Giving Voice to the Arctic
by Alison Bowen, CLA Staff Writer
CLA Music Donor, Catherine Madsen, has her photo taken outside of the Davis Concert Hall before the start of the Circumpolar Music Series.
Catherine Madsen was only in Fairbanks for three years, but it left an impression on her for life.
When she was 10 years old, her family moved to Fairbanks in 1962 for her father’s job as an assistant professor in the English Department. Coming from Detroit, she loved the mountains, the landscapes, the way people “bonded with each other very strongly.”
“I’d never seen woods, I’d never seen mountains, you don’t do that in lower Michigan,” she said. “I’d never been anywhere that was dangerous to live.” Needing to know how to avoid frostbite, like when it was 20 below on Halloween their first year, was an adjustment.
Three years later, when they left, she wanted to go back immediately.
“I made my parents' lives a misery,” she jokes, always talking about wanting to move back to Alaska.
She kept trying to make her way back, and eventually, as an adult, she did, to visit but never to live. This time, she came back with meaning.
Even as an adult, she would look at the university’s webcam, finding, she recalls, “the very view that was etched on my soul.”
“I just was overcome with longing, and started going back,” she said. She would visit campus, enjoying the landscape again.
In 2020, finding herself with a bit more money than she was used to, she wanted to use it in a thoughtful way, one that could have a regular impact on others.
“Suddenly for the first time in my life I thought, ‘What do I want to do with this?’” she said.
Her experience working as a Bibliographer at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., had shown her what donations and funding projects could do. She’d known about many of the donors, people like celebrities funding entire projects but also people making small donations, and she had seen the inspiring results of what funding moments, from small to large, could do. Donors adopted bookshelves, often in memory of others. They would come to the center, visit the shelf, take a picture, sometimes cry.
“It was a very affecting experience,” she said. “I saw how little it took to really move people, to do what they could.”
With her extra funds, she thought about what she was passionate about, and UAF came to mind.
She looked through the UAF website, finding what they already offered as far as programs. She noticed the circumpolar projects – the International Arctic Research Center, the Native Art Center, the Alaska Native Language Center, the Arctic and Northern Studies Program.
The Circumpolar Music Series led by Term Assistant Professor, Sean Dowgray, accompanied by fellow Music Department students, faculty, and volunteers at the Davis Concert Hall, on Feb. 21, 2025.
CLA student Manny Melendez reads a poem before the next piece at the Circumpolar Music Series in the Davis Concert Hall, Feb. 21, 2025.
At the same time, she noticed a void to fill, that nothing like that existed in the music department. She herself enjoys music and sings folk music.
“So I thought, ‘This is really a pity,’” she recalled.
From her experience getting to know donors at the Yiddish Book Center, she had a hunch that if she was excited about something and offered funds toward it, others might get on board.
“You see a need and you say, ‘Oh I can do that,’ and you kind of jump on it,” she said. “If you’re enthusiastic, other people get interested too.”
In this way, Circumpolar Music Series was born.
She reached out to the development department, explaining she couldn’t endow a scholarship or chair, but perhaps they could create something with the music department. In that way, they began talks about a lecture concert series, beginning with a budget the first year of $5,000, which allowed them to bring in local dancers, something they still try and do every year. Eventually, the budget expanded, and starting in Fall 2025 they will be able to bring in artists from foreign countries. This spring, the series welcomes Asikłuk Topkok and the Pavva Iñupiaq Dancers, who will present Iñupiaq culture through song and dance.
Along with funding the series, she donates her time to educating others on music in the circumpolar North through blog articles for the university about the performances.
“Catherine's funding for CMS has opened the department, its students and faculty up to workshops, events, and lectures that would otherwise not be possible,” said Dr. Sean Dowgray, term instructor of percussion at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “As far as I am aware, there is no other university that offers an annual series focusing on music and arts from the circumpolar region of the world on a regular basis.”
They offer scholarly lectures, workshops, and public concert events rooted in the various identities in this region of the world, he added. “I think it's fascinating to offer a series that says, ‘We're looking at art and music that is rooted in the unique properties of this particular area of the Earth and its very distinctive physical features.’ This does happen within other geographies, but as far as I know, it is not as well established this far north.”
The series also serves as a building block in advancing the music program, he said, and embracing the geographic location.
Visiting and experiencing these performances, Madsen said, reminds her of being a kid and attending theater productions, concerts and movies.
Once when she created a musical program in a hospital, a doctor told her, “When you play music in a hospital, you’re playing to the part of people that’s not wounded or sick. You’re reminding them of who they are, not what they have.”
In this way, she said, indigenous music and its history are “bound up with life.” “There’s something life-giving about that kind of music.”
Others who may have extra funds they are wondering how to use, she recommends, should think about something they connect strongly with. “You can start small and build,” she said. “You have to take what comes and work with it.”
On one of her campus visits, she remembers seeing the banners saying, “You belong here.”
“And I sort of feel I do,” she said. “It may not have been aimed at me, but to be there not as a tourist, but as somebody who has a small influence.”
The Circumpolar Music Series led by Term Assistant Professor, Sean Dowgray, accompanied by fellow Music Department students, faculty, and volunteers at the Davis Concert Hall, on Feb. 21, 2025.