Consider the map of Denmark for a moment. “We are almost completely surrounded by water,” says fiddler and composer Harald Haugaard. “Really, we have been a harbor for all kinds of musical influences from all over northern Europe.” Out of that, over centuries the Danish people have created a folk music all their own, reflecting their own landscape, character, and interests. Taking the story of Danish music to the world, and building on and extending its traditions, are the things Haugaard has chosen as his life’s work.

That’s been a clear path for him, although not at first a direct one. He began playing the violin as a child. “If you take violin in Denmark it’s hard to get rid of classical music!” he says, laughing. “I think it’s just a part you have to go through. I wasn’t scared or afraid of classical music, and I was brought up with normal violin teaching, and played classical music.”

There were other things at work too. “My grandfather was an accordion player, and my mother was a dance caller. So for me, for the first five years or ten years I was playing, there were no borders between classical music and folk music. It was just music, to me. And in folk music, I started to earn money -- I played for dances. In classical music you just learn to rehearse all the time, and practice. But I used what was inside me, stories I wanted to tell, it didn’t matter to me what kind of music it was,” he says. He tried out music from hard rock to Renaissance, and briefly spent time with other instruments including drums and bass. He came back to the violin, though, and was accepted into the prestigious Carl Nielsen Academy, to a course to study to become a music teacher. The course focused on classical music.

“After studying two years in classical music at the Academy, I saw that was probably not my way to go, this classical way,” he says. “All my spare time I played folk music and was building up a career already with bands playing folk music. So my *heart* belonged to folk music, and I knew that the money I was going to earn was in folk music as well. So that was a clear choice for me.” A clear choice it might have been, but the academic path wasn’t so clear. At that time there was nowhere at the Carl Nielsen Academy, or in Denmark for that matter, to study folk music at a university level. Haugaard decided to see if he could  make a change. “I went to the head of the Academy and said ‘Could we do an experiment ?"’ because there had never been folk music in Carl Nielsen Academy before. And he said yes. He was ready for an experiment. So we did it -- I went to the old fiddlers and sat in the kitchens with them, and learned even more of the tradition that I knew from my grandfather. Asking to do that was a turning point in my career,“ Haugaard says. “Later on at the Carl Nielsen Academy, we got the folk music bachelor’s and master’s degree courses, and I was hired as a teacher there.” He continued to teach at the Academy, and became head of the folk music department, until his touring schedule called for most of his time.

That touring included being in a progressive folk music band, working with a techno folk group and a fusion rock outfit, and doing school concerts of traditional music. Haugaard’s best known and highest profile musical partnership so far has been his collaboration with guitarist Morten Alfred Høirup as the duo Haugaard & Høirup. Together and individually the pair have won just about every category of the Danish Music Awards, which are equivalent to the Grammys in Denmark. They first played together as a one time gig at  conference that neither man felt went  all that well. As they talked, though, the violist and the guitar player soon found that they shared common interests in the past, present, and future of Danish folk music, a music they would take through Europe, Canada, the United States, and Japan in more than a thousand concerts over a ten year span.

You’d figure it has to be pretty compelling, an instrumental music which can reach across cultures and attract lasting fans around the the world. But what exactly is Danish folk music? That’s a question, Haugaard says, that comes up often. The analogy of his country as a harbor holding influences from many currents of music and making them in to something unique and ever evolving is one that works for Haugaard, who plays traditional material and, increasingly, composes his own works drawing on the varied ideas of Danish folk tradition. “It’s very hard to generalize about this music,” he said. ”It has a sense of humor, and a sense of melancholy, it’s very lyric, very poetic."

“The instrumental music in Danish music, as in many other countries,  is dance music. We also have a huge vocal tradition as well, with hymns and ballads and songs, and there are a lot of sailing songs, sea songs, as we are almost completely surrounded by the sea,” he continued. “In the old days, it was much easier to travel on water than on land, so we have got a lot of influences from all over Europe . When you play a Danish jig or reel, though,  it sounds different from a Scottish one, and a a Danish polka is different from a German or Swedish one.”

These days, Haugaard works on composing music for his own group, and with his wife, award winning singer and instrumentalist Helene Blum. Another thing he has done in the last few years is start a fiddle school.  “We don’t have fiddle schools so much in Europe, that’s really a North American thing, or a United Kingdom thing,” he says. He enjoys teaching, though, and has been an instructor at Alasdair Fraser’s renowned fiddle camps in the US and taught workshops elsewhere. Though it took an investment of time and finances, he’s happy with how the annual fiddle school is developing.

At the heart of all he does, as it has been through his life in music, it is the folk tradition of Denmark that centers Haugaard’s creativity. “I always have the idea that if you want to work with tradition, you have to consider tradition  is alive,” Harold Haugaard says. “A tradition dies when you don’t renew it or give it some new influences. I think it’s important to challenge tradition, in a very humble way, and see what comes of that,” he said. “Even though I am playing a tune from, let’s say, the 18th century, it’s very very important for me to play it  here at this moment, to update, to make it alive nowadays.”

Harald Haugaard - haraldh.dk

Helene Blum - heleneblum.dk

Haugaard's fiddle school  - haugaardsfiddleschool.com 

Kerry Dexter is the Music Editor at Wandering Educators

She writes about music, the arts, travel, and other things at Music Road.Strings, Perceptive Travel, and other places.  You may reach Kerry at music at wanderingeducators dot com