Vol. 100, Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning / Swedish Journal of Music Research (2018)

Welcome to the 2018 issue of STM–SJM!

The thematically open 2018 issue starts with two articles on music in Nordic film of the mid-twentieth century. In one of the articles, Tobias Pontara (University of Gothenburg) investigates how the listening to technologically mediated music was represented in Swedish cinema in the years 1930–70, and further discusses what these representations may tell us about the transformation of listening practices in twentieth-century Sweden. In the other article, Kaarina Kilpiö (Sibelius Academy), Terhi Skaniakos (University of Tampere) and Ari Poutiainen (University of Helsinki) add to the knowledge of the rise of the Finnish jazziskelmä – a highly successful mixture of modern jazz, popular music and dance music – by investigating the launch of the genre in cinema and on television in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Ola Graff (The Arctic University Museum of Norway) is an outstanding expert on the yoik, and we are proud to present his third article in our journal on this genre of Sami song. (His earlier articles are found here and here.) In his new article, Graff makes a thorough investigation of one of the most common present-day claims about yoik: that it is like a circle with neither beginning nor end. Graff analyses a large number of recordings of traditional yoik, arriving at a nuanced assessment of the circle metaphor as a description of different aspects of yoik and yoiking. He also argues that the metaphor arose fairly recently, in the context of the negotiation of Sami identity in a globalised world.

The concert hall Studio Acusticum in Piteå, with its mechanically adjustable acoustics, is used as a tool for empirical study in the artistic research project presented in the article by Sverker Jullander, Petter Sundkvist, Jan Berg, Helge Kjekshus (all of Luleå University of Technology) and Karin Nelson (Norwegian Academy of Music and University of Gothenburg). What does ‘good’ and ‘bad’ acoustics signify for a musician? Do musicians adjust to acoustics in a reflexive way or subconsciously, and what artistic possibilities do different acoustics offer? These are some of the questions posed by the authors, who, in this article, enter into a discussion on the design and methodology of the project.

What do we do when we listen, and how do we do it? In an edited transcript of his keynote lecture given at the 2018 conference of the Swedish Society for Musicology, Holger Schulze (University of Copenhagen) questions received notions of auditory normality. Instead of reiterating assumed truths about how ‘we’ listen, he argues, research should accept and embrace the fundamentally idiosyncratic nature of auditory abilities and practices. As a framework for such research, Schulze proposes an anthropology of sound and introduces three key concepts: ’sensory corpus’, ’auditory dispositive’ and ’sonic persona’.

In the sixth and final article, Annika Lindskog (University College London) turns to one of the less well-known compositions of Wilhelm Stenhammar: his incidental music for Per Lindberg’s staging of Shakespeare’s As you like it at Lorensbergsteatern in Gothenburg in 1920. Lindskog shows that Stenhammar’s music, which theatre historians have largely overlooked, forms a sophisticated response to the aesthetic and social agenda of the ‘reformteater’ Lorensbergsteatern and also to the notions of town, pastorality and freedom put forward by the play and by the particular production.

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As editors we want to express our thanks to all authors and also to those who have conducted peer review with such generosity. We further thank all our other reviewers, whose work has made it possible for us now to present a section of reviews of 20 books from various fields of music research. Our gratitude also goes to the Swedish Research Council for supporting the production and distribution of STM–SJM in the years 2018–20.

Finally, a word about the forthcoming issue of STM–SJM. The year 2019 is the centenary of our journal, and we will celebrate this by presenting a special issue on Swedish music research of the past, the present and the future. The deadline for submission of research articles has passed, but that for the debate section, to which we encourage all our readers to consider contributing, is not until 1 September 2019. For guidelines, see our call for articles.

Lund, 5 April 2019

Tobias Lund and Karin Johansson (editors)