Over the past 25 years, Icelandic music has been gaining considerable international attention. This is attested to by the international success of such acts as the Sugarcubes, and then Björk as a solo artist, followed by the worldwide success of Sigur Rós, and more recently Of Monsters and Men. And these artists reveal themselves to be ‘the tip of the iceberg’, once one delves further into the music of Iceland and the myriad of genres that thrive there. That such a small country can produce so much music of quality, value and acclaim is a fascinating situation that has boosted Icelandic tourism and made the country the ‘hippest’ place in the world. This is a book of wide-ranging essays on different aspects of Icelandic music, from the ancient traditional chants of rímur to the large output of classical music by nationalist composer Jón Leifs and others, to the plethora of Icelandic rock and pop groups that have already made an impact on the world as well as more idiosyncratic and genre-bending musicians now emerging from the Reykjavik music scene.

Over the past 25 years, Icelandic music has been gaining considerable international attention. This is attested to by the international success of such acts as the Sugarcubes, and then Björk as a solo artist, followed by the worldwide success of Sigur Rós, and more recently Of Monsters and Men. And these artists reveal themselves to be ‘the tip of the iceberg’, once one delves further into the music of Iceland and the myriad of genres that are thrive there. That such a small country can produce so much music of quality, value and acclaim is a fascinating situation that has boosted Icelandic tourism and made the country the ‘hippest’ place in the world. This is a book of wide-ranging essays on different aspects of Icelandic music, from the ancient traditional chants of rímur to the large output of classical music by nationalist composer Jón Leifs and others, to the plethora of Icelandic rock and pop groups that have already made an impact on the world as well as more idiosyncratic and genre-bending musicians now emerging from the Reykjavik music scene.

In this chapter we examine the institutionalization of continental style symphonic music as coterminous with the late 19th and early 20th century Icelandic independence movement. We argue that while Icelandic literature and the Icelandic language were heralded at the time for their supposed purity and ancient roots, local musical practices were more often seen as barbaric. At the center of this research is the 1930 Alþingishátið (Parliament Festival), an event viewed by many at the time as a prime opportunity for the burgeoning Icelandic nation to present itself as a viable and modern nation-state. We analyze documents and correspondence related to the musical components of this event to show the priority placed on large-scale instrumental music despite the necessity to import musicians and music educators in order to present such music. Following this examination of the preparation and performances for Alþingishátið, we trace the attitudes and priorities towards music making that emerged in 1930 through to contemporary practices. Through a brief consideration of the official curriculum for music schools in Iceland as well as the recent opening of Harpa, a building that (perhaps partially) fulfills a demonstrated desire for a symphony hall in Iceland, we demonstrate that large-scale Western European instrumental music maintains a privileged position within Icelandic cultural politics despite a somewhat imported nature. We do not argue that this is a problematic situation (and generally eschew ideals of cultural purity or isolation), but instead discuss how this narrative engages with Iceland’s semi-colonial legacy and ongoing nation-building efforts. We are also careful to not view so-called classical music as isolated from other forms of music making in Iceland and conclude by discussing how this material relates to contemporary music making across boundaries of popular/classical/traditional practices. The co-authored approach to this chapter contributes a strong grounding in both anthropological and ethnomusicological methodologies and theory. This writing is based on research that the authors embarked on while working together at the University of Iceland between 2011 and 2012. We include historical source material, original interviews, and contemporary ethnographic writing.

In this chapter, I will show how the Idunn Society of Intoners and Versifiers (Kvaedamannafelagdi Idunn) influenced the old rímur tradition. Rímur are epic poems, traditionally performed by one intoner (kvaedamadur). Rímur (pl.) are regarded as part of the Icelandic literary heritage, although the melodies were transmitted orally, until the beginning of the 20th century, even if the performers often used printed books for the verses. The oldest rímur manuscript dates from 1380. Performances used to take place in the Icelandic turf houses on farms, when nearly all Icelanders lived in rural areas (90% in 1890). When the Idunn Society was founded in 1929, their main concern was to preserve the melodies known by the members, and in 1935-6 they recorded 200 rímur melodies. In their efforts to preserve the rímur tradition, the Idunn Society paradoxically caused the tradition to change in many ways.

Jón Leifs (1899–1968) has in recent decades been recognized as one of Iceland’s leading composers in the twentieth century. His works are heard with increasing frequency on the international concert scene, and much of his oeuvre has now been released on CD—the Swedish label BIS has a complete series in progress. Leifs was a pivotal figure in Icelandic music history. He was the first composer to fashion a specifically ‘Icelandic’ sound derived from the elements of Icelandic folk songs, and he also drew inspiration from the country’s landscape, literature, and history. His music was met with skepticism in a local music scene still dominated by 19th-century Romanticism, and his abrasive personality won him few friends. His music remained largely neglected during his lifetime and some of his largest works remained unperformed. Research on Leifs and his works has also been scarce: a biography by the Swedish Carl-Gunnar Åhlén was published in 1999, and another by the present author in 2009 (an English version of which is forthcoming); prior to this, the only serious work on Leifs was Hjálmar H. Ragnarsson’s 1980 MFA-thesis, and even shorter articles on Leifs are scarce (the most perceptive ones are Pickard 1999 and Rickards 1992). The aim of this article is to elucidate how Leifs, at the very beginning of his career, developed his musical idiom from his exposure to the Icelandic folk traditions, and how this music drew a partly negative response from leading Icelandic composers and critics.

For a population of only 322,000 Iceland produces a surprising amount of music. In fact, it has garnered a reputation as one of the world’s most influential and prolific music-making countries. At the centre of this success is the small, compact capital Reykjavík, home not just to Björk and Sigur Rós but to a dense network of local bands, independent record labels, festivals and venues. This poses something of a puzzle to the sociologist and musicologist. How has a city of such diminutive proportions come to host such a culturally effervescent music scene? What unique properties does the city possess, how exactly do musicians in various genres collaborate and what does this tell us about the relationship between urban scale, place and the creative process? If music scenes are ‘cultural space[s] in which a range of musical practices coexist’ (Straw, 1997: 494), then at a basic level these are practices based on interacting agents who form clusters oriented to music-related activities. By this reckoning Reykjavik demonstrates scene-like qualities with strong network properties. Most of this happens in the centre of the city, in downtown Reykjavik, known by its infamous postal district 101. Reykjavík’s compact centre, its densely packed and bustling downtown area and music venues are intrinsic to the unfolding of inter-subjective musical affiliations and mutually-supportive clusters. The co-constitutive relations of music and its locale are therefore heavily dependent on the configuration of the centre of the city in that Reykjavík is more than an inert backdrop to musical practices and affiliations but actually helps to shape socio-musical connections and collectives. The chapter will draw on a mix of interviews, fieldsite visits, statistical and documentary analysis in order to explore these questions. It will attempt to ‘map’ the city’s musical networks while exploring how such networks are formed around everyday material practices and relations.

‘Everything changes in Iceland when Eurovision is on, and you don’t understand it but that’s the way it is’ (music documentary producer, 2010). Taking the above comment as a starting point, this chapter explores the place of the Eurovision Song Contest in Iceland’s musical landscape. Drawing on interviews undertaken in the capital of Reykjavik with 36 music industry workers, the chapter sets out to examine how the nation navigates and experiences a competition that is so divergent from the ‘left-field pop music’ for which Iceland is internationally renowned. To come to some understanding of why ‘everything changes in Iceland when Eurovision is on’, the chapter considers two different positions that emerged in the interviews. The first of these relates to what participation in Eurovision offers the Icelandic music industry, while the second concerns the pleasure of participation for viewers. In doing so the chapter highlights a number of ways in which Iceland’s Eurovision entries become a meaningful part of Icelandic culture and social life.

A look at the singular importance of Iceland‘s longest running “Battle of the bands” competition, Músíktilraunir (“Music Experiments”, on-going since 1982). Because of Iceland’s small population almost every Icelandic musician that has made his way in the world has had a part in the competition in his formative years as a musician, e.g. Björk, members of Sigur Rós, múm and Of Monsters and Men. This chapter looks at the sociological, cultural and musicological aspects of this unique cultural entity and its wide ranging effect on Icelandic popular music, i.e. its contribution to Iceland’s youth culture, its part in maintaining and creating music scenes (death metal, grunge, hip-hop, electro etc.), the interplay between the competition and the national radio, its role as an only outlet for young, rural bands and its overall function as an annual social hub/driving factor for the grassroots of Icelandic music. Músíktilraunir’s importance can be viewed from both a macro- and micro-social angle. It’s interesting to see how big an effect such a long running and deeply rooted cultural institution can have on such a small musical society but on a more micro sociological level it has functioned as educational institution of sorts, motivating young and aspiring musicians – most of them still at an amateur level – fortifying and creating connections and introducing them to the world of professional musicianship. Ruth Finnegan’s, Robert A. Stebbins’ and Antoine Hall’s theories about amateur musicians will prove useful in this respect as will the author’s own experience in the field; being a long serving music journalist and a member of Músíktilraunir’s jury since 1998.

This chapter focuses on a specific genre of Icelandic popular music, which can be categorised as indie rock/pop, and which within Icelandic discourse received the label ‘krútt’ (ie. cute, twee). The musicians and bands most often associated with the term include Sigur Rós, Amiina, Seabear, Emilíana Torrini, Skakkamanage, Benni Hemm Hemm, Ólöf Arnalds, Borko, Rúnk and Mugison. Even though musicians are the most prominent members of this categorisation the label has also appeared in discourse around visual arts (Proppé, 2005) and even in titles of exhibitions (‘Krútt and Lorna,’ 2013). The term first appeared in 2002 and has been attributed to the writer Gerður Kristný Guðjónsdóttir, who saw the emergence of a new group of artists who deployed cute personas and ‘publicly appeared as they still ate sand’ (Guðjónsdóttir quoted in Arnsteinsson, 2007). It seems as if the term describes not only a certain musical genre but a group of young people, then in their 20s, who had several things in common, but some see the term as describing musical and artistic practices which feel particularly ‘Icelandic’ (Proppé, 2005). A journalist for the Guardian who visited Iceland in 2008 regarded krútt as ‘eco-aware, earnest but pampered’ (McVeigh, 2008). In 2007 and 2008 the term and its definition became a controversial issue in Iceland and several articles appeared in newspapers announcing the death of krútt, either defending or contesting the term or celebrating its ideology.

Bedroom Community, formed in 2005, is a highly unusual record label. Based in Brei∂holt, which has been described as an immigrant ‘ghetto’ on the outskirts of Reykjavík, it currently involves a roster of nine musicians: Nico Muhly, Sam Amidon, Puzzle Muteson, Paul Corley, and Nadia Sirota, who all reside in the USA, two Icelanders, label founder Valgeir Sigur∂sson and composer-conductor Daniel Bjarnason, an English organist, James McVinnnie, and a transplanted Australian, Ben Frost, who moved to Iceland in 2005, after a visit to Valgeir’s studio in 2003. Eight of these musicians performed together on the same bill at a special Bedroom Community showcase at the Iceland Airwaves festival in 2012, and five of them in Reykjavík’s landmark church Hallgríminskirkja in 2013. The label’s musical identity is difficult to pinpoint, as it ranges from Frost’s noise-oriented Theory of Machines, the title track of which was included on Mary-Anne Hobbs’ 2008 UK dubstep compilation Evangeline, to weird acoustic Americana folk albums by Amidon and Muteson, classical albums by Muhly and Bjarnason, and electronica by Sigur∂sson and Corley. Bjarnason’s highly dramatic Processions involved the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the composer, along with the harp and percussion duo Harpverk, who commission works from young Icelandic composers, and recorded an album mastered by Valgeir in 2012 in Greenhouse Studios, Bedroom Community’s in-house state of the art recording studio, which has operated since 1997. Corley released his debut album, Disquiet, in 2012, dark, Eno-esque piano-specked ambient electronica, McVinnie an album of organ pieces by Nico Muhly in 2013, and violist Sirota an album of pieces by various composers including Bjarnason, Corley and Muhly, in collaboration with McVinnie, Sigur∂sson, Bjarnason and Corley . Besides being label founder and main producer, Valgeir was Björk’s main studio engineer from 1998 to 2006, and has produced recordings by other Icelandic artists such as Múm, Slowblow, rappers Quarashi and troubadour Megas, as well as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s 2006 album The Letting Go, Canadian singer Feist and English pop group the Magic Numbers. Early work on Björk’s 2004 album Medúlla was done at Greenhouse Studios, and Björk and Valgeir collaborated on the soundtrack for Lars Von Trier’s 2000 film Dancer in the Dark. This chapter examines Bedroom Community as a microscosm of the Reykjavik music scene, where genres cross and become entangled.

Rímur is a form of alliterative, chanted poetry used to perform the Icelandic sagas, which has existed in Iceland for six centuries, although it goes back to the 12th and 13th century, when Snorri’s Edda was first produced. As in many other parts of the world where traditional forms of spoken verse, poetry and rhyme have been drawn on to create hip hop, rímur has been a foundational influence on hip hop in Iceland since rappers stopped performing in English in 1998 (after Quarashi had gained some international success) and began to embrace Icelandic linguistic traditions in 2001. Traditional forms of rímur have been revived by Steindor Andersen, and in 2001 Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson instigated a project involving rímur performers, folk singers and rappers recording together. This resulted in the 2002 compilation Rímur & Rapp, which involved hip hop artists Blazroca and Baejarins bestu, along with Andersen and other more traditional exponents of rimur. Blazroca (Erpur Eyvindarson) has emerged as one of the foremost Icelandic MCs, his track ‘Reykavik-Belfast’ commenting on the protests against the government after the 2008 Icelandic economic meltdown, and his group XXX Rottweiler selling 10,000 units in 2001. He has stated ‘I feel now like part of a heritage where Steindor [Andersen] is the old school and I am the new. … rap is a kind of update of rímur, but only coincidentally … all old cultures have a way of getting stories and feelings out in a similar way as rímur, from Greenland to Africa’ (Sullivan 2003:84).

In this chapter I will explore the cultural significance of glitch aesthetics in recent Icelandic popular music, focusing especially on music by the band múm, but also including music by other well-known Icelandic acts, such as Sigur Rós and Björk. Like Nick Prior (2008), I understand glitch aesthetics as representing an experimental sub-field within the broader field of cultural production (Bourdieu) that is designed to comment critically on the mainstream. This is implicitly a position of agency, independence and outsiderness. However, more detailed scrutiny reveals how each of these categories is complicated through sonic as well as social actions and interactions, not least the question of agency, which technological mediation and a collective approach to musicking distill into something that hardly resembles heroic narratives of creative agents. I will additionally explore an aspect of naïvism in the music, which prioritizes first-hand experience (bright tones, playfulness, childlike voices, optimism, an interest in sonic objects over song narrative, the prioritizing of background detail over the ursatz (fundamental structure) of song, and consider how this is related to the concepts of cultural and collective memory. Naïvism does not in this case imply a traditional dialectical relationship to technology by reaffirming the Nature/Culture divide (see Dibben 2009a). Rather, glitch itself becomes an aspect of this innocent exploration of materials that is of its essence childlike, a form of play in the Gadamerian (hermeneutic) sense that is reparative more than overtly critical in tone (Sedgwick 2003). I will additionally explore the relation of glitch to gender politics. While glitch has previously been thought of as the exclusive realm of male specialists, there is evidence to support an alternative reading in which the glitch (or mistake) can be understood as a way of queering conventions, ‘the queer art of failure’ (Halberstam 2001; also Jarman 2011), while partaking shamelessly through the element of naïvisim and sentimentality in the music of what Jack Halberstam calls ‘silly culture’ (Halberstam 2012; also Morris 2013).

Björk is the most famous Icelandic musical icon and her work is widely seen as representative not only of an Icelandic sound, but of the Icelandic landscape and natural world. Nicola Dibben (2009a) explores the theme of nature within Björk’s work, and highlights how, particularly in her later work, the personification of nature becomes a central theme. This chapter examines the studio recordings of Björk to further explore the relationship between body, nature and sound in her work. Using theories from embodiment studies, I highlight how Björk conceptualises the relationship between the body and nature, particularly through a personal embodiment of the natural world. I analyse how Björk’s creative use of sound is an embodied expression of nature. Using sonic palettes that bring the body to the fore of her work, Björk articulates a fundamental relationship between body, nature and sound, which is at the heart of her creative practice.

Heima, the feature-length film from the Icelandic post-rock group Sigur Rós, has received considerable scholarly and critical attention, largely because it foregrounds the relationship between music and place. However, the film also takes viewers on a sonic tour of Iceland, and thus provides the opportunity to discuss timbre as not only the sound of place, but also the result of creative sonic and cinematic production. With a view toward analyzing the inherently multivalent, collaborative nature of such timbres, I introduce a new methodology I call timbral triangulation. Whereas timbre in studio recordings can be understood as the triangulation of instruments/technology/ producers that projects a ‘polished’ ethos of the studio, live recordings typically replace the technology and producers of the studio with the instruments/soundboard/crowd triangulation of a concert venue, which problematically serves as a synecdoche for the ‘raw’ experience of authenticity. I submit that Heima provides a comparatively rare timbral triangulation of instrument/place/microphone, wherein the increased focus on place (enhanced through cinema) ironically elevates the role of the microphone in its ability to capture the ‘natural’ sound of the instruments-in-place. However, this natural imagery is, unsurprisingly, also a product of very controlled signal processing in post-production. Interviews with the film’s sound editor Mehdi Hassine and re-recording mixer Chris Johnston will serve to problematise the supposedly structuralist relationship between music and place, and to specify exactly what role the physical places and instruments themselves play in the recorded sounds. Though admittedly nascent, the study of timbre in recorded (popular) music is already diverging between approaches that focus on source instruments and voices (Slater 2011, Blake 2012), and approaches that treat the studio and its inhabitants as a collaborative ecosystem (Zagorski-Thomas 2010, Easley 2011). Timbral triangulation aims to put these approaches in conversation with each other, and to elevate the role of place in the production of timbre.

Over the past 25 years, Icelandic music has been gaining considerable international attention. This is attested to by the international success of such acts as the Sugarcubes, and then Björk as a solo artist, followed by the worldwide success of Sigur Rós, and more recently Of Monsters and Men. And these artists reveal themselves to be ‘the tip of the iceberg’, once one delves further into the music of Iceland and the myriad of genres that thrive there. That such a small country can produce so much music of quality, value and acclaim is a fascinating situation that has boosted Icelandic tourism and made the country the ‘hippest’ place in the world. This is a book of wide-ranging essays on different aspects of Icelandic music, from the ancient traditional chants of rímur to the large output of classical music by nationalist composer Jón Leifs and others, to the plethora of Icelandic rock and pop groups that have already made an impact on the world as well as more idiosyncratic and genre-bending musicians now emerging from the Reykjavik music scene.

Over the past 25 years, Icelandic music has been gaining considerable international attention. This is attested to by the international success of such acts as the Sugarcubes, and then Björk as a solo artist, followed by the worldwide success of Sigur Rós, and more recently Of Monsters and Men. And these artists reveal themselves to be ‘the tip of the iceberg’, once one delves further into the music of Iceland and the myriad of genres that thrive there. That such a small country can produce so much music of quality, value and acclaim is a fascinating situation that has boosted Icelandic tourism and made the country the ‘hippest’ place in the world. This is a book of wide-ranging essays on different aspects of Icelandic music, from the ancient traditional chants of rímur to the large output of classical music by nationalist composer Jón Leifs and others, to the plethora of Icelandic rock and pop groups that have already made an impact on the world as well as more idiosyncratic and genre-bending musicians now emerging from the Reykjavik music scene.