Lajla’s comments about the album and the work around it: "The written work done by Olav is like an embroidery for the eyes – a treasure that I would like to bring forward into the light. By studying the material from his collections, I have have the possibilty to look more closely into the older part of folk music and try to put it in context with the exciting and to a degree hidden Middle Age history, which is captured in the landscape of the fjords.When we play the album in the historic Lagmannstova in Hardanger we really got the feeling that the music had come home. This material has lived a life there among the noblility, knights, monks and farmers in the fjords".
Folk music collectors
Riddargarden and Lagmannsstova the Aga in Hardanger shows that the Middle Ages were a time of growth in the fjords. Various buildings and objects from these places are still to be found, and represent some of the oldest documentation we have from that time in Norway. It is quite certain that the ballads were used in Hardanger, but what happened to them?
The folk music collectors Ludvig Mathias Lindemann and Jørgen Moe visited Hardanger only a small number of times, and have therefore a limited number of vocal materials from the fjord area in their collections. Olav Sande, on the other hand, worked as a teacher in Hardanger for a couple of years, and brough with him a larger song repertoar from both Hardanger and Voss. Olav wrote around 2000 songs from the Vest coast and South of Norway, and most of them are unknown. These collections are to be found in the National Library.
Verses from the ballad archive
As Lajla began to work on this historical material, shw noticed that only a few verses had been written down. She therefore had to search for the missing text by collecting verses from similar ballads which were to be found in the ballad archive. After a lot of work and some advice from Kirsten Bråten Berg, the result was a repertoar of medieval ballads from Hardanger and Voss, which no one was using! This later became the album «Møya som drøymde!».
Hardanger fiddle tunes brough to life in a new disguise
Lajla has also managed to find little known hardanger fiddle tunes together with John Ole Morken, from the collections of Arne Bjørndal. These songs have become awakened and renewed in cooperation with the renowned fiddle player Knut Hamre. They are small pearls, which appear as small poems in between the larger ballade lyrics.
