Listeners’ guide: A whole album of nothing but solo flute tunes? Isn’t that appealing to a pretty niche audience? Well, yes, it’s certainly aimed at them
– but there’s plenty to interest other listeners too. For example, all you people who find a whole album of nothing but fiddle tunes a bit hard going. After all, flutes are much easier on the ear than most fiddles. And of course, you can always use these tunes to spice up playlists of other music!
This year it will be 40 years since Per Midtstigen first gave me a flute he called a sjøfløyte (lit. sea flute). It looked to me like a relatively normal alto recorder, but had a different sound, with an unpolished tone and was tuned slightly differently than the ‘normal’ recorders I already had (indeed a classical recorder player would say it was “wrongly” tuned).
The point about this flute was that – unlike other recorders – it had the status of being a Norwegian traditional music instrument.
Nowadays the sjøfløyte as a traditional instru- ment is most closely associated with Numedal, since Hellik Stuvstad and Knut Juveli, the two oldest – and most important – sources of record- ed tunes came from there. Moreover, many of the flutes still in use were made by Nils Stuvstad, Hellik’s brother, who was making them up until 1980.
I’ve included one tune from Hellik Stuvstad on this album. Other than a couple of self- penned tunes, the rest of the repertoire is drawn from Norwegian traditions and includes many Hardanger fiddle tunes I’ve adapted for the sjøfløyte.
But is it so obvious that the sjøfløyte is a Norwegian traditional instrument? After all, the fact is that, other than the flutes made in Norwegian villages, many were imported from factories in Germany and Holland. They were quite obvi- ously produced as ‘recorders’ and only became ‘sjøfløyter’ when they started to be used in Norway, long after they had been made. So the instrument itself can hardly be said to be especially ‘Norwegian’ – any more than the Jew’s harp or violin can be said to be especially and uniquely Norwegian instruments. Nonetheless, all of them work well as instruments for playing Norwegian traditional music – and Swedish, Danish, Finnish, or Bulgarian traditional music for that matter...
How important is it whether the sjøfløyte is Norwegian – and if so, in what respect? When Per introduced me to it back in the 1970s I was excited about the idea of a ‘Norwegian recorder’ with an associated playing tradition. Today the “Norwegian” aspect of this project doesn’t feel as important to me as it did in those days. It’s tempting to quote Jan-Petter Blom (to the best of my recollection):
“When we dance the springar, we generally do it for fun. We don’t spend the whole time jumping up and down just to say: “I’m Norwegian, I’m Norwegian, I’m Norwegian”.

"Tunes for sjøfløyte" sheet music is included as well.