I was hearing sounds that I couldn’t identify, but this didn’t entirely surprise me.

I was standing in the garden at Läckö Castle, on Lake Värnen near Lidköping,  in West Sweden. I’d just gotten off from the red eye flight from the United States and I was in that jet-lagged, grainy-eyed, brain-riddled-with-bird-shot place where even ordinary things don’t make sense. It was a struggle to get my bearings, standing under a porcelain blue sky in the shadow of largest medieval castle in the Sweden. I was at a reception, in fact, so I attempted to make sensible conversation while I balanced a glass of white wine and a bowl of soup just made from long green beans plucked from the vines crawling up the garden wall.

And then came the sound. It was a disembodied female voice, coming from somewhere just out of sight.  It was something between singing and shouting, urgent, slightly mournful, wordless, melodic and quite loud. After a while, I was introduced to the source of the sounds, a woman in jeans and a windbreaker named Moa Brynell, with a wide open face, and blue eyes and a halo of wisps of platinum hair.

She explained that she was calling to the cows   — performing herding songs called kulning.  It’s a form of Scandinavian folk music, used not only to summon the herd from the pasture, but also to scare off predators. (Men sing kulning sometimes, but it’s mostly a women’s type of song.)  Moa offered to give me an impromptu lesson. She said it was useful to know how to use your voice as a tool — to scare off wolves, or any other creature on two or four legs that might threaten.

We walked up to the castle’s  stone-paved castle courtyard, and I could see why Moa had selected this for our lesson – terrific acoustics. She explained that we must relax our throats, that screaming, as opposed to singing constricts the throat and tires the voice quickly.  We took a wide stance and started.

Pooooooooooooooooooow!

She had us hit a tone that was somewhere in the mid-to-upper part of my range, which i held until I was almost but not quite out of breath.

“You don’t feel it in your throat?” Moa asked me. And when I said no — I was trying to start the sound in my stomach –  she was pleased.

Sih-coooooooooooooooooow!

We repeated this a few times — I laughingat the end of each of my calls from the sheer pleasure of releasing so much sound after such a long journey — and we went on,  until one of the enormous castle doors pushed open, revealing a young woman who looked much amused by the sound and the spectacle. The last tour of the day was going through the castle, and she asked us to stop for a few minutes –  and our beginner’s cow calling wasn’t a welcome soundtrack.

We walked back to the garden. Moa explained that she used to use a version of these calls to find her children when they were shopping, in a mall.  She demonstrated a very melodic call that lasted about three minutes.  “When they hear that, they know to come right away,” she said. I asked whether her children answered with a similar call, and she said no, they came quickly and quietly, as they were embarrassed.

Moa is quite known as a Swedish folksinger with several CDs, one of which she gave me, as well as an invitation to attend one of her kulning workshops – she was offering one the next weekend at Govinda, a vegetarian restaurant in Gothenburg. I’d already committed to be elsewhere, but the next time I’m back in Scandinavia, I certainly intend to take up my kulning studies again.

Related posts:

1. A Wimp Out West
2. Another view of the American West
3. Ian Tyson: songs of the Rocky Mountain West
4. Bangkok Calling

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 3:49 am and is filed under Alison projects, Europe travel, world music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.