My first visit to Karen’s was in 2020, right before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Seated in her living room in Madison, Wisconsin, were a collection of Hardanger fiddle players, all playing fiddles with ornate decoration and buzzing sympathetic strings. This group, the Madison Spelmannslag, met regularly pre-pandemic to play Norwegian traditional dance music. When I moved to Madison a few months later, in the midst of the pandemic, the group had disbanded. I saw Karen a few times over Zoom at various workshops and fiddle events as musicians struggled to keep playing together. At one workshop in the winter of 2022, Karen appeared on a luthier panel during which she and several other Hardanger fiddle makers discussed the construction of the instrument. I was intrigued by the depth of her knowledge and by her unique approach to fiddle construction. We finally connected in person in the summer of 2024 when I received a Hardanger Fiddle Association of America fiddle loan. My teacher for the following year, as luck would have it, would be Karen Rebholz. I had always been interested in the process of making fiddles, and jumped at the chance to talk with Karen about the work she does. When I arrived at her house in October of 2024 for an interview, the home workshop was evident in her dining room table, strewn with a series of delicate ink drawings, ready to be transferred from paper to the wood of a fiddle.
The Hardanger Fiddle is an intricately decorated instrument with sympathetic strings that run underneath the finger board. These are not played with the bow but rather vibrate when the strings above them are bowed, creating a distinctive resonance of sound. The oldest known Hardanger fiddle, the “Jaastad Fiddle,” has been dated to 1651 and was made by Olav Jonsson Jaastad from Ullensvang. Though the field is still small, there are Hardanger fiddle makers all over the world, from Norway to Germany to Japan to the United States. Though thought of as Norway’s national instrument, the Hardanger fiddle was regionally specific and was played primarily in the Hardanger, Telemark, Voss, and Valdres regions. The repertoire of the Hardanger fiddle consists of both regional dances, bygdedans (such as springar and gangar), and gammeldans (such as waltz, pols, and reinlander) as well as listening tunes, lydarslåtter, which are not danced to. It is important to note that bygdedans tunes were also played on the normal, “flat,” fiddle in regions of Norway where the Hardanger fiddle was less common. For more on Scandinavian dance in the Upper Midwest, check out Kom så dansar vi! Celebrating Young People in Scandinavian American Folk Music and Dance, our online exhibition by Dr. Carrie Danielson.
Karen first encountered the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle in 2008. Though she had not worked with instruments before, her interests in carving, drawing, painting, her undergrad degree in studio art and Ph.D. in biochemistry, all came together in the research, design, and construction of Hardanger fiddles. In this documentary, Karen shares her journey into the fiddle world, her personal process for building instruments of great sonic quality and beauty, and her experience of being a woman in the incredibly small pool of Hardanger fiddle luthiers. We also meet Lucy Jacobus, a young fiddler from Madison who has been playing the Hardanger fiddle since 2021. Thanks to her time playing with Karen, Lucy is now inspired to learn how to build her own fiddles. She will be starting the violin repair and making program in Red Wing, Minnesota, in the fall of 2025.
Text and film produced by Caitlin Vitale-Sullivan
Interested in learning more about the Hardanger fiddle?
Hardanger Fiddle Association of America
To see Norwegian dance, check out Folkepedia