Spaelimenninir

TITLE: Spaelimenninir: Music and Stories from Scandinavia

SPEAKER: Diane Kresh, Spælimenninir  
EVENT DATE: 2003/10/23
RUNNING TIME: 64 minutes

DESCRIPTION:

From Viking history to Lapland landscape a dynamic presentation of Nordic music and culture. Explore the oral traditions and the collections of indigenous cultural expressions. Based in the Faeroe Islands between Iceland and Norway, Spaelimenninir ("the folk musicians") -- a native Faeroese, a Swede, two Americans, and two Danes -- will perform traditional and contemporary folk music and song from Scandinavia.

Speaker Biography: Diane Kresh has been the director of libraries in Arlington, Virginia since April 2006 after a 31-year career at the Library of Congress. While at the Library of Congress, Kresh was a senior-level library administrator, director of the Veterans History Project, director of public service collections and director of preservation, and is editor of "The Whole Digital Library Handbook."

Speaker Biography: Spælimenninir (“the folk musicians”) is a lively group of six musicians that play traditional and contemporary folk music from Scandinavia on fiddle, recorder, piano, guitar, mandolin and acoustic bass and vocals. The group's home base is the Faroe Islands in the far North Atlantic, a small cluster of islands located between Iceland, Norway and Scotland. While they are based in the Faroes, Spælimenninir is not strictly a “Faroese” band, either in personnel or music. Playing together for over 20 years, the line-up includes one native Faroese, one Swede, two Americans and two Danes. This international collaboration has resulted in a varied repertoire which reflects each member's heritage and illustrates the links between the music traditions of the Scandinavian countries and the United States. Spælimenninir has toured widely in Denmark, Sweden, Orkney, Shetland, Scotland, France, Finland and the United States playing at folk festivals, dances, clubs, and concerts and conducting educational programs in schools and universities. In the U.S., they have made several appearances on the nationally broadcast radio show “A Prairie Home Companion,” produced by Minnesota Public Radio and were featured performers at the Eisteddfod Folk Festival in Massachusetts, USA.

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SERIES: Library Live