Mats Edén

Mats Edén , born 1957, is a Swedish folk musician on fiddle and accordion , national musician , composer and educator. Living in Harlösa , Eslöv . Mats Edén become interested in the traditional music from Värmland as a teenager.  This interest happened to coincide with a major revival in the Swedish folk music movement. Mats soon became a devoted part of this movement and since the late 1970s he has been a freelance folk musician. He has toured in Europe, the USA and India with a number of different musicians and groups – amongst others Groupa, Tina Quartey, Ale Möller, Lena Willemark, Ellika Frisell and Gunnel Mauritzson. Mats Edén main role models when it comes to violin playing are Anders Rosén and Torleiv Björgum, as well as fiddlers from the older generation such as Hjort Anders Olsson, Höök Olof Andersson, Gössa Anders Andersson and Ekor Anders. Värmland’s geographical closeness to Norway encouraged Mats to look across the border and explore related music traditions. In the mid 1980s he studied the hardanger fiddle with Ånon Egeland, and added several Norwegian musicians to his sources of inspiration – amongst others Hauk Buen, Otto Furholt and Sevat Sataslåtten. They have all contributed pieces to the puzzle that has gone on to form Mats’ playing. So-called multi-string playing is something that Mats Edén has taken up in his playing in a big way. Ånon Egeland calls it a playing idiom common to the past – a style of playing with different key-related tunings that is found in older fiddler’s repertoire in amongst other places Sweden and Norway. This led to the idea to develop an instrument which could capture the sound in a similar way to the hardanger fiddle, but which could be playable in the more standard tuning of A440. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.