Welcome to Blue Rose

This site is for musicians who play Scandinavian folk music: the largely traditional music of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark. See Instructions for how to use it.

It began in answer to the challenge of how to bring new musicians into an existing spelmanslag (band), where the repertoire to be learned can be very large. Rather than perpetuate a paper culture of binders or even an ad hoc distribution process via email, I decided to bring the repertoire online for some of the groups I play with.

Many people contribute to the tunes played by each group. They organize workshops and teach tunes, they transcribe tunes onto paper and distribute them, and they select the music for Scandinavian dances. I have gratefully built upon their work in the materials on this site.

Many regions in the U.S. support Scandinavian dance groups and associated musicians, and there are many great sources of information about Scandinavian folk music, including other tune archives -- check out the Resources area.

Favicon-All-260x260-- Karen Myers
October, 2005

Latest News

Major new resource available from Laurie Hart.

Musician and scholar Laurie Hart has added an excellent new book, Give a Coin to the Fiddler, as a companion to the 5 disks of her Scandinavian Traditional Fiddle series.

Highly recommended, both her new book and the recordings. See the Resources page here and Laurie's website for details.

BlueRose Books

I am both a writer and an independent publisher (Perkunas Press), and I'm interested in adding an imprint for English editions of books about Scandinavian music. If you are an author of a book and can provide an English translation, I would like to talk to you about publishing it. Please contact me at KarenMyers@PerkunasPress.com.

Blue Rose site updated

This website has been migrated to the latest releases of all underlying tech (3/2022). In particular, this fixes some problems with finding tunes by tune number. Please report any broken links or other defects.

Some background about the site.

Folk Tune Finder

Highly recommended for searches for all sorts of folk music (based on ABC) -- FolkTuneFinder.

ABC files and FolkWiki

I have been working with FolkWiki, an ABC-based wiki (publicly editable) archive of Scandinavian tunes, to provide ABC notation files for every tune in Blue Rose and a cross-reference to the same tune at FolkWiki. You will start to see FolkWiki links pop up wherever there are ABC files.

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Statistics

Tunes: 2003
Transcriptions: 2029* icondoc
Missing Transcriptions: 6
Workshop Recordings: 537iconrec
ABC Notation Files: 19
FolkWiki links: 90

*more transcriptions than tunes because of variants