Harp Songs of the Midnight Sun opens with “Folksong,” and the title’s plainness is almost deceptive. Aryeh Frankfurter does not begin with a grand overture announcing Scandinavia through thunder, mountains and heroic myth. He begins with melody itself, carried by harp in a setting whose calm surface contains far more arrangement than it initially reveals. Notes ring, overlap and recede while other instruments enter so naturally that the piece seems to widen from within. The effect is intimate, but not small. Frankfurter turns the opening tune into a landscape without forcing it to pose as one.
Released in 1998 on his own Lionharp Music label, the album was Frankfurter’s fourth CD and an early attempt to place the Celtic folk harp inside Nordic traditional music. That combination is the record’s central experiment. The harp arrives with associations formed through Irish and Scottish repertoire, but most of the material comes from Sweden and Norway, where fiddle traditions, regional dances and sharply profiled melodies developed through different instrumental bodies. Frankfurter does not pretend the harp has always occupied the center of these tunes. He asks what happens when its resonance, sustain and delicacy are used to carry music more commonly associated with bowed strings.
“The Morning Dew” gives the experiment room to breathe. At more than five minutes, it unfolds slowly enough for the harp’s decay to become part of the rhythm. Frankfurter avoids filling every space. One phrase hangs in the air while another instrument enters beneath it, creating the sensation of mist lifting without the arrangement resorting to obvious environmental effects. The title encourages visual association, but the music earns the image through pacing rather than decoration.
The album is entirely arranged and performed by Frankfurter, which makes its ensemble sound especially striking. Harp, bowed strings and other acoustic colors appear to converse as though several musicians had gathered around the same material. Yet every response, counterline and shift in texture comes from one arranger imagining the full room. The multitracking never feels like a technical stunt. It serves the tunes by giving them companions.
“The Water Lily” is especially graceful, but its beauty is not weightless. The melody floats above the accompaniment while lower notes provide a dark reflection beneath it. Frankfurter understands that a harp can become overly decorative when every gesture emphasizes shimmer. Here he allows bass strings and slower harmonic movement to give the instrument depth. The flower remains on the surface, but the water below it is cold and substantial.
“Spring Waltz” introduces motion with a three-beat rhythm that seems to turn rather than march. Frankfurter does not push the dance toward ballroom polish. The pulse remains flexible, with slight emphasis changes making the melody feel guided by bodies rather than a metronome. Harp arpeggios can easily make a waltz sound overly sweet, but the arrangement preserves a rustic unevenness around the tune. Spring appears as thaw and movement, not pastel decoration.
“Halling after Ola Mosafinn” changes the album’s physical character. The Norwegian halling is a vigorous dance tradition, often associated with athletic male performance and sharply articulated rhythm. Moving that energy onto harp could have weakened it, but Frankfurter treats the instrument percussively as well as melodically. Notes strike and release with greater attack, while accompanying parts establish the ground required for the dance to remain bodily.
This is one of the album’s recurring achievements. Frankfurter does not force every regional tune into the same gentle harp atmosphere. The instrument changes posture according to the material. Waltzes rotate, hallings stamp, marches advance and polskas lean into their distinctive rhythmic asymmetry. The record remains coherent because his touch and arranging sensibility unify it, not because every piece has been softened into one mood.
The paired waltzes after Pål Karl Persson and Sven Anders Andersson demonstrate how closely related forms can retain separate personalities. One melody gives way to the next without sounding like a random medley. The first establishes a set of emotional expectations, then the second alters the light. Frankfurter’s counterlines help define the transition, allowing the tunes to recognize each other without merging completely.
“The Death of Madam Flod” carries one of the album’s most dramatic titles, and the arrangement accepts the gravity without turning into theatrical mourning. The melody moves with solemn patience, surrounded by darker string color and low harp resonance. Frankfurter lets sadness emerge from repetition and contour. No instrument begs for attention. The piece feels less like a staged funeral than a tune remembered after the person named in it has passed beyond explanation.
That restraint protects the album from slipping into fantasy-soundtrack excess. The music can suggest forests, snow, old houses and distant stories, but Frankfurter remains loyal to the tunes as dances, marches and songs. He does not bury them beneath cinematic atmosphere. When the arrangements become broad, the melody still leads.
“March from a Farm in Nåvårsetra” carries place directly in its title. The march does not sound military in the modern sense. Its forward movement feels connected to local procession, work and communal occasion. Frankfurter gives the rhythm firmness while preserving warmth, allowing the piece to advance without becoming rigid. The farm remains present not through field recording but through the tune’s practical stride.
“Polska after Pelle Petersson” brings Swedish rhythmic character into sharper focus. The polska’s triple meter is not the evenly balanced turn of a conventional waltz. Its accents can lean, hesitate and propel the dancer through a more complex cycle. Frankfurter handles that instability carefully. The harp articulates the pattern without flattening it, while the surrounding instruments emphasize the tune’s crooked elegance.
“Bridal March from Dalby” is ceremonial but not pompous. The melody carries dignity through repetition, suggesting a community recognizing a transition rather than an audience watching a spectacle. Frankfurter’s arrangement adds breadth gradually, allowing the procession to gather people as it moves. The harp supplies radiance, but the lower instruments keep the ceremony connected to earth and footsteps.
“Northfjord Halling,” the album’s longest dance piece, gives the arrangement space to develop beyond a single statement of the melody. Frankfurter adds layers, removes them and returns with altered emphasis, making the performance feel like sustained physical movement. The music has energy without speed becoming its only measure. Strength appears through endurance and rhythmic certainty.
The “Mocksand Tunes” bring several melodies into close contact, displaying Frankfurter’s skill at arranging sequence. He does not simply place one tune after another. Transitions become part of the composition, with the ending of one phrase preparing the tonal and rhythmic entrance of the next. The medley form resembles travel through neighboring villages where related musical dialects change by degrees.
“Bagpipe Tune from Norra Råda” presents another instrumental translation. A melody shaped by the continuous tone and drone relationships of bagpipe music must behave differently on a plucked instrument whose notes naturally decay. Frankfurter solves the problem through resonance, repeated patterns and sustained accompanying instruments. He does not imitate the bagpipe literally. He reconstructs the pressure and circularity that make the tune feel driven by air.
“A Little Child” turns inward again. The arrangement becomes especially tender, but Frankfurter avoids childish ornament or sentimental fragility. The melody is treated with seriousness, recognizing that music associated with childhood often carries the adult listener’s awareness of time. Harp notes appear exposed and clear, each one allowed to vanish fully before memory supplies the next.
The closing “Samhradh Samhradh/Farewell to Ireland” shifts the record westward. After an album dominated by Swedish and Norwegian material, the Irish tune introduces the harp’s more familiar cultural territory. Yet it no longer sounds like a return to normal. The preceding hour has changed the instrument. Frankfurter brings Nordic weight, pacing and arrangement into the Irish material, making the ending feel like a traveler arriving home with a different ear.
“Farewell to Ireland” is an appropriate final gesture because the entire album concerns movement between traditions. The Celtic harp travels north, learns new rhythmic languages and returns without claiming ownership over them. Frankfurter’s performance is interpretive rather than archaeological. He transcribes rigorously, but he also understands that a tune survives by entering new hands.
The album’s nearly sixty-nine-minute length allows that process to feel substantial. This is not a short sampler of pretty Scandinavian melodies. It is a fully developed argument for the harp as an instrument capable of carrying regional dance rhythm, tragedy, ceremony and landscape without reducing them to one soft-focus atmosphere.
Frankfurter’s great strength is arrangement. His playing is technically assured, but technique remains in service to balance. Nothing appears merely because another instrument was available. Countermelodies enter where the tune can support them. Bass lines strengthen motion. Bowed textures extend notes the harp cannot hold indefinitely. Silence prevents richness from becoming clutter.
Harp Songs of the Midnight Sun is gentle, but gentleness is not the same as passivity. Beneath its polished surfaces are dances, funerals, weddings, farms and melodies transmitted through named players. Frankfurter gives them room, color and new resonance while preserving the irregular bones inside them.
The midnight sun in the title captures the album’s emotional light. It is brightness existing where darkness would normally be expected, beautiful partly because it unsettles ordinary time. Frankfurter’s arrangements behave similarly. The harp sounds familiar, yet the music passing through it changes its identity. The instrument glows, the old tunes keep their shadows, and the entire record seems to remain awake long after the day should have ended.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.