Circumpolar Music Series

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 UAF 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 UAF. 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 UAF 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.

UAF’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.