Trommeslåtter med ujevne taktarter - et tolkningsforsøk

Sammendrag

Music performed on the military field drum is an integral part of Norwegian folk music. The musical material consists of patterns deriving from military drum signals and of rhythmic patterns from traditional fiddle music. The drum tradition from the Norwegian west coast was on its heights around 1850. Be-tween 1910-35 Johannes Sundvor (1871-1941) travelled around documenting what was left of the tradition. Sundvor was a trained military musician, playing both drum and bugle, and was proficient in musical notation. In some of the manuscripts he left behind, one finds drum tunes notated in time signatures, which either are very uncommon or non-existent in Norwegian traditional music, such as 5/8, 7/8, 9/8, and 10/8. In the 1990-ies and onwards, several attempts were made to interpret these time signatures. Participants in these de-bates were mainly professional percussionists, and focus were more or less on finding a correct way of drum sticking the notated rhythms in relation to the on-going drum roll, which serves as the drone. This article is an attempt to in-terpret these rhythmical patterns in relation to how Norwegian traditional music for other instruments such as fiddle and Hardanger fiddle is notated. May these ways of notation shed light on the notational manner that Sundvor utilized when he documented the Norwegian drum music?