What Child Is This - PIQSIQ
From what I've read, Inuit throat singing isn't exactly a musical tradition. Traditionally, it's more of a rap (well, beatboxing) battle.
Two women stand face to face, close enough to hold each other's arms, and pass a rhythm back and forth, each filling the spaces where the other breathes. The loser is the one who breaks down laughing or misses a beat. The oral history doesn't recount when the tradition started, but it does say that the women would sing to entertain themselves and their children while the men were away on long hunts.
The Canadian Encyclopedia, in its page on Inuit Vocal Games, mentions, once, that:
Christian missionaries banned Inuit vocal games because they were thought to perpetuate non-Christian, non-white cultural practices.
This might have something to do with the gaps in the oral history.
PIQSIQ give voice to a lot of complicated feelings about this album, which is called Quviasugvik: In Search of Harmony. In an interview, they say that “Quviasugvik”, the Inuktitut word for Christmas time, is more directly translated as “happy time”. Which, of course, it isn’t for many people. From their description of this album:
What Child Is This is a chilling arrangement inspired by the sisters’ painful longing to comfort the children who were stolen away to experience their first Christmas in Residential Schools across the Arctic.
The ban on throat singing was lifted sometime in the early 1980s. Many artists and players of vocal games have been working to revive it since. This year, two teenage throat singers (that is, two people born in this millennium) created and performed in a short that appeared at the Sundance Film Festival. Earlier in 2019, a group of Inuit artists boycotted Canada’s aboriginal music awards over the nomination of a Cree musician who had used throat singing on her album. The group called themselves the Arnaqquasaaq Collective, which they explained in a Facebook post:
There is a little island outside of Iqaluit named Arnaqquasaaq. Inuit women and children used to have to stay there while Inuit men went to help the American army build the runway during the Cold War. The men would row between Arnaqquasaaq and shore every day.
They shared a photograph of the island, as well:
There's a tension between the sounds in this song. Delicate, almost choral harmonies set against the guttural rasping rhythm of air catching in throats. It's harsh and beautiful and uncomfortable, in a way that expresses something true. Quoting the artists’ description again:
[The album] is the PIQSIQ sisters’ attempt to stitch together these contrasting experiences and create harmony out of difficulty and struggle. The entirely lyric-less album highlights the haunting melodies of their most beloved carols, allowing them to be explored and enjoyed apart from the cutting Christian contexts that tear at their unabiding souls.
Yours in seasonal tension,
- Tessa