Annbjørg Lien
If the silvery sound of a lone hardanger fiddler is the voice of the old-time Norwegian soul, then the music of Annbjørg Lien is the sound of modern Norway joining the chorus of nations. Lien comes from a musical family in an area without a strong specific musical tradition, so she had wide-ranging ears even as she started to learn traditional Norwegian music. She studied classical violin as a young woman, first recorded at the age of 13 and her major label debut, Annbjørg, was released when she was only 18.
In the early 1990s, American musicians David Lindley and Henry Kaiser compiled a successful collection of Norwegian music, The Sweet Sunny North, which brought Lien to international attention; she even toured abroad with some of the other musicians featured on the album. Lien's work on the compilation showed her to be firmly rooted in tradition but with an ear for renewing the music with a broader palette of acoustic instrumentation.
Her folk credentials include winning the national contest for traditional music six times; she's also won for dancing. She's also toured the world with her folk quartet Bukkene Bruse (Billy Goat's Beard), and she played at the Lillehammer Olympics in 1994. Lien has also played with Irish icons the Chieftains on the band's Tears of Stone album, with symphony orchestras, collaborated with fiddler Catriona Macdonald of the Shetland Islands and done work with longtime collaborator Bjørn Ole Rasch on scores for theater pieces.
Lein's own albums have highlighted her multifarious musical personalities. Her major-label debut, released in 1989, was somewhat controversial because it pushed the boundaries of traditional music. She surrounded her hardanger fiddle with a Swedish nyckelharpa, atypical percussion and synthesizers.
In 1997 Lien showed the world where she was heading with Prisme. Recorded in Sweden with two members of the Swedish neotrad group Väsen, Prisme was made up almost entirely of compositions written by Lien. The sound was mostly acoustic, but there were some organ and other keyboard accompaniment to Lien's articulate fiddle playing. In addition, the album had a strong presence of percussion, which is unusual for Norwegian traditional music, even though country's dance music was always rhythmically propulsive, with beats stamped out by a fiddler's foot.
On Baba Yaga, released in 2000, Lien surrounded her fiddling with a soundscape of sympathetic musicians. The CD—named for a witch from Russian fairy tales—invoked ancient deities, but Lein brought them to life with an almost-orchestral wall of electronic sounds that recalled progressive rock or the big electro-ethnic sound Afro Celtic Sound System. Again, Lien was the principal songwriter, drawing in new sounds from her ever-widening travels, such as Mozambique, as well as the pre-Christian culture of Samiland in northern Scandinavia.
While Lien continues to promote traditional music through teaching and performances, her own albums show her to be not simply a folk musician representing a single tradition but an artist creating a singular vision. —Marty Lipp