Modern pagan music
Music produced in the interwar period include efforts from the Latvian Dievturība movement and the Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt.
In a 1937 article, the movement's chief ideologue Ernests Brastiņš wrote about the religion's sermons, which included music that "should create solemn and harmonious feelings".
[2] Also in the 1930s, the Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt (1908–1981) became affiliated with the Germanic neopaganism of the National Socialist journal Ragnarok and its publisher Hans S. Jacobsen.
[6] Records from this pagan scene were sold in New Age stores and information about new music was spread through magazines like Circle Network News and Green Egg.
[12] In Iceland, Ásatrúarfélagið's first allsherjargoði Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson (1924–1993) was known as both a writer and singer of rímur, a traditional form of alliterative poetry or songs.
[14] Another work with ties to Ásatrúarfélagið is Odin's Raven Magic, a 2002 choral and orchestral setting of the Icelandic poem Hrafnagaldr Óðins.
[15] The folk music group Kūlgrinda was founded in 1989 by Inija (born 1951) and Jonas Trinkūnas (1939–2014), the leaders of the Lithuanian neopagan movement Romuva.
[22] Since the early 2000s, some people within the scene, such as Barberousse of His Divine Grace and Moynihan, have been influenced by the paganism of the Nouvelle Droite and Alain de Benoist.
[23] Beyond musical commonalities, neofolk is distinguished by an elitist view of culture, opposition to rationalism and modern homogenisation, an interest in Europe, identity and ethnicity, and dark visions.
[24] The bands sometimes reference right-wing, occult, neopagan or völkisch subjects with deliberate ambiguity; the scholar Stefanie von Schnurbein calls this an "elitist Nietzschean masquerade" which expresses a "(neo-)romantic art-religious attitude".
[25] François associates the themes of the "Euro-pagan scene" with the political right, especially the conservative revolutionary movement, but also sets it apart from right-wing culture through its willingness to engage in avant-garde artistic expressions.
According to the writer, journalist and DJ Jason Pitzl-Waters, many younger pagans in the 1980s and 1990s adopted gothic rock as their preferred alternative to the tastes of the baby boom generation, which at the time dominated the neopagan institutions.
The success of Inkubus Sukkubus inspired a number of other British bands to adopt a "Pagan-Goth identity", something that quickly spread to other countries.
[28] The Australian-British band Dead Can Dance, formed in 1981, has had a significant impact on neopagan popular music, although neither of its own members has expressed any allegiance to paganism.
Dead Can Dance began as a goth band but gradually moved away from the genre and has added elements such as world music and references to mythology.
An example is a 1995 essay by the Austrian musician Gerhard "Kadmon" Petak, which quotes from Otto Höfler to draw parallels between black metal and traditions surrounding the Wild Hunt motif.
The essay first became influential in the Alpine black metal scene, and received wider distribution when an English translation was included in the 1998 book Lords of Chaos.
[39] Other openly pagan or occult-oriented bands with a clear debt to Dead Can Dance include Seventh Harmonic, Atrium Animae, Daemonia Nymphe, Trobar de Morte[40] and Íon.
[42] Typical for the pagan folk genre are premodern instruments, medievalist costumes and imagery, as well as modern elements in order to create an idealised vision of an archaic past that is present in the contemporary world.
Die erste Walpurgisnacht, set to music by Felix Mendelssohn, tells of Druid rituals in the Harz mountains.
