(slow fiddle music) (water roars) - This music traditionally was used for dances and weddings and ceremonies, for funerals, for all the important parts of life.

(light fiddle music) With some of the rituals, it demands certain kinds of music.

But the music itself, what it demands, it's different for each player I'm sure, it's very individual.

And we search different things, we need different things as humans.

(slow fiddle music) (birds call) The music is very rich, it can give you anything you need, I think.

And because it's not a music written down, it's passed on orally, it's changing, it's moving.

And you as a person, change and move of course.

So the music, it never stops being interesting.

(upbeat fiddle music) - What makes it different from the normal fiddle music, you could say, on the violin, that we have in the rest of the country, also like the bluegrass tunes.

It's usually made up by two or three parts.

You could say A part, B part, C part, and then you repeat it.

- But in the Hardanger fiddle music, the music is much more free.

(slow fiddle music) But it's also with the Hardanger fiddle sound, it's relaxing in a way, it's always the drones, and a lot of reverb in the sympathetic strings.

(slow fiddle music) (birds sing) (soft music) - I had seen it on TV.

But I thought they were playing it, like they put their fingers up through the pegs and turning those, to make all the melody.

So I thought, this I need to learn, I need to try this.

It's like a lot of strings that are singing at the same time.

But with a melody, twirled inside there.

(speaking in Norwegian) It's a foundation of song that you can lay the melody on top of so it's not only the melody that comes out of the violin, but also the strings that accompany the tune and brings life to the chorus or round.

(beautiful fiddle music) - Hardanger Fiddle music is demanding.

It's a rich instrument, it has four playing strings and five resonating strings and it can be challenging to hear what is the melody, what is the drone string.

The music is based on the melody.

The melody is guiding the listener more than the number of beats, you don't count beats.

Also it had this unique technique of what's called scordatura.

It's the Italian word actually for mis-tuning, but it's very strange that they call it that because it's not mis-tuning at all it's just that you've changed a way of tuning the fiddle.

(beautiful fiddle music) In the Hardanger repertoire there are at least 26 different ways of tuning the instrument, so you get different colors, different sounds of the instrument.

(beautiful fiddle music) - All the music that we play, traditional is dance music.

So the music has been evolving together with the dance.

- The Hardanger fiddle is a solo instrument mainly.

So it's been up to the fiddler to connect with the dancers and then you can repeat motives, find variations, and you can play differently every time.

- The Hardanger dance, it's maybe 2,000 years old.

We find it on clay paintings, and the Hardanger fiddle come during the 1600s.

I think that made the revolution for the Hardanger dance because it became so much an inspiration in musicality, which inspired new movements.

Most of our movements are inspired by animals, or by tools and farming.

We divide the dance in standing steps, and low steps, and then you have the power moves.

Some of them are similar to break dancing, for example they did the head spin here 100 years ago during the 1800s.

So it's kind of quite similar to break dancing in a way.

People are standing in a circle, often around the dancing, and the dancing is done in turns.

- Sometimes I call it the Flamenco of Norway because you can embrace and hold your anger or happiness and enjoy it.

I think it has been important, a kind of temperament ventilation for our people for a long time because we have a lot of stories from the 1600s.

A lot of murders through dance, a lot of darkness in a way.

But for the past 100 years, we've had this kind of process of elimination, and we started competitions in dance, and it became more like a stage art and lost a lot of the darkness in itself.

- I have teach people to dance here for 25 years, and I like it.

Four of my students here are now working with folk dance and folk music full time.

So this has also been education.

I think it's very important to young people to dance, I think it's the best way of being together and form their own person, and feel safe amongst other people.

Dancing is the best.

Both the dancers give impulses to the music and the musician gave impulses to the dancer.

Things happen just in the moment.

It makes it much better for the dancer, more exciting.

- There are lot of expressions of that, of the music and the dance that goes with it, it hasn't been you know fulfilled.

We haven't seen it all.

I think the music is a mirror of how the community was during war and their time off after nights and days gone and there's nothing to do but play some music and have some fun.

You can hear from the different valleys the heart of the people and how they were in their music.

(birds chirp) - The instrument originally came from Hardanger in a place called Jaastad, it was a fiddle maker there called Ole Jonsen Jaastad.

And the oldest existing Hardanger fiddle we know of was built here in 1651.

So research today say that probably it was a combination of the already existing string instrument in the area, and then when the classical violin came, this mix of instruments came to be the Hardanger fiddle.

And it's changed a lot, if you see different models, you will see that it's had these different periods very often influenced by how the classical violin changed.

(slow fiddle music) - This is cheap carbon bow, not wood, and the tone is better with a real bow I think.

(slow fiddle music) I have made 42 instruments now, Hardanger fiddles, two or three violins, I think.

It's going to have a more red color in the varnish afterwards so we can get a normal color I think.

It's very yellow now, but I started to decorate the edges and do double lines and something freehand down there.

Next I will decorate the ribs.

I use a deep pen and lay down the instrument on the table and rest the arms very well, and you just dip in there and then you draw with free hand, a lot of it.

The Hardanger Fiddle makers also look to violin making but we also try to be very traditional.

You see old instruments you want to cope with them and you see older instruments that the curvature is more like the violin.

Maybe I tried to find something between those two and the sound will change because of these things.

(light upbeat music) (bumblebees buzz) - You can feel the landscape and the life, the hard life working on the farm keeping it in the family to get the food, to get income.

You can feel that in the sound from the Hardanger fiddle, also it has a melancholy, and also a strength, and a party sound also.

- [Olav] We are meeting Ottar Kasa.

He is also one of the top fiddlers in Norway.

(upbeat fiddle music) He is also one of the top fiddle makers.

If you can buy a fiddle from him, you should be quite sure that it was tested by one of the best.

- I try to make every fiddle a little bit different, it takes a kind of lifetime-long learning process.

I think it's very important not to be too satisfied with your own work, you always need to strive for something better.

(upbeat fiddle music) I think the Hardanger fiddle is decorated in a way that many people decorate their houses and their furniture, with the paintings on the furniture.

This became the Hardanger fiddle's mark, so it's some kind of, probably a way of showing off.

It's very hard to understand economically why they wanted to put several weeks on just decorations on an instrument, so it has to be very important part of that culture.

(fiddle music) - Here I made a finger board from buffalo horn, used to be a huge horn, and then I cut it into thin splices, and then I glued it on top of spruce and then it's, so this is part of the buffalo horn, and then I put in small pieces of bone so it's a lot of work to put it very nicely in here.

And then in the old days they used goat horn but I found buffalo horn to be easier because it's bigger and then you can tap it to hear the sound.

The lower the sound the thinner the plate, so if the tone is very high you just thin it.

You can have several tones also in the plates so you have to maybe tune these different tones into a kind of harmony, and the difficult thing about the Hardanger fiddle is the sound holes, because they are in two levels, so you have to work both inside and outside at the same time to get it done.

And when I've made the whole body of the instrument I can make the neck.

You have to draw the decorations in the varnish and then you have all the small details like the tuning pegs, and the finger boards with the mother of pearl, and small subtle, and a lot of different things that has to be put in the right place.

Like the sound post on the bridge, then you can start playing, then you probably have to change something, maybe it doesn't behave the way you thought so it's taken maybe 250, 300 hours, or around that time I think.

(somber fiddle music) - For a long time it was banned from playing in churches, but the church is the best place for me.

(laughs) It was considered for a period to be the devil's instrument.

We don't know for sure the reason why it was banned but one of the theories is because the traditional instrument was used in weddings and dances and of course there was a lot of alcohol and during the 1800s it was a huge problem in most parts of Norway actually.

(somber fiddle music) The Protestant culture, it's strict.

It has this humble way of being, that are encouraged.

If you are too much or talk too much, it's just too much for many Norwegians.

That is a part of our culture that has affected us in some way.

That combined, and I wish I could say it better in English, but it's called janteloven, it's this law that has different rules, and rule number one is that you are not supposed to think you are something.

That also effects the Norwegians.

You're not supposed to say when you're doing something good, someone else has to say it for you, or read about.

It's not good for the arts.

It's so opposite from being expressive and talented.

It's not easy to find this balance between staying true to yourself and letting go to shine and really let people see you.

- I maybe challenged the traditional a bit more, recording albums with some of the oldest instruments we have.

Using the old strings and the old bow that are much rounder.

Some people think that they have kept the values correctly and that you shouldn't do it this way, and that you are doing it wrong, but in my opinion it's what making the folk music alive a little has always been like that, you can't conserve folk music, it wouldn't be folk music if it's conserved, you can't put it in a museum and just say that it's going to be played like this for the next 1,000 years.

You wouldn't have any people doing it.

(introspective music) It's just in 1905 that Norway became its own country, I guess that's a little bit why we also really want to keep our old traditions and culture, and show that we're a little bit proud of the arts and crafts and the music.

We haven't been really our own country for a long time.

- Maybe we don't go so much to concerts as French or German people would do, or have that deep culture as those countries do, but we go hiking, we go out to nature, and I find much of the similarities when I'm in nature myself as I play music.

- Some red berries there.

- As a carrier of tradition in Norway I think it's real interesting to learn the knowledge from the elders of how to use everything on the tree for example.

How to use the skin of the tree or the core of the tree in different ways.

The dancing is a natural part of that traditional using of nature.

The way the people pass on the dance tradition is so much related to the knowledge about nature also.

If you take away that culture you take away a lot of other kind of knowledge as well.

For me it was kind of a statement that dance is universal, it's not just a cliche.

(waterfall roars) - I think in general many Norwegians have a complex with our own culture, that it's not rich enough or deep enough.

We are very proud of our nature, but when it comes to our culture, we have more problems being proud of it, and that of course affects how we represent it.

That also affects how people are connected to it or not.

How much people know about it, and many Norwegians don't know much about Hardanger fiddle or have a relationship to it.

- Norway for example is such a small country and it's only about five, six million people here, people live very spread around in the country, and the folk music scene is quite small, all of that makes it very hard.

You can't tour all the year in Norway just playing folk music.

- Almost all of my job is to teach youngsters to play Hardanger fiddle and dance halling.

It's like going into the future but being very aware of your past, and bringing the past with you.

We travel abroad and have classes both in the states and in Great Britain and we go to festivals and show our tradition.

We think it's important to keep it alive, not only as proof of what has been, but as a live music and dance tradition.

- When I learned this instrument, I also realized that I was playing music that people from the same area was playing maybe two or 300 years before me.

I think you need to know everything around the music to also fully understand the music, to know the history, who played it, where they lived, what was the scenery of where they lived, and so on.

It gives you a feeling of connection to the history in a very deep way.

While I was so lucky myself to have a teacher that still is very generous with the music, for me it's the same, I want to be the same, I want to pass it on.

It's a part of being a fiddle player, you learn the music and you pass it on.

What I hope for the future of course is that the instrument will continue to be played, to be performed, spread to more listeners around the world.

It has huge potential.

- It is not good because it's old, but it's gotten old because it's good.

The value in the music, the life and the complexity in the music is what pushes it forward.

It's sort of this well that you can't empty.

(speaking in Norwegian) - It has been really important in these valleys to dance.

It has been the only situation where you could express yourself freely without having to put words on it.

(speaking in Norwegian) When it's quite strict on what you can say with words it's more important to dance.

I think that life would be real different without dancing.

(slow fiddle music) - There's always someone coming and changing the traditions, always some that are inventing new styles, that are setting the new bench mark.

This is a living tradition.

We could do it, we don't think about keeping a tradition alive, we do it because we like it.

For us it's not like we think that we really are keeping something alive, it's just alive for us.

(slow fiddle music) - The good thing is that the music itself is so rich, on many levels, so it gives you something to work on for the rest of your life.

But I've met so many people who haven't ever heard the music live before.

That's a challenge with this music I think, and something to really take care of for the future is that we bring it out to the people.

One thing is to record and do those important things too, but you need to go out and play to make people love it.

As I grow older and discover the history more and more around it and discover how it's connecting me to players that lived in this area hundreds of years before me, makes me very humble, and proud, and grounded.

(bird call) (water lapping against the shore)