Bára Grímsdóttir

Early music is a modern performance movement devoted to the repertoire of the Medieval, Renaissance, and early Baroque eras (roughly before c. 1750), approached with historically informed performance (HIP) practices. It emphasizes period instruments (or faithful replicas), historical tunings and temperaments, original notations and sources, and performance conventions documented in treatises of the time. The sound world ranges from monophonic chant and modal organum, to intricate Renaissance polyphony, to the emergence of basso continuo and dramatic affect in the early Baroque. Rather than being a single historical style, early music is a contemporary practice of reviving diverse pre‑Classical musics with scholarly rigor and artistic vitality.

Icelandic traditional music encompasses a set of orally transmitted practices that formed on the island from the medieval period onward. Its core features include rímur (long narrative song cycles chanted to fixed melodic patterns), kvæðalög (strophic song melodies), tvísöngur (parallel fifths/organum-style part-singing), and sacred hymnody rooted in medieval chant. The melodic language is typically modal (often Dorian or Mixolydian), narrow in range, and ornamented with subtle, speech-like inflections. Instrumentation historically centers on the human voice, sometimes supported by indigenous instruments such as the langspil (a bowed/plucked zither) and the fiðla (bowed fiddle/violin). Dance-associated repertoire includes vikivaki circle-dances. Texts draw on saga narratives, nature, and devotional poetry, retaining alliterative structures and kennings from Old Norse poetics while later absorbing end-rhymed stanza forms distinctive to rímur.