS signals from a herdswomen being attacked by a bear or needing help in searching for an animal which had escaped.  For all these occasions there were specific, meaning loaded melodic signals, which everyone knew and understood well.  It must certainly have been a great relief, when a woman who had a lost cow, could hear an answering signal: "Don't search any longer - the cow is here.

In all its functional flexibility the music of the summer pastures obviously formed  a rather complex communications system with quite contrary functions in the contact between human beings and animals -- on the one hand that of attracting and gathering cattle, on the other that of frightening away predators/  In these far-flung forest regions predatory animals, tame livestock and human beings have lived together over the centuries in close interaction, systematically utilizing nature and its benefits.  You may also see these grazing grounds of the summer farms as an extensive ecological system, where human beings intruded into the territory of wild animals and where women and predators constantly battled with each other for the domestic animal.

During the last decades the Scandinavian herding music has however undergone a remarkable revival.  While leaving the forest pastures it has instead moved over to folk music festivals an concert stages.  Many Swedish composers have built various compositions on the particular kulning sound and its music material.  In Tarkovskij's last film 'the Sacrifice' we can hear subdued pastoral calls shimmering over the waste land.  At official celebrations the impressive tone of the wooden lur often resounds as opening fanfares, but then is usually played by men.  Thereby this women's labor tool has changed into a public male instrument.