Album review: historical Inuit recordings let listeners eavesdrop on another world

In the isolated frozen wastes of the far north, the Inuit carved out their own haunting songs. A new compilation of historical recordings of the music gives a revelation into their harsh but vibrant lives.

An Inuit from Alaska with a traditional drum. Alaskan Inuit are similar culturally and musically to those from Greenland and Canada. Buyenlarge / Getty Images.
Powered by automated translation

In the sleeve-note booklet that accompanies the compilation Inuit: 55 Historical Recordings of Traditional Music from Greenland 1905-1987, Frenchman and Inuit scholar Guy Bordin quotes from Songs of the Copper Eskimos, D Jenness's text about his experiences while recording Inuit music in Arctic Canada between 1914-1916.

“The Copper Eskimos were not acquainted with a phonograph prior to this time,” wrote Jenness in 1925, mentioning the primitive, Thomas Edison-invented cylinder device he had used to record his subjects’ voices. “They thought a spirit was reproducing their words and were at first quite nervous about singing into the machine.”

The Inuit compilation includes music from across Greenland and parts of Arctic Canada (Alaskan Inuit are culturally and musically similar, although their music is not on the collection), and because of its considerable historical significance it is being reissued this month by the Brussels, Belgium-based label Sub Rosa. Naturally, formats include CD but this is the first time the set is available on vinyl.

Listening to it, it’s hard not to be transported by some of its older recordings. Coming to us across the frozen wastes and across the years, they are magical documents of a unique Inuit culture borne out of splendid, sometimes testing isolation.

“Songs of the drum-song tradition [known as Inngerutit] were formerly an integral part of life in Greenland,” writes Danish ethnomusicologist Michael Hauser, the other key contributor to the sleeve-notes. “Not only did people sing at feasts; they sang when they were out sealing, when they were at home, [or] when they felt sorrow, anger or joy.”

It is interesting to note, however, that love, that go-to theme of songwriters since time immemorial, doesn’t really figure as a topic in the music of Inuit composers. There are songs here about kayaks, “duel” songs, “entertaining” songs, “charm” songs and “teasing” songs but there is nothing of the “boy meets girl” variety. Inuit songs, you soon notice, all seem to have a practical function or application. The 55-pieces of music on offer are largely a cappella compositions, but some, especially those from North Greenland and Canada, also feature the qilaut, a wooden frame-drum of caribou skin whose name translates as “that by which the spirits are called up”.

Traditionally, the qilaut was struck with a stick known as a gatuk, the singers of the songs accompanying themselves. The resultant rhythms, which are very distinctive and fairly uniform here across different songs, are quite unlike those that most of us are used to. Still, even if one is sometimes reminded of the movements of windscreen-wipers, or some kind of foreign body rattling errantly in a broken washing machine, there is undoubtedly a certain charm to Inuit drumming. With our without rhythmic accompaniment, most of these Inuit songs are less than a minute long and few of them last longer than two minutes.

The Inuit language Kalaallisut divides the songs into various sub-genres. Hence there are, for example, anersaatit (“songs expressing mood or feelings; often with beautiful nature descriptions”), aqaati (“charm” songs sung for children), and uaajermeq (the so called “game” songs of East Greenland, which often involved role play).

It's also refreshing to learn that, long, long before the Inuit hip-hop band Nuuk Posse emerged from Nuuk, Greenland, in 1991, Inuit music had its own precursor to the kind of "rap battles" portrayed in, say, the Eminem biopic 8 Mile. Pisit is the Kalaallisut term for the kind of "duel" songs that were popular in East Greenland. Such songs were reportedly a civilised and entertaining way to settle disputes in public without resorting to violence. A crowd would watch two singers take it in turns to point out each other's failings and weaknesses, and the Inuk who came up with the funniest insult was deemed the winner.

One of the songs on Inuit: 55 Historical Recordings of Traditional Music from Greenland 1905-1987 is in fact a lullaby, but you wouldn't necessarily guess it from the fairly stentorian approach of Olga Maratse, the Inuit woman singing it. The 46-second fragment was recorded by the Danish ethnomusicologist Poul Rovsing Olsen in Semilgaaq, East Greenland, in 1961, and we're told that the lyric is about "a horrible dog and may seem more frightening than soothing".

One wonders, all the same, what Maratse would have thought of our own Rock-a-Bye Baby, wherein an infant sleeping in a treetop cradle comes tumbling down to earth after a branch breaks. Hardly the stuff of sweet dreams, either.

Hauser makes the point that each Inuit song was "regarded as a part of the [composer's] soul, and was therefore his personal property for as long as he lived". No copyright issues in the Inuit oral tradition, then. The CD's inclusion of two versions of the same song recorded 75 years apart is also fascinating. The recording that Norwegian ethnomusicologist Christian Leden made of local man Ihré singing his own song, Ihré's Song, dates from 1909 and the voyage that Leden made to Dundas, Greenland, with polar scientist Knud Rasmussen. Fast forward to 1984 and the version that Navssapuluk Sadoranna sang for Hauser in Qaanaaq in north-west Greenland, and very little has changed, save for the quality of the recording and the fact Sadoranna accompanies himself on gilaut.

This near-perfect mapping of a song across the years without recourse to any kind of notation and without access to a recording, Hauser argues, was possible because of the stringency applied when songs were passed from Inuk to Inuk: “Slovenliness was frowned upon: the song had to be rehearsed carefully and sang in the right style exactly as it has been composed.”

Inuit: 55 Historical Recordings of Traditional Music from Greenland 1905-1987 bears testament to the enduring power of the Inuit oral tradition and to the pioneering, early-20th century explorers and ethnomusicologists who managed to document it in difficult circumstances. When you listen to the Dane William Thalbitzer's 1906 recording of a Tasiilaq, southeastern Greenland woman's Duel Song, you are touching base with a long-lost world.

James McNair writes for Mojo magazine and The Independent.