Luren Soap Box String Quartet, Skurrekvartten i Luren. No date. The band’s name plays with two meanings: Skurre means “grating to one’s senses,” perhaps a humorous reference to what these fellows sounded like. Skure means “to scour, to wash,” which would refer to their soap box instruments. Left to right: Oscar Holm, Carl Larsen, Ole G. Huff, E. M. Sunnes. Vesterheim Archives—Luren Singing Society Collection.
Luren Singing Society
and Norwegian Male Choruses in America by John Robert Christianson Luren Singing Society of Decorah, Iowa, is profiled here as representative of many notable choral groups and singing societies that Norwegian Americans formed to help satisfy their love of music. This article is based on a manuscript written at the request of Luren to commemorate the centennial of the society. It draws on extensive primary sources in the archives of the Luren Singing Society, Preus Library at Luther College, and Vesterheim. These sources include the original minutes of meetings of the society 1884-1968, scrapbooks and other documents in the society’s archives, photographs, objects such as banners and presentation pieces, and articles in the local Norwegian-language newspapers, Decorah Posten (published 1874-1973) and Fra Fjærnt og Nær (published 1870).
I
n the year 1868, four young immigrants from Norway came together in Decorah, Iowa, to form a male quartet and sing the songs of their native land in four-part harmony. One of them, Hartvig Engbretson, was a native of the Norwegian capital city of Oslo, then called Christiania. Growing up in Christiania, he had enjoyed listening to a male choral society named Luren and proposed that the Decorah quartet should take that name as well. They did, and Luren has been singing Norwegian songs in Decorah, Iowa, ever since. The Civil War had been over for three years, releasing the floodgates of emigration from northern Europe. Norwegian Vol. Vol.7, 7, No. No.22 2009 2009
emigration to the U.S. shot up from around 4,000 in 1865 to over 15,000 in 1866 and 18,000 by 1868, at a time when the total population of Norway was only around a million and a half. By 1870, there were more than 160,000 Norwegians and their children in America, living primarily in the Upper Midwestern states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. At the same time, the frontier was expanding rapidly westward. Native peoples were driven off the plains of Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, and settlers of European origins rushed in. The Norwegian-American tradition of four-part male choral singing was born in this era of dynamic population movement, when people and institutions imported from northern Europe were being scattered all across the Upper Midwest and Great Plains. The very first Norwegian singing societies were organized in Christiania in 1845. By the 1850s, similar choral organizations were being established in towns throughout the kingdom. By the 1860s, immigrants were beginning to bring them to Norwegian settlements abroad, including the small town of Decorah. In North America, Norwegian singing societies came first to towns and later spread to rural settlements. Decorah had less than 3,000 inhabitants, but small as it was, it was still one of the principal American centers of Norwegian urban life. Norwegian cities also tended to be small by American standards—Aalesund was less than 3,000 in 1860, Skien and 17 17