The Northern Silence — Andrew Mellor
A discussion with Andrew Mellor on the Rasheed Griffith Show
Full Transcript Below
Episode Overview
What does the architecture of the Copenhagen Opera House tell us about the Danish welfare state? Why are Finnish conductors taking over the world?
This episode takes us deeper into the idea of art as part of the welfare state. Music journalist and critic, Andrew Mellor is our guide to the historical nuances that fuel the Nordic's ongoing domination of the classical music space.
Finland boasts the highest number of conductors per capita in the world. This has not happened by chance. The unique way of talent selection at the Sibelius Academy plays a large role in this. The country exports its prowess to almost every corner of the classical music space. In the UK, Every BBC orchestra is headed by a Finn.
Iceland, a population smaller than some Caribbean countries, has crafted itself into a music powerhouse. The geography of the Nordics has played a remarkable role in shaping their high art and music-focused culture. Harsh winters and foreboding landscapes greatly influence one's outlook on life. This has made them exceptional leaders, diplomats, and, of course, conductors.
The proliferation of the Nordic brand of music, forged by geographical circumstances, is not dissimilar from that of the Caribbean, save for a critical difference. The governments of the Nordics saw the potential in this cultural output, not just as a revenue source, but as a way to better the everyday life of their citizens. The Caribbean music scene has all but diminished. What can be learned from the Nordics?
Andrew Mellor on X (formerly Twitter)
Rasheed Griffith on X (formerly Twitter)
Reading and Listening Recommendations:
Andrew's book: The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture
Klaus Mäkelä conducts Sibelius
Kata 1902 Album
Víddir by Bára Gísladóttir
Carl Nielsen Concerto for Clarinet
Sibelius Tapiola
Rasheed: Hi everyone. Welcome back to the show today. We are joined by Andrew Mellor, a British music journalist and critic based in Copenhagen. We had a very wide-ranging conversation.
Based on his fantastic book, "The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture.” I've been looking forward to this conversation for quite some time, and I hope you enjoy it, too.
Rasheed: Hi, Andrew, and thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Andrew: It’s a pleasure. Lovely to be here.
Rasheed: I'm going to jump right into the first question. Why are there no great Swedish composers?
Andrew: That's a good question. That is one many of us have asked ourselves many times. There's something about Sweden's status in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century, where it didn't have this desperation to prove itself and to emancipate itself.
It had been a great nation, and it had been a huge imperial power, and it had lost everything. In a very modern sense, it came to the conclusion that that's fine. We can exist as a small nation. Again, we don't need to prove ourselves. We can just focus on a kind of creativity and happiness. And the legacy of that is still felt very much in Sweden today.
I just think the Swedish music isn't that interesting in relation to theirs. It's not that progressive. It's very nice, but it didn't push the envelope like Sibelius and Nielsen did. And therefore, it doesn't still seem so relevant. I don't know why.
It must be somehow connected to Sweden's grand aristocratic history. It's idea of itself. It's always been the Nordic nation with nothing to prove almost. Maybe it still enjoys that status today. So yes, I don't know, maybe, maybe there are more boring reasons for it, like the education system there or the system of progress and patronage was a little more tied up feudally, so talent didn't necessarily get through. That's the interesting thing about Carl Nielsen, of course, is that he was an absolute nobody, a working-class poor young man from a nothing family who, succeeded as a classical musician at a time when normally that you would have had to have status and education to have succeeded.
And of course, he had an education, but only because he was pushed into it by his community kind of gathering around him and raising the money for him to study. The short answer is, I don't know, I haven't worked it out yet. Maybe you have some thoughts on it.
Rasheed: It is said that it's near impossible to identify a piece of music as structurally Nordic in sound, except when it comes to Icelandic music. Why is that?
Andrew: This incredible aesthetic distinction has emerged in Iceland over the last, probably two or three decades, whereby there are just these characteristics which seem to unite all the composers and also across genres.
There are exceptions to it, of course, but there are, there's the sense of very slow speeds, of a sense of this very distinctive landscape in Iceland, of the way the weather changes. Even if you're in Reykjavík in the metropolis, the way the color of the sky changes is very distinctive to Iceland. It's very, what feels like a very rapid shift in the weather, but actually it's probably happening over a period of minutes.
So it's not so rapid as it seems. And these things have somehow infiltrated the aesthetic of a lot of this new generation of Icelandic composers who are working now. But it's also interesting that they owe a lot to Jón Leifs, who was the sort of Sibelius of his day, although a century later, just under a century later.
I always think about, I believe that the pace of life of a place very much dictates the kind of art that's created there. And I don't know if you sense this too, given that you're from somewhere very culturally distinctive and yet you live and work in places other than that. So it gives you a perspective on it.
But when we had the European soccer championships in 2016, Iceland made it into the finals and their fans had this, they called it the Viking thunderclap, this very slow clap that would start very slowly and then very gradually increase in speed until it was a sort of full blown applause. And it was very interesting to me that other countries tried to replicate it.
Other fans from other countries tried to replicate it in the stadiums, but they could just never get the speed slow enough to begin with. And they would always speed up too quickly. That struck me as a really interesting thing that like the Icelandics were somehow attuned to a slower speed. And the Iceland Symphony Orchestra has been releasing this series of new orchestral works by this new generation of Icelandic composers.
And so many of them have just a fundamentally low speed, less than 80 beats a minute. And that's quite remarkable. There's a lot of slow, droney music being made in other parts of the Nordic region as well. But in Iceland, it's combined with the sense of textual darkness and of looking into the abyss and of this meteorological phenomenon.
You hear it in Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Veronique Vaka, a Canadian composer living in Iceland who writes very interesting music based on actual timescales of the erosion of glaciers. So she maps, she measures how much the glaciers have decreased and then maps that onto a piece of music, but scales it massively down, obviously.
So you hear this process of glacial change in her music. And it is really interesting. So Iceland is a tiny place, and Reykjavík is a tiny capital. There's one place where you can study music degree level. So there's all of this idea of an anesthetic has come from the fact that everybody knows each other and everybody works together and even Europe, you can hear some of her music, and it sounds a lot like music by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, even though they're ostensibly working in completely different genres. It can just sound the same. And yeah, it's very interesting to me.
Rasheed: So sticking on this point of the environment having this impact. So, there's a term in Finland that I always pronounce badly.
It's "Kaamosmasennus" like the polar depression, darkness essentially, because of the winter, there's almost no sun for a few months. And then, obviously, in summer, there's a complete reversal. I'm wondering if you think that would have a strong effect on how a lot of Finnish composers would have historically and even currently do a lot of their music inspiration.
Andrew: Certainly, they've always had a tendency to look into the abyss, the Finns, and that's connected to that, the weather you talk about, the darkness, the idea that they've constantly had this threat from Russia on the border, and actually from, on the other border from Sweden as well in years back, and I think there's this strong sense of it in Finnish filmmaking, actually, as much as in music. I see a real parallel there, like a lot of films from the late 20th century and earlier this century, where characters who are really emotionally in trouble have addiction problems and are looking at into their lives and not really seeing, liking what they see.
And in a paradoxical way, it's quite a healthy thing to do. Because in the kind of Western capitalist societies, we're often, we're encouraged to force ourselves to toe the line and be successful and be happy. And if you're successful by doing A-B-C and you're happy by doing A-B-C and the Nordic countries have always felt a little bit differently about that, which is I think one of the reasons why they are, they're constantly rated the happiest countries by these strange surveys that the sort of various world bodies conduct. So I think the idea of being able to confront your own misery and your own depression, which you have to, when it's dark outside for two or three months, you have to face up to it, is actually quite a healthy one.
And also letting it out through your artistic work. So, giving voice to this darkness in your artistic world may make you a little bit happier. There are lots of Finnish and Danish composers who write very kind of dark, miserable music, and then you meet them in the bar, and they're very happy, joy-filled people.
But Finland, yeah, you're right, and you will have experienced this as well being there. You have to roll with the punches in that dark period. And it's not even just the dark. Like October, November, March are miserable times in Finland when it's not dark yet, but it's just grey and wet. These days, we know when there's not so much snow, actually.
So there used to be, even in southern Finland, in the Helsinki region, as from November through to February, March, certainly February, possibly March. And now, a lot of the time, there is no snow. It's a wet sludge, which is a lot more miserable than snow, because it doesn't bring that lightness into the air, and there's no fun to rain, whereas there's quite a lot of fun to snow.
Rasheed: Andrew, why does it seem like Finnish conductors are taking over the world?
Andrew: Now that I do have some answers to, because I actually, just recently I did a little article on this for a newspaper in Britain and, and I had some ideas about it. There are some ideas in the book, in my book, about it. And these are well-worn ideas with the fact that there are more professional orchestras in Finland per capita than anywhere else in the world.
So you have access to experience conducting an orchestra from, you're more likely to get access to an orchestra to conduct. The fact that Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, they have Conducting courses that are unique in the world; in every lesson, you're conducting a professional orchestra for 13 minutes. And then the fact that there's this individual, Jorma Panula, who has the ability to spot conductors before they know it.
He can point to someone in an orchestra and say, you're a conductor, you should come and learn with me. And he was professor of conducting at the Sibelius Academy for many years. And one of the reasons for this massive crop of conductors is that a lot of them, they just say, Jorma came and told me I was a conductor and it started from there.
So there's that, but I think there's also something about the way Finns communicate and about this sort of very international and yet at the same time idiosyncratic mindset that they have, which means that in particularly in America and Britain, they just seem to work very efficiently with orchestras.
And there's still, in Britain, this horrendously stifling class system where you're not supposed to say certain things to certain people. You still have to maintain this air of politeness in certain areas of society and work, including the kind of classical music workplace. And Finns just completely ignore that.
They come along and they say, that sounds terrible. You have to go away and sort it out. We need to, trombones, you're off here or strings, you need to work on this because it currently is just sounding dreadful. They will say it like that. And I actually think that the British and Americans, in particular, just find that very refreshing in the workplace, to be told directly that something's problematic and to be told why without any sense of awkwardness.
There's also a huge shared sense of humor between the British, particularly and Finns, which works very well. I was asking the Swedish conductor Sofi Jeannin about this and she had this very idea about the kind of transatlantic British and American desire to be the very best you can be in the workplace for the sake of your colleagues.
Meeting this very distinctive, communicative culture from Finland, which means nothing is talked around, everything's just directly dealt with and solved right there and then. It's partly why Nordic individuals have proved such effective diplomats. Yeah, think of Jens Stoltenberg, the head of the, was it NATO, for many years.
And his predecessor, actually, at NATO was a Dane. Their direct manner of communication can be very refreshing. And fundamentally, Finnish conductors are incredibly well trained. They know this guy, Jorma Panula, teaches them to use their hands. So they talk a lot less than most other conductors and orchestras like that.
They don't feel they're being lectured by Finns. And they have a temperament, a certain temperament, which allows this kind of wildness to come out. At certain points, they have restraint, coupled with a sort of wildness, which works very well in a lot of classical music. The interesting question from a musical geopolitical perspective is what's going to happen next because Norway is absolutely determined to take over Finland in this regard, the kind of production of conductors.
Rasheed: But aren't Norway's orchestras mostly headed by Finns?
Andrew: Yeah, they are. We're starting to see the traffic go the other way. So for example, we're starting to see there are British chief conductors now at Finnish orchestras, which is always, they always would be, all the Finnish orchestras would always just be conducted by Finns.
They had enough staff to do it. They had enough talent to do it. And we're starting to see that work the other way. And we're starting to see Norwegians in particular. I mean, there's an interesting gentleman, Jasper Parrott, who runs one of the biggest talent agencies in classical music, Harrison- Parrott, and a very wise man and very perceptive.
And you can, it's interesting to watch where he's spending his time. He's spending a lot more time in Norway these days. He's responsible for the careers of most of the Finnish conductors who work outside Finland. I think we'll see some movement there from Norway, maybe from Denmark too.
Rasheed: So I have a concern about this. Is it not possible that given there's so many Finnish conductors now heading well-renowned orchestras globally, that it will have a kind of like homogenization of the orchestral sound, given that Finns do have that very similar temperament, that similar cultural background, and they all head these very distinctly German, British, American, Danish orchestras?
Isn't that potentially a risk for the homogenization of orchestral sound?
Andrew: Yeah, I agree. It is a risk. And it's also, it's slightly unimaginative. We have this situation of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London, where there's the, both the chief conductor and the principal guest conductor are Finns. And it's not particularly varied for the audience of that orchestra to have two Finns. And yet the remarkable thing is that despite everything we've said, and despite the fact that their temperament as human beings is similar, they're all so different technically as conductors. If you think about just two of the youngest ones working right now, Santtu-Matias Rouvali and Klaus Mäkelä, they have the polar opposite social and temperamental and musical approach.
Santtu has a wildness about him. He turns up in his hunting gear with an animal over his shoulder and he doesn't care what he says, he doesn't care what language he uses. He's quite rude in a sense, but in a refreshing sense. And yet Klaus is this very elegant kind of urbane figure, always in a finely tailored suit, a kind of absolute aesthete.
And they're both incredible conductors of the same, very similar age, both from South Finland and yet very different. One of the great things that Panula, Jorma Panula, did was that he actually never told anyone how to conduct. He always just allowed people to grow into themselves as conductors. And I actually think about Esa-Pekka Salonen, who I've always thought is a really fascinating musician, but just not with Finnish music.
I don't want to hear him conduct Finnish music. I want to hear him conduct like Lutosławski or Stravinsky or his own work. I suppose his own music is the exception when it comes to Finnish music. Good. He's not a great Sibelius conductor if you ask me. He doesn't have that sort of, particularly, that manifestation of that Nordic temperament I described.
I suppose I would say I do agree with you, and I think it's a danger, and it's also slightly unimaginative to have the world just fill up with Finnish conductors. But at the same time, there's a striking diversity among them, even of the same generation. And then you think of there's also, there's new generations coming up.
There's the middle-aged generation, the Osmo Vänskä. And then before that, Paavo Berglund and Leif Segerstam, who was very much the sort of, had their own style too. I don't know what you think is, I know you've been to the LA Phil, right? And you must've seen Finnish conductors there and elsewhere, I'm sure.
Rasheed: Indeed, last time I saw the L.A Phil, it was Dalia [Stasevska]. She conducted, I believe it was the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and another set of Italian new pieces, so I forget the composer's name right now, but yes, I saw her at the L.A Phil, and she is Finnish.
Andrew: Yeah. And that's, of course, Dalia, of course, is a woman.
She brings a whole new range of temperamental qualities to music making, and she's completely different from Susanna Mälkki if you ask me. That's the interesting thing. And with Dalia, a whole new area of repertoire, a whole new world of music and a very distinctive interpretive and gestural style that's not really that comparable.
Although I suppose she does have to kind of like a big, she has a sort of big shoulder up gestural language. If you can compare with Santtu and with Leif Segerstam on some degree.
Rasheed: The height thing, given she's a bit short.
Andrew: Yeah, there is that too. And of course, a lot of these women who are emerging as conductors now, it's getting easier every year.
But for many years, they had a doubly hard job because there was an inbuilt prejudice against them from many orchestras. So not only did they have to get over the normal hurdles that a conductor faces with a new orchestra on a Monday morning, but they also had to overcome this gender prejudice. That's equipped them in many ways a lot better than a lot of the men who are emerging to deal with this job, which is just horrendously difficult. I was in Norway a couple of weeks ago, watching six young conductors conducting the Oslo Philharmonic for a sort of half an hour each. And they just turn up, they say their name and they start. And then Klaus Mäkelä, the chief conductor, was stopping them as a masterclass situation, stopping them and asking them, why did you do that?
What did you hear that was wrong with the last 10 measures? And it's just so hard. I can understand why management consultants and business schools use it as a sort of tool. Orchestral conducting is a tool, metaphorically and physically, because it's so hard to demonstrate that authority when someone's stopping you every five minutes and in front of a hundred people and telling you to admit what you've just done wrong.
It's a very difficult profession and I don't envy anyone who goes into it.
Rasheed: So, Mäkelä's last, or most recent Sibelius album set, what do you think was the unique insight that he had in re- recording all these Sibelius symphonies at that age?
Andrew: Oh gosh, that's a good question. It's a long time since I heard that series, that cycle. It had a certain concentration to it, I think. That was partly because of the time it was recorded, I think, because he recorded it in lockdown.
They had nothing to do but just sit and play these symphonies and record them. I didn't review it because I wrote the booklet notes, so I never- My opinion on it perhaps hasn't crystallised yet, but I do think that he has a certain concentration, bar to bar concentration, that was quite distinctive to me, and it was this very distinct sense of phraseology, but I think I would have to listen again, return to it, to have a better, more clear opinion on it, sorry.
It's interesting, this Masterclass, last week, whenever it was, the week before, they were conducting the 7th Symphony. And of course it starts with this kind of rumbling kettle drum and this very slow bass movement upwards. And one conductor took it very slowly and it reminded me of some of the old school Finnish conductors like Berglund and I thought, gosh, that's really powerful, that's really effective.
And Klaus came in and stopped him and said, I think you need more movement here and you need to make it a bit more mobile and I was almost thinking the opposite, thinking how successful it was to have it being very muddy, like lava. But the playing on that, I do remember that the orchestral playing is really good and there's this really fine.
There's some beautiful woodwind players in that Oslo Philharmonic, some amazing brass, they have it, the brass section has this really almost American idea of its sound, this very sort of smooth, beeline brass sound, which I think I really admire. Yeah, I'll have to listen to it again to answer that question well.
Rasheed: For you, are there any specific conductors that come to mind very quickly when you listen to them interpret a particular piece and suddenly a light bulb goes off in your mind and you say, Oh, I finally hear it properly? For example, in my case, when I first heard Dudamel conduct Mahler 2, that was when I could say I first heard it properly.
I didn't really have a very good explanation for why I felt that way, but then years later, I was watching a documentary of him, about his life and conducting. I don't remember what year this was. I must have been maybe 16 or something like that. And he was conducting a master class with the Berlin Philharmonic and he was explaining to the brass section, the trumpeters in particular, a particular way he wants them to interpret that particular measure set.
And he said, you think about it as the salsa players in Latin America. That was his metaphor for trying to play how his ears wanted it to be sounded. And I heard that and I was like, ah, that's probably it. But me coming from the Caribbean, there's something instinctive, I believe, of how Dudamel would interpret a piece, him coming from Venezuela, that would just perhaps sound more accurate to me.
Andrew: Yeah, I have. And actually I'm thinking of one recently where it was an absolute repertoire piece, like a Tchaikovsky symphony or something, and where I thought I actually really get that now. I can't remember what the piece was or who the conductor was. So I'll use a different example, which is Claudio Monteverdi, the operas of Monteverdi.
And here in Copenhagen, where I live, we had a production of L'Orfeo, Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo, recently conducted by Lars Ulrik Mortensen with the period instrument band, Concerto Copenhagen. And he was very unorthodox in the sense that he used a big orchestra, maybe 35 players. And that was a revelation to me because like you said about Dudamel, he knew that this is dance music.
A lot of this is dance music. You just have to, it has to have a kick to it. In a theater the size of the modern opera house, it has to have a band big enough, an orchestra big enough to give it that kick, to make the whole thing lift. And I think I'm very frustrated by recordings and performances of Monteverdi's music where the dances just sound a bit dull.
I remember when Dudamel started recording that, a lot of Latino and South American music in LA, and also Alondra de la Parra has done this with her Orchestra of the Americas. And some of that music is just intoxicating when you first hear it, but you need to hear it done by someone who understands the dance behind it.
Like you said, so I found that fascinating as Márquez, this Mexican composer who Alondra conducts a lot of, who, these are people who are really thinking about rhythm just as much as Stravinsky, but in a kind of much more vernacular way. And I think Monteverdi was, I really think that this was about song and dance.
And if you don't have that, then it's a non-starter. So certainly Lars Ulrik Mortensen conducting Monteverdi, other conductors to some extent conducting Monteverdi, Christina Pluhar, I think is another one. And I should also say, I really do Wagner. I'm a massive Wagner fan, have been for my entire life, but I always found Tristan and Isolde a little bit slow and too languorous for me and too boring in the opera house, actually.
And then I heard Daniel Barenboim conduct it. He just does it like nobody else, like in the Prelude; it has just this sense of tension and releases almost bar to bar in the Prelude. There's a video of him doing it in this new Dmitri Tcherniakov production from the Staatsoper in Berlin. And the intensity is just on a level I've not seen before.
That changed my understanding of Tristan and Isolde as a piece of music completely. And he just conducted like nobody else. I'd always thought that he was a very fine conductor, but ultimately replaceable. Now I've realized that he is actually irreplaceable, sadly.
Rasheed: What does the architecture of the Copenhagen Opera House tell us about the Danish welfare state?
Andrew: That's an interesting one. First and foremost, it's an opera house without any boxes, without any- when you're sat watching an opera with everybody else, you're not in a cordoned off space or a box or anything like that. Even the Queen's box is effectively just open to everybody else. And I remember actually the first time I went there in 2005 for the ring, to see the Copenhagen Ring Cycle, the Queen of Denmark was there and it felt quite ordinary actually that she was there and she had to exit via the revolving doors of the front like everybody else. So there's, there is that. If you have a building that's open and made of glass and steel, it just has a sort of openness to it. I think it's just a little bit more egalitarian. And there's also this thing I write in the book, which is what you referred to about the fact that you can see out, but you can't see in.
So you can look out at the view and the cheaper your seat, the better the view is because you're, the foyers, you'll be higher up. So you can look out across Copenhagen Harbor, but also it's not for people to look at you inside the opera house as it is not architecturally, but in a lot of other, a lot of more classical opera houses.
They're built so you can be seen to be there. It reflects the aristocratic origins of the art form, but I've always been a bit uneasy about that. And I just like modern buildings for classical music because they seem to reinforce my belief that the art form is not, doesn't really date. It's ever contemporary.
And so, yeah, I like that. And we have some beautiful buildings for it here in Copenhagen.
Rasheed: Stick on that point; I think I heard you say at some point as well that culture is part of the welfare state. In the book, you mentioned that almost 90 percent of the annual income for most of the orchestras in Nordic countries comes from the government; that is a very stark statistic.
How do you see the government of Nordic countries really trying to promote serious art, not pop art per se, but serious art, and what would happen, do you think, if they were to pull away from that tradition?
Andrew: It's a good question. This all comes from the post-war period when the Nordic countries drew the social contract, and they decided to sort themselves out because they hadn't really been particularly organized or civilized up to that point.
If you think of Norway; it's connected to geography as much as anything else. And Finland, very long countries where if you're paying a tax, any proportion of which goes towards culture, then you have to have some culture available within reasonable distance. But it was always a little bit more than that, especially in Denmark and Finland too, and Sweden to some extent.
It was always about democracy as far as I understood. I've always seen it as a sort of democratic thing, not only in the sense that you would irrigate your brain and therefore you would be more likely to think about bigger things and therefore more likely to engage in the democratic process, decide who you agree with and disagree with and vote accordingly, but also Just in the sense of access, that everybody should have access to these things, and that ultimately helps, like, it helps with people getting along and with community building and some sense of togetherness.
And it's been very interesting because that's been questioned recently, as of course it must be politically, and it's going in divergent directions across the Nordic countries. And we will see this in Holland, where Gert Willis has been elected, or rather looks like he'll form a government, where his manifesto argues for a complete removal of state support for culture in Holland.
You know, and Holland is one of the countries we think of as the, one of the examples of where this works and has a legacy. Of course, it won't happen because he'll be in a coalition with two other parties, minimum. So there'll be loads of, um, ground giving on his part and he'll never get it through. But it's the idea of him putting it forward as a motion that's very interesting.
There's obviously a libertarian argument, arguing that this stuff shouldn't be paid for out of the public purse. It should be, if people want to support it privately, as in the States, then they can do, but it shouldn't be prioritized in public spending. But in Denmark, we've gone back the other way now and we have a government that is very much supportive of culture and wants almost to retain the sort of the old social democratic idea that it is central to life and part of a good democratic nation and that it encourages listening and that it encourages dialogue.
Now it's combined with this kind of export mentality, like Danish film, for example, is worth such and such to the economy. So therefore it's worth supporting it to boost that dividend. And I understand that as a principle and as a political idea. But once you go with that, the danger is then what you end up with what's happened in Britain, whereby the government sort of culture is just economics for them.
So now they think it's not a priority for us, so we will stop funding it. And that means you get institutions that do really good work and good work on the stage and in the community and in society that are suddenly facing closure after hundreds of years in operation, which I think is regrettable.
Rasheed: That's why I'm always so fascinated by Iceland's rise in classical music, and general art scene. Because Iceland has an even smaller population than some Caribbean countries, and they are able to have a very world renowned high art scene. Where the Caribbean is actually very well renowned for general pop-reggae music.
Everyone in the world knows Jamaican reggae and Jamaican dancehall music. Yet, it's actually not well supported anymore in Jamaica itself. Because the state backed away from it in many ways. But in Iceland, the state has a still a very strong involvement in the art scene. It's a good one. It's like public goods that are worth the investment.
Andrew: Yeah, it's true. But it's also very interesting because anyone with a musical sort of, with ears and with some knowledge of musical history, they will never look at the Caribbean and not associate it with the music you mentioned, with dancehall and with certain very prominent musical figures. The Nordic countries have had to have state support in order to create anything near that.
We know Sibelius and we know his symphonies, but 95 percent of the population of the world doesn't and has no interest. Whereas a far smaller proportion of the world doesn't know about the great Caribbean musicians.
Rasheed: That to me makes the problem even more dramatic because that is definitely true. And yet, in the Caribbean, these days, the actual birth of new, good, internationally famous artists is even way less now because before, back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Caribbean artists were household names. People couldn't name a current active Caribbean reggae singer. The most important Caribbean artist by far is obviously Rihanna right now, but she hasn't actually made any music in a decade.
So it's always interesting that there's still that weird decline happening where the state didn't capitalize that much on the, call it branding, call it potential economic growth, anything you want to say, but didn't capitalize on that thing we had in the 70s and 80s and now it's actually substantially diminished.
Now you have Afrobeats as the main art form these days with a similar vibe.
Andrew: Yeah, I see what you mean. And it's also about the development of the art form, right? And if you have an art form like reggae, how is it developing? And you touched on this in your really interesting conversation with Tyler. Once something gets swallowed up by the global music industry, it doesn't necessarily make it less good, but certain identities disappear from it.
And you get like this sort of mush of like quite interesting, progressive. music, there's bits and pieces from everywhere, so you lose some sense of identity. And you were talking about very progressive jazz artists, and how and why can these musicians be supported, and do they deserve that support? And sometimes I think about classical music, and really, what really needs the money is like very niche jazz and contemporary music, more than something like the kind of classical tradition, which in a sense will look after itself.
The difference in the Nordic countries is that it's the classical music institutions who have a vested interest in the kind of radical avant-garde who look after it. And they exist far more easily side by side. And, like you say, Iceland's really interesting in that regard. It's perfectly ordinary to sit and listen to Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and then go and have a drink in the bar for 20 minutes and then come back and listen to a kind of insane piece of avant-garde music for a crazy assembly of 40 musicians and electronic tape and everything. That's okay. And it's okay in Finland, and it's okay in Denmark, but it's not really okay in England anymore. And it was one day, but it's not anymore. And I don't think it's okay in America anymore. You have to have your separate avant-garde music scene.
Whereas the thi’s really wonderful about Iceland, in particular, is that they can exist side by side. And actually, you can have very diverse genres of music existing side by side. So like this death metal tradition in Iceland and the Faroe Islands, which shares personnel with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.
There are people who do both genres. That's something I could never imagine happening in England, for example.
Rasheed: Why should we all be excited about Faroe Island folk music?
Andrew: One reason is because it's like a great element of our global heritage that's still being practiced. It's one of the only forms of indigenous folk music that's still being practiced daily. And that, to me, is quite remarkable. Or certainly in Europe, being practiced daily in Europe.
And it's like what we were saying about the global music industry. We've lost sight of a lot of our traditional musics, in Europe. And this Faroese chain dancing, which originated even in Spain or Portugal, is one of the last that's still happening. That is quite remarkable. And also, it's very, a lot of the music there is very beautiful and distinctive.
And this, and quite crazy. If you're British like me, and I don't know if it's the same if you're from a country with strong links to Britain as you are. But our idea of folk music in Britain is something very twee, polite, inoffensive, smooth, easy. And that is not what the folk music of the Faroe Islands is like at all.
In many ways, it's more strongly resembles African music. Like the way you have a community of people in a church singing kind of Protestant Lutheran hymn, but with these extraordinary vocal embellishments and melismas and improvisations. And there's nothing really like that in Europe. But I think that it's like we were saying about Iceland.
It's just a tiny place where music is completely cross-fertilized. So you cannot grow up even as a classical musician like you can in many places in Britain and America, where you can just play classical music your whole life and not really have anything beyond that in your vision, whereas that can't happen in the Faroe Islands because you'll be forced into playing in someone's band, you'll be forced to play folk music. You'll be forced to help out at a DJ set somewhere. You just- there's only, there's 15 people in the capital kind of organizing everything. So you'll be roped into something whether you like it or not. And that's a very interesting way of maturing as a musician for me.
That's why there's so much interesting music coming from there. There's also lots of very bland derivative music coming from the Faroe Islands, that's almost even more remarkable that such can happen.
Rasheed: Besides the fantastic group Kata, who should we all be listening to from the Faroe Islands?
Andrew: I really like this singer-songwriter called Konni Kass.
I heard her play there in 2016 or 17. There's nothing overtly Faroese about her music. She just sings good, good, relatively mildly sophisticated saxophones, tune kind of songs, ballads, and like soul-infused songs, which I really like. There's an amazing composer, Sunleif Rasmussen, who writes big symphonies and also smaller classical notated works, but he's a very interesting guy and he is absolutely trying to listen to the nation around him and build the music from it, like Sibelius was doing a hundred years previously.
And then there's Christian Black, who's a just sort of Mr. Music, really, in the Faroe Islands. So he organizes everybody and runs this incredible organization called Tootle, which is like a record shop, other things like a record label, a festival, a ticket agency. And he also writes music and makes electronic music, which is very interesting to listen to.
Then there are all these death metal bands, some of them I mentioned in the book. They're quite something to come across. And when you've been there in this forbidding landscape, I don't know if you've ever been to the Faroe Islands.
Rasheed: I have not been.
Andrew: It's just like nowhere else on earth, really. Like the most extraordinary landscape and the idea of these, a series of islands that you can see them all almost.
That's how close they are together. And you have to hop between them on boats or bridges or tunnels. And it's a forbidding place to be. The landscape is telling you not to stick around. Like you are not welcome here. And that is good. A good mental state to be in to like engage with like music. I think this is very exciting.
Rasheed: A few years ago, I saw an exhibit in Fotografiska in Sw- No, it was Kiasma in Helsinki, where it was an exhibition focusing on, it was a video of women in traditional Sámi dress, but they were dancing to Jamaican dancehall music. In my mind, it's just the most outrageous things that come across randomly in Helsinki, but I never followed up on this. Do you have anything to share about Sámi folk music?
Andrew: Yeah, it's much the same as the Faroese, an extraordinary living tradition. For the Sámi, of course, it's, it's a little sadder and more lined with tragedy because they are a community very much under threat and have been misunderstood and ignored by the Nordic governments for many years. So it's almost become a protest, sort of, a form of protest song, which, of course, it never was intended to be.
But yeah, the Sámi and the Joiks, the Joik, the reindeer calls that the Sámi use, which we call Joik, a very intense form of music making. And the Sámi have this belief that, yeah, so this is, as you said, this is the indigenous tribe that lives in the far north of Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Russia. And they have this sort of belief that through the Joik, through this kind of incantation, this vocal incantation, that single person does with no amplification, they can transform themselves into other beings.
So into a mosquito or into a wolf or into sort of animal or plant life, and it's extraordinary to hear it and to come across it, really. It's almost not like music. It's more like prayer. I would say some sort of form of prayer. It's very fascinating to think of the kind of connection between Caribbean culture and Nordic culture.
But of course, the Nordic countries are very different, but united by this kind of umbrella term, Nordic countries, and they have like basic sort of commonalities. And I suppose it's maybe it's similar in the Caribbean. I've never visited where there's a sense of cultures existing side by side and yet being, having a lot in common and yet being somehow distinctive.
And the Joik is a personal thing. It's never the same. And everyone does the Joik differently. It's, it's based on how your voice sounds in its most natural form. So it's an extension of the idea. It's a genre, but of course, it's very particular to the individual who's actually singing it.
Rasheed: The Sámi Joik style reminds me of a folk singing style in Panamá called Saloma.
For someone who wants to visit Copenhagen, they've never been there. They have four days. What should they be doing?
Andrew: I think even before music, you have to eat something. The food scene here is really remarkable. It's incredible. Unfortunately, it's very expensive, but Copenhagen has the most amazing restaurants and street food. And this is a kind of culture that's really emerged since over the last decade.
And it's exploded since I moved here in 2015. Pick one really good restaurant and spend all your money going to somewhere really nice. I went to a really fantastic Japanese-Italian fusion restaurant recently. It was a gift card, so I wasn't paying myself.
The top ones are very well-known, like Geranium, which is the most Michelin-starred restaurant in the world right now, I think. But then there are also really lovely places that are less pretentious than that.
Rasheed: I think Noma is closed, right? [It is technically still open]
Andrew: Yeah, Noma has closed, but there's a really nice restaurant in the building where Noma used to be, which, again, the name escapes me.
But anyway, there's that. And then, of course, there's a fantastic bar scene in Copenhagen where you can go into these bodega-style underground bars where people can still smoke indoors and step back in time. And that's a really fun thing to do. It's really interesting to see the new architecture, of course, we have the most wonderful architectural scene down the harbor.
You can just pick off the new buildings and award-winning buildings, and just take a boat tour around the harbor. You'll see them all. And Tivoli, the fantastic fairground in the city centre, which is also quite expensive, but you can get good food in there too. Just some nice restaurants or just a hot dog. The Danes do hot dogs really well.
So if you go into 7-Eleven and ask for a Franske hot dog, it's a very delicious sausage stuffed into a French-style baguette with a solid end, so the sausage will never fall out. And that's something that is really good to do. I grew up trained as a musician playing the organ and Copenhagen has some incredible churches and organs, historic organs that some of the great kind of musicians of the Baroque actually played.
In an expensive city, it's always worth nipping into church for free and just seeing if there's often, there'll be someone playing the organ. You get some free, free music from that. And I would always recommend going to Our Saviour's Church Vor Frelsers Kirke it's called down in Christianshavn, which is the sort of historic canal district of the city.
There's an organ in there, which sounds like none other I've heard in the world. If someone's playing it, you'd feel it in your body, even if they're playing very quietly. So I would recommend it. And the usual, there's a fantastic National Gallery, the Royal Library is a very good place to visit. It's open.
It's free. You can go and see exhibitions there. There's a restaurant there. There are bookshops. And, of course, you can just check out the actual library. So I would recommend those things. The Danes can be quite unfriendly in a way, but if you catch them at the right moment on a Friday or Saturday night, they can be very entertaining and endearing.
Yeah. Do some of those things.
Rasheed: Andrew, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Andrew: Not at all. It's been a pleasure. I feel like I haven't heard enough from you, but maybe we'll do a return at some point. You can, I'll do the questions, and you can do the answers.
Rasheed: Sure! I think that'll be pretty fun.
That's it for this episode. For updates about the podcast, please subscribe to our Substack. You can also read our newsletters and long-form content on Caribbean policy improvements.