Nyckelharpa - an amazing Swedish thing

Today I attended a workshop put on by Salt Lake Scandinavian that included a demo-lecture about the instrument you see pictured,  the  Nyckelharpa.  Check out SLS out at
    http://saltlakescandidance.shutterfly.com/
They do bi-monthly Scandinavian dancing in Salt Lake City,  for all levels, and other special events and are a very friendly group of folks. 
    The nyckelharpa is basically a "keyed violin" found extensively in traditional Swedish folk dance music.   I have heard this instrument for years being used by the Swedish band "Väsen" and have loved the dry vibrato-less quality with it's slightly raw intonation and relatively loud noise and clatter component.  Some of the expert players of the nyckelharpa have absolutely dazzling technique and play very expressively despite the disconnectedness of the left hand from the strings.
  The keys are pushed in toward the string and a small oak peg with a tapered edge ( a tangent, as it's called)  makes contact with the string to create a new speaking length - the string is just touched and not actually pushed against the neck or any kind of fret board - the tangent is rather like a fret itself.  The pitches are all individually tuned by miniscule rotations of the tangent - one for each of the many  notes!  The modern instrument usually has 16 strings, 3 that are directly bowed and keyed, 1 that is a bowed drone, and 12 that vibrate sympathetically to give a full reverberant sound and the keys are laid out chromatically. 
 Check out the American Nyckelharpa Association on the web   www.nyckelharpa.org/  for extensive reading about the instrument, its history and many variations.  It actually predates the violin by several centuries! 
  Also check out Väsen on Rhapsody -- one trick, though - you've got to have the umlaut over the "a" to achieve any search results ---option+u, then type a.   There are 4 CD's that will pop up when you select "albums".  They are a group of 3  - guitar or cittern, fiddle and nyckelharpa.
  Another album of note -  Sweden:The Nyckelharpa  by Daniel Peterson, solo nyckelharpa.   A majority of these Swedish dance pieces are in 3/4 but are often phrased in somewhat obscured long rather complicated phrases of 6, 4+2 or 2+4 depending on the dance style. Sometimes the underlying 3/4 is not at all transparent, which is what makes it most interesting to follow.  There is a distinctive plaintive quality that pervades Scandinavian music that I also really enjoy.