Traditional
Music
Concerts & Festivals
Dances & Weddings
Classes & Workshops
Sound Samples & CDs
Travel Writing
Dance to Your Shadow
Excerpts
Scotland
Arctic Canada
Georgia Sea Islands
Wildlife Programs
Museum Programs
School Programs
Photography Classes
Research Projects
Wildlife Quiz
buy the CD
Wild Wood
More from Arctic Canada
More from Chapter 11: The Lessons
To witness throat-singing is to stand between two halves of a heartbeat. To sing it is to release your voice into the pulse.
I had listened to recordings, watched videos, seen live demonstrations, and even observed mother and child practicing together. But until I let go of reason and fear and stepped into the rhythmic stream of sound, I did not understand the value of hearing Inuit voices speak.
The give and take of breath and sound comes first. It’s a little like rowing a boat with a partner, or operating a two man saw. To do it well, you and your partner must find a single rhythmic instinct.
It is so difficult–-and so critical–-to create a fluid, seamless flow of sound with your partner, that the traditional way to learn and perform throat-singing is to stand with your faces close together. Sometimes partners hold each others arms or hands while singing. Always your breath brushes against your partner’s face.
There is something intimate and personal in this sharing of space, that somehow allows for a little more trust as you sing. With less consciousness and more intuition, you learn to respond to subtle intentions of breath and sound. You begin to fill the spaces of your partner’s rhythm as if it were your own, and their intuition fills the rhythm of your pauses as well.
And then there is the sound itself. At first, to the untrained ear, it seems like a random series of tones, sighs, grunts and whispers. But the sounds are not random at all, they are a finely tuned set of traditional expirations, carefully controlled and passed on from one generation to the next. When Madeleine was four years old, her grandmother Minnie gave her a sound to practice. One bright summer morning thirty years later, Madeleine gave the sound to me.
"Hum-MAH" she whispered, her lips barely moving as the sound echoed from her chest."Homh-MoH" I repeated helplessly.
"Hum-MAH" the soft sound came again.
"Huumm-MMH" I struggled.
"Hum-MAH" she touches my fingers to her throat so I can feel how the sound is made.
"Hum-MMH" I adjust.
"Hum-MAH" patiently, softly.
"Hum-MAH" I see a tiny smile cross her eyes as I make the sound correctly.
"Hum-MAH...Hum-MAH...Hum-MAH..." She sets up the rhythm and pacing for me.
"Hum-MAH...Hum-MAH...Hum-MAH...Hum-MAH..." I concentrate on repeating the sound and close my eyes. I know that I’ll get it wrong again, and she will correct me again, softly. It takes a lifetime to learn all the sounds, where they fall in your chest and throat, and how they cross your lips. It is a language. As my first sound finds its balance in the air, Madeleine steadies herself in front of me and adds her voice to mine.
"Hum Hum MAH MAH Hum Hum MAH MAH Hum Hum MAH MAH..."
The sound staggers, falters, and then begins to merge. I open my eyes and smile at her as we continue, alternating breath and sound, push and pull, whisper and word. I search her face for clues, scan my voice for corrections, over-think, get confused, and stop. Immediately she laughs.
"That was good!" She giggles. Laughter is a traditional part of Inuit throat-singing. It is a game, an exercise in focus and adjustment, which naturally builds a sort of happy tension between the singers. When it ends, no matter how it ends, both partners laugh a little in release.
Repeating the exercise until I have a steady pattern, Madeleine begins to add the next element to the song: tone. Substituting a soft melodic note for one of her syllables each time, she creates a sound from our two voices that is more than the sum of its parts. Even I can feel it–-it seems like more than two people are singing. Varying the tone from place to place in the pattern creates a wonderful layer of counterpoint to the rhythmic scheme. It is a vocal dialog of air and tone and percussion.
One day, when I am a more experienced throat-singer, I will learn to follow her tones and add a diabolically clever element of gamesmanship to the song. Competitions in this style can go on for hours at festivals, as they have for centuries in the Arctic on long, cold nights.
But for now, I am content to begin working on my simple skills of making the right sound at the right time, and keeping it steady so that Madeleine can weave a beautiful line of tonal color into the rhythmic texture of our song.
One after another, she teaches me new sounds that I must practice, sing correctly, and hold steady against the new tones she produces. The geese, the saw, the poor little puppy–-many of the songs have names, and are an imitation of sounds in nature or sounds in the village. Some are improvised, but most are from a body of traditional throat-singing which has regional variants and recognizable standards. The Greatest Hits of Inuit Throat-singing. Trot out the old standards and the crowd goes wild. There is so much to learn.
Transitions from one song into the next are another important part of the tradition. I can only listen now while Madeleine explains and describes them to me, I’m in far over my head already.
But I can see from here that the art of Inuit throat-singing is a richly complex tradition which, like no other singing I have ever experienced, is wholly dependent on oral transmission. It absolutely requires the touch, breath, and patient closeness of another human being to learn. I am overwhelmed by it, and incredibly grateful to have been introduced to it.
When I study music, record it, write about it, or teach it in workshops, it’s important to me to put the music into its cultural context. Work songs, lullabies, songs of war or grief or celebration–-learning the history and place a song occupies in the culture is a critical part of learning to sing it.
But the cultural context of Inuit music is not just about the situations in which the songs are sung. It is also about the social relationship between singers. It’s about understanding the people and the land that created this unique vocal form, and the beautiful sounds of the Inuktitut language. Those things affect the way you express the feelings of the music, and they affect the way you produce the sounds with your singing partner. It is what makes this music Inuit.
I began to understand, finally, why you cannot learn Inuit music from words on a page, or from a recording, or even simply by taking throat-singing lessons from a teacher. The music is part of the culture, and the culture part of the music. Of course, you can say that about the music of any culture. But the lesson had never meant so much to me as when I learned it through throat-singing.
I had spent a lot of time worrying that I couldn’t find someone who was willing to help an outsider learn music of the Inuit culture. I was privileged to get a small glimpse into the window of that culture and music during my time on Baffin, and it made me hungry for more. In the end I began to understand why singers are reluctant to try and share it when someone asks. It’s simply too big to hold in your arms–-how can you hand it to someone?
CD Project
The songs that inspired the book Dance to Your Shadow
Book a
Presentation
And demonstration of mouth music for your group or
event