Into the Arctic

Annie Kappianak

Numbers 64 and 65 of the Top 100 2012 happen to belong to the same series of recording and come from the same album: Songs of the Inuit Iglulik. Both songs were recorded by Jean-Jacques Nattiez in 1977. That the songs appear next to one another in the list is a coincidence; I do not place the songs into the list as I fancy, the songs appear by virtue of a number system. Both the Huangahaaq (#65) and the Nirdliruyartak (#64) happened to end up with the exact same number of points. Both Huangahaaq and Nirdliruyartak are a form of throat singing games but different from katajjait (a song style). Compared to the dozens of katajjait recordings that have featured in recent top 100s they were also recorded further north from the Hudson Bay area most katajjait originated from. Number 64 was recorded in Pond Inlet and 65 in Iglulik. Both locations are close to one another and well inside the Arctic Circle. The Inuit: Iglulik cd is well documented. It comes with a 55 page booklet with numerous illustrations, all photographs by Jean-Jacques Nattiez. The photo of Annie Kappianak (together with Rose Iquallijuk) that appears in the booklet is the only throat game song illustrated though and is of the performer of number 65 be it with a different partner than on the recording. Kappianak teams up with Jeanne Amainuk on a Huangahaaq game. The song "is not based on a text but on the juxtaposition of syllables or words, connected more for their sonorous qualities than for telling a story." "The game consists of making the partner lose [his] seriousness, using diverse modulations of the word hang. The women pull wry faces."

Iglulik Inuit, Jean-Jacques Nattiez

The nirdliruyartak is similar to the katajjait of Northern Quebec. The nirdliruyartak is a complex game of alternating high and low sounds and is difficult to learn. The sounds are made while both inhaling and exhaling. The high sequence of sounds is called nirdliruyartak, which means goose cry, and is the name of the game. The image I used for this song does not appear in the cd booklet but appears in Inuit Throat-Games and Siberian Throat Singing: A Comparative, Historical, and Semiological Approach by Jean-Jacquez Nattiez. [University of Montreal, 1999] The women in the photo by Nattiez are not identified by name but are Iglulik.

Jean-Jacques Nattiez

Rekutkar performers
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

Jean-Jacques Nattiez
14 x 11 inches, oil and spray paint on canvas, 2019

For the obvious reason of similarity in style I assumed that the three vocal throat singing traditions, the Inuit katajjait, the Ainu rekutkar, and the Chukchi pič eynen, found within the arctic circle must be related and/or have a common ancestor. I recently signed up for JSTOR, an online database of scholarly research papers and lo and behold the relationships have of course been studied at length. I am now the proud owner of a wealth of information about this subject. The paper I am referencing here is Inuit Throat-Games and Siberian Throat Singing: A Comparative, Historical, and Semiological Approach by Jean-Jacques Nattiez. I've also downloaded the liner notes to the cd Canada: Inuit Games and Songs produced by Nattiez. In these notes I am now able to identify all singers of katajjait in the Top 100 (there are many) that were previously anonymous. The two paintings presented here are to illustrate Imitation of the Cries of Geese and Assalalaa, the recordings were made by at Baffin Land  by Nicole Beaudry and Claude Charon in the mid seventies. The painting for Assalalaa I was working on from a photograph found by an image search of the terms katajjait combined with Jean-Jacques Nattiez represents not Inuit but Ainu singers. I intuited this was the case since I had not seen katajjait performed sitting down while the pose was the same as in my painting of rekutkar. The image I used was originally taken by I. Kurosawa (used by William P. Malm in 1963) and reproduced in Nattiez' paper. There's a hint of the Scottish flag in the bottom third of the painting that appeared when the thought of painting the flag arose. I never reject a thought but I obscured it later on as both the flag in form and meaning had really nothing to do with what I was painting. What I am most interested in is the history of these three vocal styles and its (ancient) origins. Nattiez hints in his paper at a possible shamanic origin of said vocal styles but it is hard to establish sound evidence for this hypothesis. Scientific papers do not, per definition, use incidental inferences.
Jean-Jacques Nattiez was born in Amiens, France, 30 December 1945. He is a musical semiologist and professor at the Université Montréal. He was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1990.

Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. "Inuit Throat-Games and Siberian Throat Singing: A Comparative, Historical, and Semiological Approach." Ethnomusicology 43, no. 3 (1999): 399-418. doi:10.2307/852555.