Live Events in March
Catherine Madsen
The Circumpolar Music Series goes into high gear in March with five live presentations,
all of which will take place in Davis Concert Hall and are free and open to the public.
On Thursday, March 7 at 11:30 a.m., the UAF Troth Yeddha' Dance Group will visit the Alaska Native Music course to demonstrate and discuss Athabaskan songs and dances. The group was established in 2011 by students who realized there was no Dene dance group on campus at the time. This joyful, high-energy group consists of students and community members representing various villages and tribes.
On Thursday, March 21 at 1:00 p.m., Seattle-based folk harper Beth Kollé will present on Nordic Folk Music, exploring the musical modes and rhythms that make the traditional music of Scandinavia distinctive. Beth has lived and worked in Norway, toured Iceland and Denmark, performed in Sweden, Finland and Estonia, and is one of the first American harpers to specialize in Scandinavian music. She founded the Harpa cultural exchange tours “to introduce harp players to Scandinavia and Scandinavia to harps.”
On Saturday, March 23 at 7:30 p.m. Beth’s solo recital will showcase her beautiful arrangements and demonstrate just how enchanting this music can be. If your experience of harp music has been mainly through the lush glissandos and arpeggios of the classical concert harp, you’ll hear something intriguingly different and very Northern in the dance tunes, love songs and dark ballads of Scandinavia.
On Thursday, March 28 at 11:30 a.m., Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk will visit the Alaska Native Music course to discuss Circumpolar Music and Dance. Dr. Senungetuk is a Kingikmiut Iñupiaq violinist and ethnomusicologist who grew up in Fairbanks in a distinguished artistic family. Now based at Emory University in Atlanta, she was the first postdoctoral researcher in Indigenous Studies at McGill University and the first postdoctoral fellow in Alaska Native Studies at UAA.
On Friday, March 29 at 7:30 p.m., Dr. Senungetuk will explore how circumpolar Indigenous song and dance forms express cultural traditions, ancestral ways of knowing, and connections between communities, as well as building connections across space and time by adapting forms from other world musics. Dr. Senungetuk has published important articles on the interface of music and modernity in Indigenous music, and her essay “Tavluġun atuutit: chin marking music” is included in Raven Chacon’s score For Zitkála-Šá.
Don’t miss these exciting contributions to the musical culture of Fairbanks!
Links to Events
Find out more information about all of these events on our Facebook page!
About the Author
Catherine Madsen is a writer, singer and folk harper now living in Michigan. The three years she spent in Fairbanks as a child (1962-65) were a turning point in her life, and she established the Circumpolar Music Series as a gift of gratitude.