Marianne Clausen (25 December 1947 – 17 September 2014) was a Danish musicologist and choir conductor. She was the daughter of composer, choir conductor and musicologist Karl Clausen (1904–1972). Her main achievement, begun in collaboration with her father in the early 1970s, intensified during the 1990s, and concluded just weeks before her death, was the preservation of traditional Faroese folk singing, which she presented in a number of large volumes with music notation transcriptions of sound recordings. Based on more than 6,000 such recordings, collected by many different scholars, including herself, throughout the entire 20th century, she published around 3,350 music notation examples of various genres of traditional Faroese singing, together with hitherto unpublished song texts, as well as historical and musicological analyses.
Marianne Clausen also led and conducted several amateur choirs, most notably 1978-2000 the Faroese choir in Copenhagen, Húsakórið, and 1984-2013 the Danish choir Con Brio.
Early works The daughter of high school teachers Karl Clausen and Grethe Clausen, born Jensen, and the youngest of four siblings, Marianne Clausen grew up in a large rented apartment in the 18th-century villa “Stormly” on Godthåbsvej in the Copenhagen neighbourhood of Frederiksberg. During the 1950s, her father, by then a well-known choir conductor and musicologist, who had specialized in folk singing,Karl Clausen (1958): Dansk Folkesang gennem 150 år, 347 pp., Forlaget Fremad, reprinted 1975 by Tingluti Forlag gradually became aware of the very rich Faroese folk singing tradition. He went to the islands several times with a tape recorder to collect, first of all, examples of the religious, spiritual singing, known as Kingo-singing, which had so far not received much attention from collectors.
During trips with her father from the mid-1960s and onwards, Marianne Clausen was introduced to the Faroese people and their singing. Her father discovered that she possessed a special talent, surpassing his own, for writing down accurately and unbiased, as regards musical harmonics and scales, the melodies that were sung in the recordings. After his death she completed a volume containing 97 melody examples, with lyrics, of Faroese spiritual singing.Karl Clausen og Marianne Clausen (1975): Åndelig Visesang på Færøerne, in: Fra Færøerne : Úr Føroyum, vol. VII-VIII, 203 pp., Dansk-Færøsk Samfund Part of this volume she used as the thesis for her major degree in music from Aarhus University 1975. In c. 1983 she finished her MA degree by taking a minor in English from the University of Copenhagen. A little later she also passed the PO organist's exam.
Following her failed first marriage, which was insecure and traumatic, and the death of her father not long after, Marianne Clausen went through some years around 1980 with alcohol abuse. She managed to get out of the abuse in 1983, and she never touched alcohol again for the rest of her life. However, repercussions of the mental and physical damage from those events were probably at least partly responsible for her premature death many years later.
After some years where she recovered and mainly worked with choirs, she went on a number of collection trips to the Faroes 1988-94, which resulted in a publication about spiritual singingMarianne Clausen & Jógvan Thomsen (1990): Åndelige viser og sange / Andaliga vísur og sangir, 31 pp, w. gramophone record. and one about Danish language ballads, Hundredesyv-visebogenMarianne Clausen (1995): Hundredesyv-visebogen - Danske folkeviser og andre viser på dansk med færøske melodier, 280 pp, H.N. Jacobsens bókahandil The latter in particular gained positive attention among the Faroese,Trý hundrað ár eftir Peder Syv, book review by Pól á Kletti in Dimmalætting, p. 5, 22 June 1995Nýútkomið bókastórverk gull vert, book review by Beate L. Jensen in Dimmalætting, p. 1, 23 June 1995 partly because it was the first publication for many yearsEgil Bakka, Mortan Nolsøe & Ólavur Hátún (1977): The Faroese Dance, p. 24-37 in: Faroe Isles Review, vol. 2, no. 2, Bókagarður, Tórshavn to deal with Faroese dance, the folk singing genre that had best withstood the modernization of the Faroese community in the decades after World War II, and was still thriving, as it is today, in various dance associations across the islands, as well as in the Faroese communities in Denmark.
Hundredesyv-visebogen was released on the 300th anniversary of Peder Syv’s songbook,Peder Syv (1695): Et Hundrede Udvalde Danske Viser … Forøgede med det Andet Hundrede Viser … Til Lyst og Lærdom. Reprinted 1787 by P.M. Høpffner, Copenhagen which was itself inspired by Anders Sørensen Vedel’s songbook HundredvisebogAnders Sørensen Vedel (1591): Hundredvisebog. Reprinted by Karen Thuesen, Reitzels Forlag 1993. from a century earlier. Hundredesyv-visebogen was the last of Marianne Clausen's books based exclusively on her own collections of folk singing; her last five books were all primarily based on folk singing recordings by other, earlier collectors.
Regin Dahl recordings Before embarking on her principal work (see next section), she undertook the project of writing down in music the compositions of Faroese poet and composer Regin Dahl (1918-2007). Over the years, Dahl had composed several hundred melodies, both to his own poetry and to that of other poets and authors, e.g. the Faroese Jákup Dahl, Hans A. Djurhuus, J.H.O. Djurhuus, Christian Matras, Jóannes Patursson, Mikkjal á Ryggi and Símun av Skarði, the Norwegians Knut Hamsun and Nordahl Grieg, the Dane Jeppe Aakjær and the Swedes Gustaf Fröding and Erik Axel Karlfeldt, as well as many others. Only in exceptional cases did Regin Dahl write his music down, but instead remembered it by heart, as was customary among the Faroese. Following the release in 1972 of a gramophone record with Regin Dahl songs,Regin Dahl (1972): Lukkurímar og fagnarljóð, gramophone record, Mentanargrunnur Studentafelagsins, Mál 105-106 a good friend of his arranged for Regin Dahl to perform his entire musical production, by singing at the piano in a recording studio, which he did in 15 recording sessions between April 1973 and January 1977.
In the mid 1990s, Marianne Clausen had these recordings, as well as his gramophone recordsRegin Dahl (1974): Barnarímur hjá Hans A. Djurhuus, gramophone record, Mentanargrunnur Studentafelagsins, Mál 107-108, reissued 2010 by Tutl and other Regin Dahl recordings that emerged during the project, transferred to compact cassettes, her preferred media for music transcription in those years (from 2006 she mainly used an iPod), and transcribed and published 439 of Regin Dahl's melodies, together with lyrics.Regin Dahl (1996): Atlantsløg, edited by Marianne Clausen and Zakarias Wang, 282 pp, Stiðin Regin Dahl (1997): Atlantsløg II, edited by Marianne Clausen and Zakarias Wang, 69 pp, Stiðin Regin Dahl (2005): Atlantsløg, box with 25 cds, produced by Kristian Blak, Tutl (contains 439 sound recordings corresponding to music transcriptions in the books Atlantsløg and Atlantsløg II, edited by Marianne Clausen and Zakarias Wang) These were the last of her books with hand-written music transcriptions; for her next (and last) five books, she used music notation software.
Faroese folk singing At the middle of the 20th century, the isolated and still rather traditional way of life on the Faroe Islands caused traditional folk singing to flourish here for several decades longer than was the case in, say, Europe and North America, where a modernist outlook, combined with e.g. motion pictures and radio and later tv broadcasting, had largely replaced traditional way of life, and ousted folk singing.
The spreading of sound recording equipment among musicologists, from the 1890s the phonograph, and in particular from the 1940s the tape recorder, easy to carry and not too pricey, opened a time window of some decades, where Scandinavian and German musicologists brought modern technology to the Faroe Islands and recorded numerous examples of the islanders’ still vigorous folk singing tradition. With the introduction in the late 1950s of Faroese radio broadcasting, and in the late 1970s of television, traditional singing suffered a severe setback.
The few hundred folk singing examples recorded on phonograph wax cylinders in the first decades of the 20th century formed the basis for several scholarly studies of Faroese folk singing,Hjalmar Thuren (1908): Folkesangen paa Færøerne, 337 pp., Andr. Fred. Høst og Søns Forlag, CopenhagenHakon Grüner-Nielsen (1945): De færøske Kvadmelodiers Tonalitet i Middelalderen, Færoensia, Vol. 1, Einar Munksgaard, Copenhagen whereas the several thousand examples recorded on tape recorder at the middle of the century paradoxically only resulted in a rather limited scholarly production.
Kvæði
In 1998 Marianne Clausen began to collect from various Scandinavian archives sound recordings of Faroese kvæði (Faroese language ballads used in Faroese dance). After a registration check of the recordings (of who sings and what is sung), she began to make handwritten transcription drafts of all the recordings, with melody and lyrics, for the kvæði amounting to a total of 2,050 recordings.
Then she played all the recordings again, and compared them with the transcription drafts, checking for errors or mishearings; and when she was finished, she played all the recordings one more time, checking again. During this repeated process, which she also used in her next books, she began to select melodies to be included in the book manuscript. She based this selection on criteria, which ensured that the various kvæði texts and melodies were comprehensively represented, as regards persons, geography and time (recordings from as many islands and villages as possible, with special focus on renowned singers with large repertoires, and new recordings as well as old, sometimes rather indistinguishable phonograph recordings, in some cases dating back to 1902).
In 2003, Marianne Clausen's work with the kvæði recordings resulted in the eighth and conclusive volume, Føroya kvæði VIII, Løgini / MelodiesMarianne Clausen (2003): Føroya Kvæði VIII, Løgini/Melodies (FK VIII), 735 pp., Universitets-Jubilæets Danske Samfund, No. 559, Stiðin, of the magnum opus Føroya kvæði, the first seven volumes of which were published 1941-54, 1963–72 and 1996, containing the lyrics of 236 Faroese kvæði, with indexes. This volume is the biggest of her books, containing 1,343 melody transcriptions.
Spiritual singing