Uccelli [née Pazzini], Carolina Uccellini, Marco

(f) Scandinavian.

Although Scandinavians began to immigrate to the Americas in the 1600s, the principal influx was in the decades spanning the turn of the 20th century. Indeed, the US census of 1910 indicated about 815,000 Norwegian-born and American-born of Norwegian-born parents – a number roughly equal to one third of Norways's population at the time. Most Scandinavian immigrants settled in the upper Midwest, especially in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, areas also popular with immigrants from Germany and eastern Europe. Patterns of culture in Scandinavia had emphasized local identity to a degree difficult to maintain in the USA. When villages relocated nearly intact, village-specific musical repertories could be and were briefly retained. Much more frequently, however, national, pan-Scandinavian, pan-immigrant, or more generally assimilated patterns prevailed soon after resettling.

A variety of long-lived and vital secular and religious ballad traditions from each Scandinavian country were soon widely circulated in the USA. The boundary between oral and written traditions was never clear – that is, handwritten or published texts were often used as memory aids, though supplementing texts with musical notation remained much less common. New emigrant ballads, many distributed as broadsides at the same time that they were transmitted orally, recorded personal and group experiences vividly. Some of these ballads offered encouragement to the prospective immigrant, while bleaker texts may have had the opposite effect. Transplanted ballad traditions naturally experienced change in both content and meaning in their new homes. On the broadest level, the connotations of all tunes and repertories tended to de-emphasize specific inherited meanings in favour of a more general evocation of rosy memories of their singers' original homes. During the course of the 20th century, balladry gradually declined, partly as a result of the growth of mass media but also as a consequence of the gradual abandonment of the Scandinavian languages.

Hymns and various types of religious songs were very important in the lives of Scandinavian immigrants. This was due both to the strength in the Old and New Worlds of Scandinavian Lutheranism and to the waves of Pietism that had swept parts of Scandinavia during the second half of the 19th century (many immigrants came from areas where Pietism had been especially influential). While many Scandinavian communities in the Old World possessed distinctive repertories of older secular music, church hymnody was more standard, and therefore apt for the mixed Scandinavian communities of the New World. At the same time, religious tunes whose main life was in oral tradition (these came to be called folketonar in Norway) were initially healthy transplants to the Midwestern USA, although institutional hymnody persisted more vigorously, since the church became central to the generalized Scandinavian immigrant experience.

Scandinavian instrumental music was initially a weaker transplant than religious music. The weight of religion that had discouraged the nurturing of dance and dance-tunes late in the 19th century in much of Scandinavia lifted more slowly in immigrant communities than in Scandinavia itself, but the conservative pressure did gradually subside.

Most Scandinavian instrumental music falls into two broad historical layers (both centred on dancing), which have fared differently in the New World. The older set of repertories centres on a family of dances in a metre freely mixing 9/8 and 3/4, including the Swedish polska and, in Norway, the pols, springar, springleik and so on, with each of these names actually an umbrella term for regionally defined arrays of music and dance dialects. These dance-tunes were traditionally performed on fiddles, generally the standard violin but in western Norway on the Hardanger fiddle, a highly ornamented instrument with four bowed and four sympathetic strings. More than a few fiddlers (on either type of fiddle) who emigrated to the USA either visited or moved back to Scandinavia, so that musical influence flowed in both directions.

In Scandinavia, fiddle music has been revived with an emphasis on local tradition: most fiddlers publicly perform only tunes and versions of tunes inherited within their own town's tradition. In the Midwest, fading memories and marriages between individuals whose parents came from different locations in Scandinavia have blurred such specific Old World affiliations. Many young instrumentalists whose ancestors came from areas of Norway where the standard fiddle was played have taken up the Hardanger fiddle, since the latter instrument is more distinctively Norwegian. Thus national identity is gaining precedence over the local loyalties that were more important before emigration. Other fiddle-playing descendants of Scandinavian immigrants participate in the American fiddle revival and, in many cases, play repertories and use styles that are either compromises between Scandinavian and American fiddling or that largely abandon any distinctively Scandinavian element.

A younger layer of Scandinavian instrumental music met a different fate in the Midwest. The Scandinavian versions of pan-European 19th-century social dances, collectively known as gammaldans (with minor re-spellings in different Scandinavian dialects), inspired the formation of New World Scandinavian bands (often including violins, but centring on accordions) to play these polkas, waltzes, schottisches etc. Over time, the polka has become the most important dance among these, and bands led and dominated by eastern Europeans are pre-eminent in the polka band market. When young American descendants of Scandinavians dance polkas and waltzes to these bands, their pan-immigrant Midwest identity comes to the fore.

Other instruments, including the Swedish keyed fiddle (nyckelharpa) and plucked zithers such as the Norwegian langeleik, Swedish hommel and Finnish kantele, are more common in revival than they ever had been previously, both in Scandinavia and in the USA.

Scandinavian American social organizations generally include music as an integral part of most activities. Throughout the 1880s, such organizations tended to be pan-Scandinavian. Later, increasing populations of immigrants allowed specialization by national group. Some organizations remain specialized – at least one large organization per national group – while others have reverted to being pan-Scandinavian, either because of intermarriage between later-generation immigrant descendants or because a given organization is located where there are few interested immigrant descendants. The larger nation-specific organizations often support choral societies with traditional repertories. These societies may sponsor annual festivals, with both society and festival following German models. Smaller, pan-Scandinavian groups often restrict their singing to broadsides that join texts celebrating lutefisk – a widespread, somewhat humorous cod-based cultural icon – to tunes widespread in the USA, such as Christmas carols.

Scandinavian American music publishers and recording companies were once busy disseminating traditional music by both Scandinavian and Scandinavian American composers and performers. This echoed similar endeavours involving nearly every ethnic group in the USA large enough to support in-group commercial activity. The Scandinavian American synods of the Lutheran Church were central to this effort, and local newspapers helped too. An important Midwestern Danish music publisher was Askov American of Askov, Minnesota, which issued F.L. Grundtvig's Sangbog for det danske folk i Amerika, first published in 1889 (fig.12). Sparsely populated areas such as the Finnish communities of northern Minnesota and Michigan received traditional music by radio.

The 1970s to 90s witnessed a Scandinavian American ethnic revival with music at its core. Refreshed interest in both the collection of older traditions and performance of reshaped ones can be witnessed in the activities of well-known figures such as Leroy Larsen of Minneapolis and by hosts of younger musicians. Most of this activity concerns secular dance music. Some of these individuals are seeking links with their own heritages, while others – not all with Scandinavian backgrounds – are simply looking for interesting and attractive alternatives to the modern mass media. A young national society nurturing the Hardanger fiddle, numerous folk-dance clubs, and older ethnic-specific groups continue to find pleasure and meaning through cultivating Scandinavian song and dance.

USA, §II, 1(ii): Traditional music: European American: Western