Flirttiä vai alistamista? : Dialoginen analyysi Carita Holmströmin Södergran-lauluista

Abstract

In this article I analyse the relationship between music and text in Carita Holmström’s song cycle Dagen svalnar – fyra sånger till dikter av Edith ­Södergran (1977). The analysis is based on my experiences of performing and rehearsing the song cycle as a pianist together with two singers, Milla Mäkinen and Marika Kivinen, over several years, and it focuses on our interpretations of the songs and the dialogical relationships between us, the music, and the song texts. To delve into these dialogues I use a combination of performer’s analysis, dialogic analysis (Moisala 2001), and descriptive analysis (Guck 1994). With these tools I examine the relationship between music and text in the Dagen svalnar ­cycle from four different perspectives: (1) the music supports the text, (2) the music contradicts the text, (3) the music brings a new viewpoint to the text, and (4) how the order of the texts, changed by the composer, affects the interpretation of the cycle.

I argue that descriptive analysis is a useful tool in writing out performers’ experiences, which can be difficult to access through more formal methods of analysis. My article makes the performers’ intuitive knowledge visible and describes the collective interpretative process. The dialogical analysis brings to light how our interpretations and the text-music relationship align: In the songs “Jag såg min herre” and “Dagen svalnar”, where the music supports the text, our interpretations are very similar, whereas in “Du kastade din kärleksröda ros”, where the music seems to contradict the text, also our views differ the most, from flirtation to possible rape. One of my goals in this article was to refer as much as possible to research done by women, which proved most difficult in the fields of Finnish music history and song analysis.