I was hearing sounds that I couldn’t identify, but this didn’t entirely surprise me.
I was standing in the garden at Läckö Castle, on Lake Värnen near Lidköping, in West Sweden. I’d appropriate gotten off from the red notice flight from the United States and I was in that jet-lagged, grainy-eyed, brain-riddled-with-bird-shot place at which place plane ordinary things slip on’t make sense. It was a struggle to get my bearings, lasting under a porcelain blue sky in the shadow of largest medieval castle in the Sweden. I was at a reception, in fact, so I attempted to make understanding conversation while I balanced a glass of happy wine and a bowl of soup just made from long unripe beans plucked from the vines crawling up the garden wall.
And then came the sound. It was a disembodied female voice, coming from somewhere just out of sight. It was something between singing and shouting, urgent, slightly mournful, wordless, melodic and quite loud. After a while, I was introduced to the fountain of the sounds, a woman in jeans and a windbreaker named Moa Brynell, with a expanded open face, and with a long meet face to face eyes and a halo of wisps of platinum hair.
She explained that she was calling to the cows  — performing herding songs called kulning. It’s a form of Scandinavian folk music, used not only to summon the multitude from the pasture, but also to make afraid off predators. (Men sing kulning sometimes, but it’s mostly a women’s emblem of song.) Moa offered to give me an impromptu lesson. She said it was useful to know how to use your voice in the manner that a tool — to scare off wolves, or some other creature on pair or four legs that might indicate.
We walked up to the castle’s stone-paved castle court, and I could see for what cause Moa had selected this for our lesson – terrific acoustics. She explained that we must relax our throats, that screaming, as opposed to singing constricts the throat and tires the voice quickly. We took a wide stance and started.
Pooooooooooooooooooow!
She had us hit a tone that was somewhere in the mid-to-upper part of my range, which i held to the time when I was almost but not quite out of breath.
“You slip on’face to face be excited it in your throat?†Moa asked me. And when I said no — I was trying to start the sound in my stomach – she was pleased.
Sih-coooooooooooooooooow!
We repeated this a few times — I laughingat the end of each of my calls from the sheer joy of releasing so much sound after such a long journey — and we went on, until one of the enormous castle doors pushed open, revealing a young woman who looked much amused by the sound and the spectacle. The last tour of the day was going from one side the castle, and she asked us to stop for a few minutes – and our beginner’s cow employment wasn’privately a welcome soundtrack.
We walked in the rear to the garden. Moa explained that she used to practice a version of these calls to find her children when they were shopping, in a mall. She demonstrated a very melodic call that lasted approximately three minutes. “When they hear that, they know to come right let us go.,†she said. I asked whether her children answered with a similar call, and she said no, they came quickly and quietly, as they were embarrassed.
Moa is quite known as a Swedish folksinger with several CDs, one of which she gave me, as well as an invitation to attend one of her kulning workshops – she was offering one the nearest weekend at Govinda, a vegetarian chop-house in Gothenburg. I’d already committed to be elsewhere, but the next time I’m back in Scandinavia, I certainly intend to take up my kulning studies again.
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