Runnin’ Back to Sigurd Jorsalfar

There is perhaps nothing more subjective than taste in music, which can shift and evolve throughout the life of an individual. This has certainly been true for me. It would be pointless to attempt any explanation of my improvised excursion from Burton Cummings to Stanley Turrentine to Jackson Browne to Herbie Mann to Claude Debussy to Alexander Glazunov to JS Bach.

Lately I’ve had an unquenchable thirst for various “greatest hits” of a Scandinavian nationalistic flavor, primarily those by Edvard Grieg and Jan Sibelius. I’m finding much pleasure in pieces that others have judged to be bombastically second rate. And I love how a personal connection with music can trigger new areas of interest and investigation on the Web, such as Nordic dramatists of the late nineteenth century (Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson), Finnish folklore (Lemminkäinen), or medieval Norwegian history (Heimskringla).

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