The duo project Blåsang (Frøydis Grorud and Anne Gravir Klykken) will be holding folk music seminars for the sixth graders with primary schools in the Drammen municipality 12 March to 9 May 2019. The duo started as a master’s thesis project in traditional art at the University of South-Eastern Norway. For the past four years, the ladies have been working on interaction, arranging, toning and improvising over old recordings made from 1911 to the present. The sources are mainly traditional culture carriers from Telemark and Buskerud. Using two melodic instruments, Blåsang takes listeners through atmospheres, descriptive musical features and a rhythmic drive that can be associated with bygone times, while innovative elements form the basis of the music’s design.
At the folk music seminars, we meet the pupils in the classroom. We talk about concepts in functional folk music, discuss the genre of folk music and play examples of traditional music and examples of how we have worked with this music for improvisation and free play. We also activate the students with lullabies, kulning, dance, stories and local verses. During the folk music lesson, we also invite students to a small dance.
The main purpose of these lessons is to inspire students to use folk music in their own everyday lives, in their work in music and with their own musical expression.
The folk music workshop is also intended as an inspiration to the teachers in the different classes we visit, so that they can get ideas and new thoughts on how folk music can become part of music education and other teaching.
Blåsang released a album called Blåsang in 2015. It can be listened to at this link: https://itunes.apple.com/en/album/blasang/id1040247781?l=nb