The year of 2019 saw the start of a new tradition in the folk music flute community. Markus Tullberg and Andreas Ralsgård arranged and hosted 25 eager flooters in Landskrona for six days, and what a workshop it turned out to be!
First some words about the hosts. Andreas and Markus have for the last decade or so been workng on reviving the 19th century simple systems flute into the swedish folk music tradition. The instrument was more or less totally gone from the tradition but it is slowly gaining ground again. Andreas and Markus have produced four records and toured, as duo, trio and as a quartet, they are teaching flute at the University in Lund and at the Folk high school in Skurup. They have been gathering a community of transverse flute players in the southern part of Sweden for flute meetups since 2012 (or -13, I cannot really remember). All in all, they have become two of the biggest proponents of simple systems flute in Sweden.
When they visited and taught at Boxwood festival in 2018 their old idea of making an international flute workshop in Sweden resurfaced and a few months later the invitations were sent out. They had previously hosted flute workshops in Sweden at the folk high school, but this was the first time with aim for an international audience. And indeed it turned out to a great success! 25 flautists from Canada, Denmark, England, Iceland, Israel, Sweden and USA heeded the call.
The sunday started off at the hostel where were going to spend the folling five nights. We were welcomed with a suprise dinner cooked by Jessica Ralsgård, who actually had volunteerd (freely!) to cook this dinner and all subsequent lunches for us for the whole week. The food was so delicious and I think we were all amazed at the fantastic service, we are ever so grateful! An evening session at the local restaurant Mythos finished the first evening.
The following days were packed with music. We had workshops, split out in two main groups; those with keyed instruments and those with unkeyed ones. There was also a youth group which were taught by one of the participants, Lisa Gilbert who also runs the fantastic project #låtlördag where she spreads the Swedish folk music to the world. The instruments people played were a mix of simple system flues, silver concert flutes and also two clarinet players :) In the workshops were were taught a variety of tunes, all in all around 25 tunes, a lot of them with second voices, so we had a busy schedule.
When we werent learning tunes in the workshops we had a dance lesson where Liv taught us the basics of how to dance slängpolska, we had a talent night by the participants, we had flute yoga by Lisa, we had a kletzmer workshop with the famous klezmer flute player Adrianne Greenbaum and we had fantastic evening sessions at restaurants in Landskrona. On the last evening we also had a concert at the town Library! The concert can be found on YouTube
All in all this was a fantasic week and everyone is looking forward to SFFW-20 next year. We certainly hope there will be one!