The sound that inspired Frozen
The otherworldly sound of Norwegian folk captivated fans of the Disney blockbuster. Catherine Nixey meets the choir keeping the tradition alive
In the 17th century, travellers ventured to the far north of Norway and recorded what they found there. This was a strange and otherworldly place; a land of silver birches, midnight sun and year-round rain. It was also the land of the Sami, a people with broad cheekbones, small noses and a high tolerance for being damp.
What these explorers did not find was music. As one of them wrote: ‘‘The Sami people seem to be the only people in the world with no musical tradition. Though,’’ he conceded, ‘‘one could hear some strange noises when they became drunk.’’
Fast forward 400 years, and this otherworldly land welcomes two more intrepid explorers. To be more precise, two Disney executives, who have come to Trondheim looking for inspiration for their new film. They know this film is going to be about a girl who lives in the frozen north, who has great powers. However, they need to know more; they need a look, a sound ...
Few parents of children under 12 won’t know what they found next. What these two executives discovered on a CD in a small instrument museum in Trondheim would be used not only in the opening of the film Frozen (worldwide box office figures, US$1.2 billion), but would also inspire the famous swishy dresses of the two leads. They had found what their 17th-century counterparts had failed to, namely the music of the Sami. Or, to be more precise, a version of it: Vuelie, written by the Norwegian composer Frode Fjellheim, and sung by the all-female choir Cantus.
Now they have been signed to the British label Decca and a new album is about to be released. Elsa and Anna don’t appear on this one, true, but this certainly seems to be making the most of the Frozen connection: its trailer is shot in the sort of forest where you can imagine Kristoff happily herding reindeer; the Northern Lights swirl above; and the women are all dressed in those Frozen-inspiring traditional ‘‘bunad’’ dresses.
It all looks a bit chilly, singing in the snow in a frock, and you can’t help wondering whether they, unlike Elsa, are bothered by the cold. The choir assures me that the bunads – which weigh about as much as a small child and are so expensive that they have to be insured separately – are designed for this sort of thing. The sound of the album retains that ethereal, but powerful Frozen sound (think Enya, but less Celtic and with more heft), yet diverts from it too: while some tracks play with traditional Sami themes, others have stronger accompaniments; others are Christian in theme.
On a damp evening in a church hall in Trondheim, Cantus are practising. It is a long way from the Super Bowl glitz of Frozen‘s most famous singer, Idina Menzel, who sings the earworm that haunts any parent of small children: Let It Go. There are homemade cakes and coffee on a trestle table at the back; a quiet rain is falling outside and there is a good dose of knitwear inside. One of the singers has a Frozen keyring on her rucksack.
Cantus was started by Tove Ramlo-Ystad in 1986, a time when the reputation of all-female choirs was, as she says, ‘‘the worst’’. People saw them as unprofessional and deeply unfashionable – as hysterical women or quavering elderly ladies. They had, says Ramlo-Ystad, very low status.
Ramlo-Ystad helped to change that. It was she who commissioned Vuelie from Fjellheim. And when the Disney music team heard it, they wanted not only the song – but her choir to sing it.
As Tom MacDougall, the senior vice-president of music at Disney, explains: ‘‘If we’d recorded that in Los Angeles with session singers it might have a familiarity that could be from any other film.’’ He wanted a sound that would feel a bit ‘‘other’’. He wanted ‘‘those nuances that audiences might feel, but might not be able to quantify’’. They flew over to record and, after two days, it was done.
That wasn’t quite the end of the story. The Frozen soundtrack went on to have quite an afterlife, shifting 10 million copies in 2014 alone after the film’s release in late 2013. This has, for Fjellheim certainly, been life-improving if not quite life-changing. ‘‘It’s not bad,’’ he says, with Norwegian understatement, as we sit in a nearby cafe before rehearsal.
For pretty obvious reasons, Vuelie is a common song in the Cantus repertoire. As the rain falls outside, they sing it again. Ethereal as the Norwegian winter sky in its upper register, in its lower ones the song has a powerful, primordial sound; the sound of the sort of woman who would know what to do with a recalcitrant reindeer. And that’s before you get to the lyrics, which run something like this: ‘‘Hahiyaha naha/ Naheya heya na yanuwa . . . ‘‘ You can see why the 17th-century explorers were wary.
Those lyrics are a yoik. Fjellheim explains: ‘‘In the Sami tradition every person has their own yoik.’’ Fjellheim’s great-greatgrandmother was a Sami reindeer herder and his father was interested in the yoik. ‘‘It’s like an extension of your name which includes a description of you.’’
It’s quite a long extension, mind. I ask Fjellheim to sing his yoik, which he does. It’s Arabic in tone (it was composed by a friend, in part because he likes Arabic music) and lasts for about 16 seconds. This is not something that you’re going to put on your passport or use to call your children in to dinner – or not if you’re in a hurry, anyway.
Fjellheim then yoiks a vase on the table in front of us. ‘‘Connnnng,’’ he says for the glass bit, sounding like a bell, before doing something more swoopy for the rose in the middle: ‘‘Ooo-wahooo-wha-ooo-wah.’’ I ask him if he can yoik me, as it were. He says that he can’t; you can yoik someone only when you know them very well. Very polite people, the Norwegians.
One of the reasons this style is so unfamiliar is that the yoik had started to die out and exists more on the stage than in common use. Mainly because the Christians, when they arrived among the Sami, had no trouble classifying this unclassifiable thing. They knew, instantly, that it was the work of Satan. ‘‘They declared that yoik had to be banned,’’ says Fjellheim. In many places, it was forbidden to yoik, while the traditional Sami woodframed drums were confiscated and burnt. There are barely any left.
Christians still stop Sami music; in 2014 someone was thrown out of a church in Norway for yoiking in it. A few years ago, when Fjellheim was touring in northern Norway with his group, who use yoiking, a priest wrote to the local paper advising people not to go to the concert. Why? ‘‘Because it is the sound of the Devil.’’
Certainly the yoik does have an unearthly aspect to it. Part verb, part adjective, part tonal language, part way to spend an evening, these are not like anything in mainstream western tradition. The adjective part is the easiest to understand. In much the same way that characters in Homerian epics had their stock epithets – ‘‘fleetfooted’’ Achilles, say, or ‘‘ox-eyed’’ Hera – so Sami people would have their yoik. It’s said that, as long as anyone can remember and sing your yoik, part of you still lives.
The yoik part of Vuelie is in those opening ‘‘Na-na-na-hey-ana’’ (vuelie, confusingly, also means yoik). This particular one was Fjellheim’s attempt to describe the ground where he was walking one day in Norway. He walks his fingers over the table, as if they are legs, to show what he means. ‘‘Nana-na’’ - that was the left-right-left. Then ‘‘there was something on the floor’’ and he had to lift his foot, hence: ‘‘Hey-na-na . . . ‘‘ And that was it. That was what inspired one of the most-sold songs of 2014; a bump on the floor.
Back in the church, among the homemade cakes and the hymn books, it seems unlikely that Frozen fame will change the lives of this choir. The money that this has brought has enabled the choir to have a little more freedom but, once again, hasn’t been lifechanging. They are respected in the area and occasionally young girls, when they realise what they sang in, are star-struck. But these are not the sort of women to have their heads turned by having fiveyear-olds wanting to touch their hem. The singers are amateurs and they have eminently sensible other jobs – one is a lawyer, one is a landscape gardener; the choir has a good supply of teachers. They’re not going to give their jobs up now.
And what does Fjellheim really make of Frozen? He says he does like the film. Although in a very honest, Norwegian sort of way he has some Sami reservations about the reindeer herding. ‘‘I don’t think,’’ he says, ‘‘reindeer eat carrots.’’