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Wild Shore New Music

Wild Shore New Music celebrates 11 seasons in Alaska with performances by Dr. Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk and Alaskan musicians, premiering "For Zitkála-Šá Series" by Raven Chacon.

Sounds of the Changing Arctic

Three Juneau-based composers—Todd Hunt, Beth Leibowitz, and Michael Bucy—will premiere climate-inspired works in Fairbanks, collaborating with ������ scientists and local musicians.

Several years ago I encountered the Yup’ik phrase “When I first became aware.” Immediately I thought, “That was what happened to me in Fairbanks.” I was ten years old when my family moved there, in 1962—my father had taken a job in the English Department—so I had been conscious of myself and my surroundings for quite a while, but in Fairbanks I became aware in a different way that things mattered. Alaska makes its people rise to an occasion; it makes them want to be worthy of it. Among my classmates I’m sure I was an insufferable preadolescent faculty brat, but alone on the trails I was discovering I had a soul.

We lived there for only three years, and all I wanted in the world was to live there again, but by the time I muddled my way into knowing how to make a living I had personal commitments that made that impossible. I shared the memory of Alaska with my parents, but (as Gimli says in The Lord of the Rings) memory is not what the heart desires. What I wanted was a way of belonging to Fairbanks in real time—a way of going there as something other than a tourist. While working at a nonprofit in Massachusetts I discovered that donors were often interesting and imaginative people, who supported the institution not only with money but with intellectual energy; when I got old enough to have (to my astonishment) a bit more money than I needed, I started wondering whether I could do something with it at ������. It’s one thing to care about a place quietly and privately and painfully; it’s another to make something original happen there.

I didn’t know at first that it would be through music. Folk music has always been part of my life, both as a listener and as a performer, but primarily I’m a writer and could have gone in almost any direction. While looking through the ������ website I thought the most exciting programs and courses were those on circumpolar science and technology, circumpolar history, circumpolar ethnography, circumpolar law and policy, circumpolar art and culture—but there was a gap when it came to music. What I wanted to support, I realized, was circumpolar ethnomusicology—from the local wealth of Alaska Native music and dance to the undiscovered realms of indigenous and folk music across the circumpolar North. I especially wanted to introduce Fairbanksans to some of the beautiful Scandinavian music I’d found while searching at latitude 42 for music to remind me of latitude 65.

������’s Judith Kleinfeld says in Go For It!: Finding Your Own Frontier that if you want to do something in Alaska nobody will stop you. Mrs. Boko of Denali Elementary gave my sixth-grade class the word initiative and expected us to run with it. The Circumpolar Music Series is my response to those opportunities. I hope it will inspire others to explore and support the music of the North.