Ice Music in Sweden: When Music Becomes a Language of Its Own

From an orchestra built from ice in Swedish Lapland to the way music crosses language barriers, Ice Music shows how sound, culture and creativity can communicate before a single word is spoken.

You do not always need to understand the words to understand the message of a song. Rhythm, tone, expression and emotion often do part of the communicating for us.

And then there is Ice Music, where even the instruments have something to say.

In Luleå, Swedish Lapland, American ice artist Tim Linhart created an extraordinary musical project built around instruments made almost entirely from ice. Violins, cellos, basses, guitars, banjos, drums and even marimbas have all been carved from frozen water and played inside a concert venue made from ice.

It is part concert, part sculpture and part experiment in what music can be.

Hey Brother, this really is cool music

One of the performances featured the band Whiteroom playing Hey Brother, the international hit by Swedish artist Avicii.

The familiar song sounds rather different when the musicians are surrounded by ice and some of the instruments producing the music are frozen too.

What makes the performance interesting is not simply the novelty of an ice violin or guitar. The setting becomes part of the communication. Sweden, winter, music, the musicians and the instruments themselves all work together to create the experience.

What does Ice Music have to do with language?

Quite a lot, actually.

Music is one of the easiest ways to see that communication is much bigger than vocabulary and grammar. We can often recognize excitement, sadness, tension, humor or affection in a song even when we do not speak the language in which it is being performed.

For language learners, music can also make unfamiliar sounds and expressions easier to notice. A phrase heard repeatedly in a song tends to stay with us rather differently from the same phrase sitting alone on a vocabulary list.

We have used that idea elsewhere at Verbalists, including Learn German with music, where a song becomes a simple and entertaining way of picking up new German words.

But there is another side to it as well. Learning a language means gradually learning the culture around it: its humor, music, expressions, references and the countless small things people understand without explaining them.

That is one reason we see language education as much more than lessons. Whether someone is learning online or taking part in language study abroad, the real goal is to become more comfortable communicating with people and understanding the world in which that language is actually used.

The story behind Ice Music in Swedish Lapland

Tim Linhart explains how his unusual ice orchestra was created and what it takes to make instruments from a material that can crack, melt and change with the temperature.

There is something rather fitting about discovering this in Lapland. Travel frequently gives us precisely these encounters: an art form, tradition, sound or expression that makes much more sense once you experience the place it comes from.

That connection between language, culture and travel is also at the heart of the Verbalists idea. You can learn vocabulary anywhere. Understanding people usually requires a little more curiosity.

People have many ways of communicating, and words are only one of them.

Sometimes music speaks first.

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