BETHANY STUDENT RESEARCHES MUSIC IN SWEDEN

LINDSBORG, Kan.—Bethany College student Benjamin Lagerberg-Teitelbaum is spending his summer in Sweden researching how culture affects music.

            Lagerberg-Teitelbaum, Castle Rock, Colo., will meet with Sven Ahlbäck, a folk-music professor at the Swedish Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, to discuss Ahlbäck’s system of musical analysis.

            Lagerberg-Teitelbaum’s self-designed summer project is the first comprehensive study of this system.  By comparing how the system understands, or “hears,” a melody, and how people from different cultures hear the same melody, Ahlbäck and Lagerberg-Teitelbaum hope to discern how a person’s culture affects how that person understands music.

            Also this summer, Lagerberg-Teitelbaum will interview noted musicologist Hans Eppstein, 95, a German Jew who fled to Sweden just before World War II.

            “There are fewer and fewer living Jews who experienced WWII Germany first hand, so I take seriously the opportunity to meet Eppstein, as well as the resulting responsibility to record and share his story with others,” Lagerberg-Teitelbaum said.

            Lagerberg-Teitelbaum plans to contribute his research to a database at Brown University and write an article on his findings.

            Lagerberg-Teitelbaum has conducted several studies of music and culture, a field also known as ethnomusicology.  In April, he presented the lecture “Status Through Detail: High Art and Music Notation in the Swedish Folk Music Genre” at the Conference of the Midwestern Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology at Ohio State University.  His was the only undergraduate presentation accepted, and is now on the waiting list for the national conference.

            At Bethany, Lagerberg-Teitelbaum is a member of the Honors Program and the first nyckelharpa performance major in North America.

            He plays the nyckelharpa, a keyed string instrument traditional in Swedish folk music, in the Swedish folk trio Bjärv.  The group recently released a new recording and will tour Sweden, Norway and the United States this summer.

            Lagerberg-Teitelbaum was elected this spring to the board of directors of the American Nyckelharpa Association, the largest Swedish folk music association in America and Europe.

            Lagerberg-Teitelbaum has studied at the Eric Sahlström Institute in Tobo, Sweden; Metropolitan State College, Denver, Colo.; and the Swedish Royal Conservatory of Music, Stockholm.  In addition he has worked as an intern at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.

Bethany College, established by Swedish Lutheran immigrants in 1881, is a college of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The mission of Bethany College is to nurture and challenge individuals in their search for truth and meaning as they lead lives of faith, learning and service.

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