My recent op-ed for Music Norway, Music From Norway: Just How Important Is It, Really?, republished today at All About Jazz.
When asked, by the newly minted Music Norway, which brought two separate organizations together at the beginning of 2013—Music Export Norway (responsible for exporting the country's music to the world) and Music Information Center (responsible, for many things, including acting as an archive/information source)—to write a piece about the Norwegian music scene from an outsider's perspective, it seemed, at first, to be a truly daunting challenge...and no small honour. The music scene in Norway is so rich, so diverse, so huge that trying to answer some of the obvious questions and capture what the essence of this music is, seemed an almost impossible task in the space of but a few thousand words. But after spending the last eight years traveling the country, from Kristiansand to Svalbard, from Molde to Oslo, from Bergen to Kongsberg and from Trondheim to Stavanger, I've been fortunate enough (with the kind support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Music Norway and more people than I can list here) to have been afforded a rare opportunity to gain exposure to a scene few (if any) from my neck of the woods have.
Why and how has the Norwegian scene managed to build such a reputation, not just on its own turf but around the world? There are a number of answers to that question, but first and foremost is a commitment to the arts that began more than 40 years ago and which has, unlike so many other countries, remained a priority ever since. When Sverre Lunde, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, spoke at the 2013 Punkt Festival in Kristiansand—announcing that, after nine years, the Ministry would be providing some well-deserved (and much needed) financial support to the festival, and that Punkt was now considered amongst the country's elite events—what was, perhaps, an even more compelling statement was that the country's goal has been to devote a full one percent of its budget to culture. That means that last year, in 2012, ten billion Norwegian Kroners—nearly 1.7 billion US dollars—was devoted to the arts. As a Canadian in a bilingual country, there's a French word to describe this: incroyable!
But while many people at home and abroad say, when it comes to the way Norway supports culture, "Well, they have oil money," the sad but true obvious response is: "Yes, but were Canada to come into the same per capita money, they would absolutely not spend it the way the Norwegians have."
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Originally Posted by Zeuhlmate
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