Music and Spring

"Here comes the sun

    Here comes the sun".

Remember that happy song from the Beatles?

If you’re lucky, you might remember checking the long counters of vinyl recordings of 78 RPMs, or  33 1/3s, and shopping the latest pop-tunes on a 45 RPM to find the latest “Hit Parade” tune on one side  while

the flip side featured a never-heard filler tune. Collectors can still find these in thrift stores and playable if  they can find a needle  for the  turntable!. Currently, our youth have earbuds full of sounds as  their eyes stare downward, glued to a tiny screen.
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 Ordered from our home computers, sources such as Itunes are making music stores obsolete.

One of these digital services is Spotify, developed in 2006 in Stockholm, Sweden.and launched  October

7th, 2008. While free accounts remained available by invitation to manage the growth of the service, later subscriptions were opened to everyone.On January, in 2010, Symantec's antivirus software determined that Spotify was a Trojan horse, disabling the software for millions of computers. However, one month later, Spotify was reinstated and evolved to the point of becoming one of the world's largest music markets. To this day, music-lovers are using sources such as Google Play, Pandora as well as Spotify to enjoy their music.

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Music has always been a part of country celebrations of weddings, dances and folksongs.

The Halling was an early folk dance traditionally performed in rural Norway, with some versions of the 
dance also found in parts of Sweden. It has been documented as the oldest folk dance in Northern Europe.

The dance was traditionally performed by men at weddings and other solemn ceremonies. The Halling is a dance known today as a rhythmic acrobatic dance that requires a lot of strength. Sons of Norway features a touring Stoughton, Wisconsin High School dance team known by their program of Scandinavian dance. One of their highlight feature is a tall young man circling a hat held high on a pole. Leaping into the air, one leg is extended and his foot kicks the hat into the air. The ‘halling’ is a solo male dance described as “something bearish” as it develops into furious action we might see in a Russian Cossock dance, or our breakdancers.

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On the calmer side, composers such as Edvard Grieg have made Norway music internationally known.Modern music in Scandinavia has continued to thrive in various forms. Norway is famous for a variety of musical concerts and  musical events.

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Thousands of spectators attended a recent concert by  Karpe Diem, a well-known Norwegian rap  group. While the concert was being enjoyed, a young fan apparently got carried away. In a bizarre event in this Bergen, Norway youth concert, a twenty-eight-year-old man , who wasn’t in the audience but had back-stage access, grabbed a fire-extinguisher and sprayed several in the audience resulting with respiratory illnesses, damaging band equipment before he was arrested. Music is enjoyed in many ways.

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Justin Bieber is extremely popular in Norway, with some schools even having rescheduled exams in the past so their students could attend his concerts.

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  In another music genre, Oslo, Norway is known as the City of Music.Every March since 2001, a music festival known as The Oslo International Church Music Festival has been held featuring several concerts in   some of the city's most beautiful churches .

Heard in concert are cantatas by G. F. Händel, Telemann, Bach, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's Elijah, and the list goes on .The festival has since 2001 presented choirs, ensembles, orchestras and soloists of the highest class.

 The people of Oslo love music and they  love going to concerts. Audiences fill both large venues and small basement clubs any day of the week, all year round as spring brings out the music in Norwegians. With the Easter celebrations approaching, church choirs are busy getting ready for the celebration. Easter is, of course, a religious highlight of the year , but the churches have a problem.

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Norwegian chuches are apparently in need of 
pastors. Norway is not known to be a highly-religious country with Easter popular as a secular  holiday rather than religious while Christmas remains the high point of the spiritual year.

 There is a    shortage of pastors. Even though few people are

coming to services, there is a need for church officials to conduct  weddings, funerals, and other church-related events.NOK (Norwegian Broadcasting) has reported that many Norwegian pastors are reaching retirement age and too few young Norwegians are studying for a career as a pastor. “We’ve had to advertise vacant positions and are struggling to find applicants for the vacancies” Trond Glimsdal of one diocese told NRK. This situation exists all over the country and personnel chiefs from Norway’s eleven dioceses recently met to discuss the need to fill

existing vacant church positions as well as those needed to replace retiring pastors . Consolidation of congregations is often impossible due to the large separation of communities. There are openings and opportunities for those wishing to study for a pastoral position in Norway, so here’s your chance.. Easter will soon be here.
               Easter and spring.

                                          Let the music begin.