I met Nugos Per for the first time in 1970 or 1971. I can't tell the exact year of his birth, but it must be around 1888, because he was around 83 years old by then, if I'm not completely mistaken.

He lived in the little village of Heden in Nås, West Dalarna. He was very poor and lived in a small cabin without electricity.

When I met him he didn't have a fiddle. Someone had taken it from him, thinking it was too valuable for an insignificant person like Per. I brought my fiddle to him as I visited him several times and he was eager to try it, although he had trouble playing because of his rheumatism.

He had a special way of tuning the fiddle. He didn't use any reference pitch at all, like a tuning fork, but tried the resistance of the strings to his fingertips while he was listening to the sound. The result was always that he found a pitch that was about one and a half steps lower than standard pitch.

He didn't approve at all of steel strings. He used the expression "the proper strings" for plain gut strings, and in that way he influenced me to try them too. He talked enthusiastically about an e-string he had once owned, which had lasted a whole year; and said that in the old days gut strings were made locally in Vansbro near Nås. Not only sheep gut was used but also cow gut.

It was rather difficult to hear from his fiddle playing what he wanted to bring out because of his trembling hands, but I soon found out that he also sang his tunes. After he had played a tune I asked him to sing it and in this way I also discovered that he varied his tunes to an astonishing degree, more than anyone else I've heard in Swedish folk music. If I asked him to repeat a tune, as if I hadn't quite got it, it often came out differently next time. This was more evident for walking tunes (marches) than for polskas or waltzes. The most fascinating thing was that he regularly used varying lengths of the same phrases in a tune when repeating it. A phrase which was rather long one time could be cut off to half its length next time, and the corresponding phrases didn't always have the same end note. I think Nugos Per's variation technique would be worth an academic dissertation, that's how important it really is.

Anders Rosén

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