Swedish bagpipes

Swedish bagpipes (säckpipa, Swedish: svensk säckpipa, or dråmba, koppe, posu, or bälgpipa) are a variety of bagpipes from Sweden. The term itself generically translates to "bagpipes" in Swedish, but is used in English to describe the specifically Swedish bagpipe from the Dalarna region.

History

Medieval paintings in churches suggest that the instrument was spread all over Sweden. The instrument was practically extinct by the middle of the 20th century; the instrument that today is referred to as Swedish bagpipes is a construction based on instruments from the western parts of the district called Dalarna, the only region of Sweden where the bagpipe tradition survived into the 20th century.

Revival

In late 1930s, the ethnologist Mats Rehnberg found some bagpipes in the collections of the museum Nordiska museet, and he wrote a thesis on the subject. Rehnberg managed to find the last carrier of Swedish bagpipe tradition, Gudmunds Nils Larsson in the village Dala-Järna. Rehnberg visited Larsson together with a music teacher, Ture Gudmundsson, who managed to reconstruct an instrument, with which Ture later played and recorded two tunes for the national publicly funded radio broadcaster Sveriges Radio.

During the following decades only a few instruments were made, until 1981 when woodworker Leif Eriksson (pipemaker) started to manufacture a model of bagpipes that he himself had developed, and the folk fiddler Per Gudmundson learned to play it. Eriksson's bagpipes was a compromise between the roughly ten different instruments held in museums, and he made some slight modifications to make the instruments better suited for playing with other instruments such as the fiddle.

Today there are several Swedish folk music groups that include the bag pipes in their setting, such as Hedningarna, Svanevit and Dråm (the two latter involving Erik Ask-Upmark and Anna Rynefors).