Northern Streams – Lunchtime Concert, Friday 3 April 2009
Wighton Heritage Centre, Central Library, The Wellgate, Dundee DD1 1DB: 1.15pm
Top nyckelharpist, Ditte Andersson, performs a mixture of traditional Uppland and other Swedish music “spiced” with her own tunes and folk songs with pianist Anders Göransson.
This is a free concert with donations welcome! In partnership with Friends of Wighton. For more details contact: 0795 191 8366 or visit: www.eltmsa.org.uk or www.friendsofwighton.com

And here’s a little more detail that you might find interesting!
Ditte Andersson
A nyckelharpa player and singer – her repertoire is folk music from Uppland and the rest of Sweden, “spiced” with other types of music, from the rest of the world. The nyckelharpa is usually called a Swedish instrument outside Sweden, but in fact it is a provincial instrument, from the province of Uppland. Uppland starts with the northern half of Stockholm, and stretches some 160 km to the north from there. The instrument, or an ancestor of it (nobody knows) came to this region via the Hanseatic League, probably, and stayed there. Until the 1970’s it didn’t spread further. During the “folk music wave” in the 70’s it spread all over Sweden and further. Now there are about 20,000 nyckelharpa players in Sweden.

Swedish traditional music is a solo genre, traditionally. In the 70’s we started to play in groups, like everybody else, alongside with keeping the old way of doing things. I play both purely traditionally, but also love to play with other, unorthodox instruments – like the piano. I have composed quite a number of tunes intended for such contexts – i.e. playing with a guitar or a piano. The tunes reflect both nyckelharpa tradition and my own musical experiences. www.ditteandersson.se/Engelska

Anders Göransson accompanies Ditte on the piano. His field of expertise is in choral groups and he works with “Uppsala musikklasser”, a council school with a music profile with pupils from 10 – 16 years old. He also teaches at workshops for choirs, and is a trained conductor at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. He has led a local rock/jazz choir for ten years, which has won the rock/jazz prize in a national choir competition.