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Dance to Your Shadow:  Chasing a Song Across the World

    The following excerpts are from travel in Arctic Canada on Baffin Island, including a sound

sample for Inuit throat-singing described in Chapter 11.  (All material copyrighted, no copy

or re-print is authorized without written permission of the author.)

    For general information about the book click here.  To contact Pam call (510) 530-7826

or e-mail  pamswan@pamswan.com

From Chapter 9:    Atiq

    Madeleine Allakariallak kneels quietly at the top of a windy ridge, picking tender qungulit

leaves that force themselves up through the hard Arctic tundra between patches of summer

snow.  "Eat these," she smiles, holding out a handful of velvety leaves and stems, red and green

confetti against her soft brown skin. "They’re sweet like candy," she beams. "But you can only

find them for a few weeks each year, when the weather’s warm like this."

    I glance at my pocket thermometer reading 22F, and smile beneath my woolly scarf. For

Madeleine it’s a balmy summer day, but my wimpy internal California thermostat won’t register

this as anything like July. There are icebergs in the bay below us, and snow on the ridges all

around. The Canadian wind puffs and howls past our parkas, and I haven’t been able to feel my

nose since we left her house

to explore the stone covered hills of Baffin Island. Yet in a way I do feel oddly warm standing on

this rocky ridge, blasted by a crooked sun and floating in the cobalt blue of an Arctic sky.

    From the hooded pouch in Madeleine’s sealskin parka, 13 month old Jack stretches his hand

out to me and coos softly. I pretend to bite his chubby fingers, and he giggles and holds onto my

hair as Madeleine and I climb the ridgeline above Iqaluit on a clear summer afternoon. Jack is

Madeleine’s third child, her first boy.

    He is also her grandmother.

    In the Inuit way, Jack carries more than just the name of Madeleine’s late grandmother Minnie–-

he also carries her identity, the spiritual element that is in her name. Her atiq. He has nine names,

 each of which connects him to a web of relationships with people in the community. For Madeleine,

 it is her grandmother Minnie, for a woman in another village, it is the name he bears of her late

 husband, and on and on with each of this little boy’s names.

    I am fascinated by this, although I do not fully understand. So I ask Madeleine, her mother,

other elders I meet, to teach me about atiq. The answers come slowly, as Inuit answers always do–-

freely, but without urgency for me to understand. I will or I won’t. Either is good, in the Inuit view,

and there is time.

From Chapter 11:  The Lessons

    There’s a softness and carefulness about Inuit speech patterns, and after a while, I noticed that I was

 responding to people a little differently too, trying unconsciously to fit in to the rhythm of Inuit

vocal interaction.

    As a friend of mine says–-I was learning a new intuition.

    I could feel it in the pace of my speech, and even in the rhythm of my thoughts. The teacher in me

 was fascinated by this pattern, and I wanted to understand it better. I wish I had more opportunity to

 follow the curve of that change once I recognized it, but my time on Baffin was coming to an end and

 we had to move on to the next part of my training.

    The day had come for me to try, and fail, and try again to apply the things I had learned to the art

 of Inuit throat-singing. As Madeleine worked with me patiently that first night, I imagined the

extraordinary kindness it must have taken to teach an adult a skill normally taught to a young child.

It was as if she was teaching me to tie my shoes, or write my name for the first time.

    I truly envy the children who learn this music at their mother’s knee, as I had watched her

daughter Natashia do–-she’s a veteran throat-singer at eight years old–-synchronizing her sounds to

the rhythmic waves of music coming from Madeleine’s mouth only inches away from her own.

    It made so much sense to me that little Jack, playing on the floor or being carried in a pouch on

Madeleine’s back, would instinctively insert bursts of baby talk–-baby song–-into the spaces left by

her music. It is exactly the way we acquire language, and exactly the way we develop social

connections to others when we don’t know the language. Fill in the spaces left open by example.

In the safety of your teacher’s company, abandon self-awareness, and imitate, create, perform.

    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.   Click here for sound sample.

"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 Throatsinging. 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 Inuktituit 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?