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Inuksuit

by Dr. Sean Dowgray, CMS Faculty Organizer and Term Assistant Professor of Music

This month, members of the UAF Percussion Group and the Inu-Yupiaq Dance Group will travel to Indianapolis, Indiana to present to an international community of over 6,000 musicians, students, teachers, and professionals in the percussive and performing arts world. The UAF Percussion Group will partake in a performance of John Luther Adams’s momentous work, , while the Inu-Yupiaq Dancers will perform their own song and dance on both Friday, 11/14, and Saturday, 11/15. This is a wonderful opportunity for UAF students to interact with an international community and represent Fairbanks and ����ֱ�� more broadly.

It started in July, when the Percussive Arts Society International Convention (PASIC) released an announcement programming John Luther Adams’s Inuksuit as the focal piece of their 50th Anniversary celebration. Composed in 2013, Inuksuit is a concert-length work for percussion intended to be performed outdoors. Its instrumentation consists of “Calls” (conch shell trumpets, Tibetan trumpets, airhorns, plastic horns), “Clangs” (handbells, chimes, Tibetan cymbals), friction sounds (rubbed stones, sandpaper blocks, maracas, rattles, shakers), skin drums (tom-toms, snare drums, bass drums), resonant metals (cymbals, tam-tams, triangles, hand bells), glissandi (sirens, tam-tams dipped in water, timpani), and bird songs performed on glockenspiels.

As Adams describes in the program note:

Inuksuit is a concert-length work for percussion, in which the performers are widely dispersed and move throughout a large, open area. The listeners, too, may move around freely and discover their own individual listening points. This work is intended to expand our awareness of the never-ending music of the world in which we live, transforming seemingly empty space into a more fully experienced place.

Each performance of Inuksuit is different, determined by the size of the ensemble, the specific instruments chosen, and by the topology and vegetation of the site. There is no master score. Rather, a folio containing a collection of musical materials and possibilities for musicians to use in creating a unique realisation of the work.

Inuksuit invites exploration and discovery of the relationship between the music and the site, as well as the musicians' interactions with both. The musicians are encouraged to consider carefully the selection of instruments, the distribution of performers, and the acoustical properties of the performance site.

A general outline of the piece shows five distinct sections performed by three different groups of percussionists. Within each section, there is specific notation instructing the percussionists what to play and when:

 

This is a great work to bring an international community together in performance (with just 4 days to do so) to commemorate PASIC as a bedrock of the percussive world, especially as the work takes performers out of the concert hall and into the natural environment where wood is with wood, stone with stone, and metal with metal. But it is also an opportunity for so much more, given the primary inspiration of Inuksuit. As Adams notes:

Inuksuit is inspired by the stone sentinels constructed over the centuries by the Inuit in the windswept expanses of the Arctic. The word ‘Inuksuit’ translates literally: ‘to act in the capacity of the human.’ This work is haunted by the vision of the melting of the polar ice, the rising of the seas, and what may remain of humanity's presence after the waters recede.

Adams lived in Fairbanks from 1978 until about 2014, initially working as a percussionist and environmental activist. WIth encouragement from Gordon Wright, he played timpani in the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra, and in exchange, Wright . Since then, he has received the Pulitzer Prize (2015), a Grammy (2015), and numerous fellowships and honors.

It’s hard to imagine where Adams’s life may have led had he not taken that leap from California to ����ֱ��. Even more impossible to imagine is the direction his compositional identity may have taken without the influence and inspiration of the ����ֱ��n landscape and its inhabitants. Adams makes a clear distinction about his relationship between music and this place when he says, “I don’t think of my music as being about ����ֱ��. I think of it as coming from ����ֱ��,” a subtle but very important distinction to make. Given this, I felt a strong motivation for the UAF Percussion Group to travel to Indianapolis to perform as part of this instantiation of Adams’s work, not only to have the experience of performing with an international conglomerate of musicians, but to serve as cultural ambassadors to a group of performers of whom many have never been to the Arctic regions of the world. The students of the UAF Percussion Group play on the same stage Adams once did. They live, study, and work within the same landscape that inspired and propelled Adams’s compositional career. The percussion studio also continues to feature Adams’s works, including a recent performance of Drums of Winter for percussion quartet and Mathematics of Resonant Bodies for percussion and electronics. Therefore, these students won’t just impact PASIC with their musical artistry, but with their lived experience in this place.

As the prospect of traveling to Indianapolis developed, I felt that sending the percussion studio to represent UAF and ����ֱ�� was not a full representation of this place. Given the title of Adams’s piece, Inuksuit, a strong representation of ����ֱ�� Native culture at PASIC is not just desirable, but necessary. Having worked with Assistant Professor of Iñupiaq Language, Chelsey Zibell, and the Inu-Yupiaq Dance Group just last November on a multi-faceted performance (), this was an opportunity to continue and expand our collaborative efforts together. The Inu-Yupiaq Dance Group was formed in 1995 by and dances to Yup’ik, Inupiaq, and Siberian Yupik songs. The group’s exciting, youthful, and dedicated energy is apparent at the outset of any performance they give, which you can see from , for example. The Inu-Yupiaq Dance Group will first present for the performers of Inuksuit (over 150 anticipated to play) on Friday evening with the intent of bringing the Arctic to these international players who, in turn, will then perform a piece that comes from that same place. This is an opportunity for these international musicians to experience the source of Adams’s compositional inspiration directly, while also witnessing how very different the priorities of ����ֱ�� Native music are compared to the stylistic features and creative priorities of contemporary Western music practices, which are well embedded in Adams’s work. I hope it will raise questions concerning how we think, feel, and give voice to the Arctic region of the world, and how contemporary Western music communities incorporate different creative and ritual practices.

Following this Friday evening exchange between performance groups, the Inu-Yupiaq Dance Group will then open the Saturday afternoon performance, PASIC’s primary 50th anniversary event, which is to be held outside at the White River State Park. Following their performance, the UAF Percussion Group will take part in the performance of Inuksuit, alongside fellow national and international percussionists.

With this event, there are many firsts that will occur. This is the first time the Inu-Yupiaq Dance Group will perform outside of ����ֱ��. It is the first time each student member of the UAF Percussion Group (Troy Irish, Jack Greenwell, Adrian Ducat, and Sadie Richert) will attend and perform at PASIC. And it is the first time that PASIC will feature an ����ֱ�� Native dance group. I have known that this year marks the 50th anniversary of this important convention, but only recently realized it is also the 30th anniversary of the Inu-Yupiaq Dance Group. With this, we are beyond excited to celebrate in the spirit of music, cultural sharing, and collaboration - three integral pillars of the Circumpolar Music Series.

 

 

 

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About the Author

Dr. Sean Dowgray is a classical percussionist specializing in modern and contemporary music. Dowgray is a proponent of creative collaborations which has resulted in recent musical works by Daniel Tacke (Vorrücken and einsamkeit), Josh Levine (Shrinking world/expanding and Les yeux ouverts) as well as new chamber works by Justin Murphy-Mancini (Sic itur ad astra and A Song of Grecis.) and Lydia Winsor Brinadmour (As if, sand). In the recent past, Dowgray has collaborated closely with composers including Jürg Frey (Garden of Transparency), Christopher Adler (Strata), Ioannis Mitsialis (Machine Mode), Lewis Nielson (Where Ashes Make the Flowers Grow and NOVA), and James Wood (Cloud Polyphonies). As a soloist, Dr. Dowgray has focused extensively on works that stretch the technical and expressive capabilities of both instrument and performer. This includes the work of Jason Eckardt, Josh Levine, Daniel Tacke, Salvatore Sciarrino, Lewis Nielson, David Lang, Christopher Adler, Brian Ferneyhough, Luciano Berio, Richard Barrett. Dowgray has been featured as a soloist at the Oberlin Percussion Institute, the Percussive Art Society International Convention (PASIC), the WasteLAnd New Music Series, Harvard’s Institute for Advanced Learning, the University of Arizona, the SoundON New Music Festival, and Eureka! Musical Minds of California. As a creative practitioner, Dowgray has focused recently on his project, WHEN for mixed ensemble set to premiere in 2025. He recently completed the interdisciplinary collaboration, In A Time of Change: Boreal Forest Stories featuring artists and scientists. As part of this collaboration, Dowgray created the work Moving Through the Boreal Forest in partnership with Maïté Agopian (light and shadow work) and Daryl Farmer (poetry), Associate Professor of English at UAF. Dr. Dowgray is a graduate of the Interlochen Arts Academy where he studied with John Alfieri, the Oberlin Conservatory (B.M.) where studied with Michael Rosen, the ����ֱ�� (M.M.) where he studied with Dr. Morris Palter, and the University of California San Diego (D.M.A) where he studied with Steven Schick. In Dr. Dowgray's dissertation, Time Being: Percussion as a Study of Time, he presents an analyses of new and rarely heard works for and with percussion through theoretical frameworks of time study from authors including Jonathan Kramer, J.T. Fraser, Edward T. Hall, and others. Recent notable performances include John Corigliano's percussion concerto, Conjurer with the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and Lewis Nielson's Lengua Encubierto for solo percussion at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention (PASIC).