Programme Note by Ole Jørgen Hammeken and Galya Morrell
In ARCTICA, Symphony No. 4 the libretto flows in a stream of consciousness that mingles Kalaallisut, Inuktitut, and other Arctic tongues. It draws on Irinaliurutiit—magic songs and formulas by which shamans summon Tuurngait (helping spirits) to journey beyond time and space. These incantations often comprise fragmented phrases that recall an era when humans still understood the language of animals.
The symphony charts an Angakok’s metaphysical voyage through five states of awareness and nine epochs, from the present day back to a world before humans. Along the way the shaman encounters Moon, Sun, Wind, and Light Spirits; boredom’s own spirit; ancient giants; and myriad animal souls. The destination is Sedna, Mother of the Sea—guardian of life’s renewal in the realm the Inuit call Issittormiut nunaat: Arctica.
Yet the Arctic’s most spectral voice is the climate itself—a vast, breathing archive whose pages melt before our eyes. Where once the pack ice groaned with slow, ancient rhythms, it now fractures like glass beneath a silent hammer. Storm tracks drift off course, bringing rain where snow should fall, and the permafrost—keeper of millennia-old stories—thaws into murmuring rivers that release methane ghosts aloft. For the Inuit, these upheavals are not headlines but ruptures in a fragile covenant: when sea ice fails, hunting songs fall silent; when caribou paths shift, ancestral narratives lose their compass. ARCTICA gathers these tremors and amplifies them, reminding us that the planet’s fever is measured first in the skipped heartbeats of cultures who read the sky like scripture.
Words falter in the Far North. Arctic nouns can stretch longer than freight trains, while many Western abstractions—war, possession, even “music”—find no equivalent. In boreal speech one more often says sound. The sounds of the Arctic—ice groaning, wind keening, water dripping from glacier walls—form the living core of Auerbach’s score.
ARCTICA translates the invisible: it balances on that abandoned cliff, listens for voices buried under snow, and lets them resound through chorus, orchestra, and the wordless memory of ancient stone.
High atop a red-volcanic cliff that overlooks the kaleidoscopic icebergs of Disko Bay once lay Angakkussarfik, Greenland’s legendary shaman-training ground. Here young Angakkut—future Arctic shamans—endured years of silence, hunger, and polar cold, learning to perceive what lies beyond the visible horizon. Balanced on the cliff’s edge, they rubbed stone against stone for hours, days, even years until the moment of revelation arrived. Only through great deprivation could they gain great vision.
When their human skins finally loosened, the Angakkut might soar as eagles, dive beneath sea-ice as whales, or travel among the stars. Transcendent light poured into their emptied bodies, letting them peer through mountains and converse with bears, walruses, and spirits. Some never returned fully to human form.
Millennia ago the ancestors of today’s Inuit—nomads from Central Asia—left verdant valleys and journeyed ever northward in search of their promised land. They crossed the Bering Strait and pressed on across shifting sea-ice in months-long darkness, infants bundled in anorak hoods, elders in tow. How did they navigate without maps or compasses? They had their Angakoks.
These voyagers owned no coins, clocks, or passports, yet they were entirely self-reliant. They travelled for seasons on bare ice, guided by the flicker of a seal-oil lamp and by an art of balance taught to every Arctic child before the first step or first word. Balance, say boreal peoples, sustains the universe: rocks, humans, animals, and spirits once existed in harmonious interchange. A man could become an iceberg, marry a fox, sire a baby whale. With no hard borders between kingdoms, death itself had no dominion.
Today sled dogs still lilt across the snow and hunters still slip kayaks into black water, but the shamanic lineage has all but vanished. Colonial “civilisation” branded old values demonic: extended families were torn apart, children sent to boarding schools, drum-dancers exiled, shamans outlawed. The red cliff is deserted now; few dare climb to glimpse what lies behind the horizon.
Thanks to the field notes of explorer Knud Rasmussen, who documented rituals, songs, and drawings across the Arctic, fragments of this heritage survive. And thanks to composer-explorer Lera Auerbach, we can once more ascend that cliff—this time through sound.