Tundra Songs – Music by Derek Charke
Kronos Quartet; Tanya Tagaq
Centrediscs CMCCD 21015
The story of the music on this extraordinary album is multi-faceted and interwoven with transcultural skeins. Allow me to tease out a few threads.
On one hand all the music is composed by the JUNO Award-winning Canadian composer Derek Charke (b. 1974). He is also a flutist and a composition and theory professor at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. On the other hand the gifted young storyteller Laakkuluk Willamson Bathory is the only presence on track 7, reciting a gripping Green-landic version of the creation story that exists all across Inuit lands, the Sassuma Arnaa. She remarks that “we don’t so much own this story as we belong to it,” keeping it alive through retelling it today, “despite intensive colonization and religious conversion…”
That story is retold in Clarke’s exhilarating 30-minute opus Tundra Songs (2007) by the third presence on the CD, the Polaris Music Prize-winning Inuk avant-garde vocalist Tanya Tagaq. Her masterful virtuoso vocal presence, at times taking on the multilayered quality of two Inuit women throat gamers and at others the innocence of childhood, domi-nates this work of vast scope.
The fourth element on the album is perhaps the best known to music lovers: the renowned Kronos Quartet. In over four decades, specializing in modernist, post-modernist and wide-ranging world music collaborations, they have been astonishingly productive, commissioning more than 800 works and arrangements. I have seen them several times live and they never fail to engage their audience musically, and also often inter-culturally. They do both in this album.
In Tundra Songs the most substantial work here, the story being told is of the Arctic, its soundscape, animals and peo-ple. The telling accumulates several layers including Charke’s Nunavut field recordings and his polished string quartet score brought to life by Kronos’ brilliant string playing. Also featured in the sweeping mix are studio-produced sounds, a regional origin myth, and a star turn vocal performance by Tagaq who just won a 2015 JUNO Award for her album Animism. As the North becomes more readily accessible – I did my first Arctic Skype sessions last year – so too the world is slowly learning to open its ears and hearts to its remarkable music and musicians.
