1
Darcy Copeland
Dr. Stephen Rumph
MUHST 500
June 10, 2020
“RETRIBUTION WILL BE SWIFT”:
INDIGENOUS ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AND ENVIRONMENTALISM IN THE
MUSIC OF TANYA TAGAQ
Dating back to Ancient Greece, artists felt a desire to prove connections between music and nature, and thought about these relationships has been prevalent across a vast range of cultures and genres throughout the centuries. It wasn’t until the 1970’s, however, that critical thought about music and its relationships with nature began to emerge within the academy, mirroring a growing public concern with environmental issues. As Sabine Feisst states,
“ecologically motivated art dovetails public debates about environmental degradation, climate change, and growing desire for sustainable ecosystems.”1 Aaron S. Allen offers a name for this new field of critical thought: ecomusicology.2 The term stems from ecocriticism, a field of literature combining the study of environment within written works, and applies the eco-critical lens to musicology, which stems from the study of music and culture. Thus, ecomusicology may
1 Feisst, Sabine. "Music and Ecology." Contemporary Music Review: Music and Ecology Vol. 35, No. 3 (2016). p. 1.
2 Allen, Aaron S., and Dawe, Kevin. 2016. “Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature.” New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. 2 be more aptly referred to as ecocritical musicology—the critical study of nature, culture, and music.3
Ecological musical works have spanned from soundscapes and installation pieces to popular music and music videos to Western art songs and contemporary classical concert music.
No matter the genre, ecologically motivated works share some commonality. Feisst describes ecologically motivated works as “reflecting, on the one hand, the idea of interconnections of organisms and their relationship with inorganic components in a specific environment, and on the other hand, a critical or activist attitude towards human impact on the environment.”4 Many composers have taken inspiration from their environment to inform their music throughout the past century,—from Olivier Messiaen’s fascination with bird songs to Maggi Payne’s electronic soundscapes of the desert—which are a product of reflecting on the connections between the organic and inorganic. Numerous other composers, performers and artists have taken on the debate surrounding climate change through their music, spanning across a vast multitude of genres. John Luther Adams, who won the Pulitzer prize for music in 2014 for Become Ocean, seeks to make listeners aware of their inherent connection to nature and their role in its demise or revival by sonifying place in works such as Inuksuit and The Place Where You Go To Listen.
Icelandic singer Björk has expressed concern for environmental issues and connection to nature in albums such as Medúla (2004) and Biophilia (2011), the latter of which translates to “a love of
3 Allen, Aaron S. “Ecomusicology: Ecocriticism and Musicology.” Journal of the American Musicological Society , Vol. 64, No. 2 (2011). p. 1-2.
4 Feisst, Sabine. "Music and Ecology." Contemporary Music Review: Music and Ecology Vol. 35, No. 3 (2016). p. 1. 3 the natural world.”5 Experimental pop musician Grimes released an album earlier this year entitled Miss Anthropocene (2020), a conceptual narrative album in which the artist takes on the persona of a misanthropic demon celebrating climate change as a force of good, finding glee in humans oblivious destruction of the earth.6
Some recent scholarship has suggested a shift within the field of ecomusicology from the study of any musical works which derive from or connect to nature towards a more activist oriented study. Jeff Todd Titon has even gone so far as to expand upon Allen’s ubiquitous definition of ecomusicology, offering instead “the study of music, culture, sound and nature in a period of environmental crisis.”7 This change in verbiage implies a reprioritization of the goals of ecomusicology, suggesting that ecomusicologists look specifically at how music interacts with the anthropocene.
Anthropocene, the term decided upon to denote the period in which humans have had the most monstrous impact on the earth, has been considered a “complex and fraught term among
Indigenous peoples”8 in particular. Kate Galloway states that “the proposed ‘start’ of the era of the Anthropocene raises important questions concerning power, notions of time and which worldviews dominate the contemporary environmentalism.” Scholars such as David and Todd,
Lewis and Maslin, and Harroway and Kennedy argue that the true beginning of the anthropocene
5 Dibben, Nicola. "Music and Environmentalism in Iceland." In The Oxford Handbook of Popular Music in the Nordic Countries. Oxford University Press, 2017. np.
6 Mistry, Anupa. “Grimes’ Miss Anthropocene.” Pitchfork, 2020. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/ albums/grimes-miss-anthropocene/
7 Allen, Aaron S. “Ecomusicology: Ecocriticism and Musicology.” Journal of the American Musicological Society , Vol. 64, No. 2 (2011). p. 2.
8 Galloway, Kate. “The Aurality of Pipeline Politics and Listening for Nacreous Clouds: Voicing Indigenous Ecological Knowledge in Tanya Tagaq's Animism and Retribution.” Popular Music 39 (2020). p. 124. 4 coincides with setter-colonialism and global trade.9 Debates surrounding the anthropocene and climate change unfairly paint the picture that equal blame is to be shared on all inhabitants of the earth, further pushing a colonialist narrative that continues to disregard Native culture, philosophy, and way of living. The effects of the anthropocene are directly related to settler- colonialism, the removal and genocide of Indigenous people, disruption of Native ancestral land.
Further, the influence of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, culture, and philosophy has been overlooked in the critical study of ecologically motivated musical works, contributing to the ongoing removal of Indigenous voices from the global debate surrounding environmentalism and climate change. Tanya Tagaq, a prominent voice in ecological contemporary music, vehemently puts forth her Inuk heritage and activism in her environmentalist works. Her voicing of
Indigenous Ecological Knowledge as well as Indigenous culture and experience promotes a more equitable climate debate. In this paper, I seek to highlight the Indigenous Ecological Knowledge,
& culture present in Tanya Tagaq’s Animism (2014), Retribution (2016), and Sivunittinni (2015) as I explore these works with an ecomusicological lens.
Tanya Tagaq is an Inuk avant-garde composer, vocalist, and writer who is known for her use of katajjaq (Inuit throat singing) in her works, combining the technique with contemporary sounds and improvisation. She first gained fame on a global scale when touring with Björk in
2001, and appearing as a collaborating artist on Björk’s Medúlla by providing guest vocals on the track “Ancestors”, which also appeared on her own album, Sinna (2001). In 2014, she won the
Polaris Prize for Animism, and collaborated with Kronos Quartet in 2006 to create Nunavut, and again in 2016 as part of their Fifty for the Future commissioning initiative to compose Sivinnutti.
9 Ibid., 124. 5
While Tagaq is praised for her “innovative mixture of traditional and modern musical techniques”10, Tagaq’s katajjaq technique is far from traditional. Katajjaq is traditionally a vocal
“game” performed between two women. Galloway describes katajjaq as such:
“…two women participate in vocal exchange and mimicry, collaborating, improvising, and co-composing the vocal counterpoint until one participant laughs – a physical reaction signaling the end of a throat song. The structure and the semantic and sonic content of throat song mimics and evokes the local environment, incorporating words and syllables from nature and locale (e.g. place names, plant and animal species), onomatopoeic words and mimetic sounds representative of sounds heard in and absorbed from everyday life. Through the practice of throat singing, vocalists are grounded in a sense of belonging to the community, traditions and the environment.”11
Tagaq wasn’t raised practicing or learning katajjaq—it wasn’t until she went to study at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax that she began to experiment with the technique, listening to tapes that her mother sent her and mimicking the sounds.12 Without a partner to sing with, Tagaq instead forged an intimacy with the natural world in her songs, and used electronic sounds to layer her vocals, playing a game with herself. Tagaq explains during an interview with NPR's Talia Schlanger: “This [katajjaq] is part of a root of what I do but it isn’t
10 Pettigrew, A. (2014). UBC School of Music's Aaron Pettigrew on Tanya Tagaq. Retrieved from https://chancentre. com/news/ubc-school-of-musics-aaron-pettigrew-on-tanya-tagaq/
11 Galloway, Kate. “The Aurality of Pipeline Politics and Listening for Nacreous Clouds: Voicing Indigenous Ecological Knowledge in Tanya Tagaq's Animism and Retribution.” Popular Music 39 (2020). p. 128.
12 Ibid., 127. 6 traditional. Not even close. ... I don't adhere to the rules of traditional throat singing. ... I don't like following rules.”13
Animism
With Animism, Tagaq’s music came to the forefront of North American popular music, and her win of Canada’s prestigious Polaris Prize for the album revealed a “widespread awakening in Canada to Tagaq’s art and messages by non-Indigenous setter-descendant audiences”14. Tagaq uses katajjaq, electronic sounds, and western classical instruments to construct the sound world of the album, giving voice to the ecosystem, its inhabitants, and the earth itself. The thematic content of the album stems from Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, which “takes a holistic view of an ecosystem through a deep local knowledge of place shaped by lived experience, and that understands pollution from settler-colonial extractive industries as a form of colonialism.”15 Galloway explains further, “By relying on their intricate knowledge of the land – its plants, animals, water systems, climate, and topography – Indigenous people have developed important knowledge about ecological processes to live in harmony with the land and reciprocate.”16
Many of the track titles reference animals found in the Canadian wilderness, with some named after animals such as ‘Caribou’ and ‘Rabbit’, and others referencing animalistic actions,
13 Schlanger, Talia. (2017). Interview Tanya Tagaq on World Cafe. NPR. Retrieved from https:// www.npr.org/sections/world-cafe/ 2017/05/17/528657318/tanya-tagaq-on-world-café
14 Galloway, Kate. “The Aurality of Pipeline Politics and Listening for Nacreous Clouds: Voicing Indigenous Ecological Knowledge in Tanya Tagaq's Animism and Retribution.” Popular Music 39 (2020). p. 128.
15 Ibid., 131.
16 Ibid., 131. 7 such as ‘Howl’, ‘Flight’, and ‘Fight’. Other tracks, such as ‘Genetic Memory’, refer to the
Ecological Knowledge shared by Indigenous communities and carried over through generations.
In naming these tracks in reference (and reverence) to the non-human environment, Tagaq seeks not simply to provide a musical representation of the environment or express how she takes inspiration from it—rather, Tagaq asserts that the non-human environment and its inhabitants deserve our attention and respect, and gives voice to the experience of the destruction of ecosystems through their perspectives.
The last track on the album, ‘Fracking’, takes on the broad environmental issue of hydraulic fracturing, otherwise known as fracking. It is on this track that Tagaq personifies the earth itself, as she uses her voice to auralize the pain and violation felt by the earth. Tagaq’s use of katajjaq vocal techniques evoke the mechanical operations involved in fracking, and her piercing cries, moans, and low grumbling intonations over a rising violin tremolo give voice to the earth’s violation. Beginning with painful groans, the piece grows in intensity, Tagaq’s voice morphing into sobs, chokes, gurgles, and growls, becoming more urgent as the violin rises. The final section of the piece begins suddenly, with Tagaq’s voice turning from urgent, piercing moans to whimpers while the violin plays a soft scratch tone drone.
Retribution
Retribution is Tagaq’s fourth studio album, and in it Tagaq addresses environmental and
Indigenous issues head on through a multitude of musical styles. As Alexa Woloshyn describes,
“Tagaq's music references diverse musical codes (i.e., katajjaq, Western pop music, punk, and experimental music) through the perspective of a contemporary, living Inuk woman whose home is impacted by climate change and whose community continues to suffer from the legacy of 8 colonialism.”17 The album itself addresses environmental, political, cultural, and personal vio- lence against the earth and Indigenous peoples, especially Indigenous women; Tagaq describes the album as being about the "rape of women, rape of the land, rape of children, and despoiling of traditional lands without consent.”18 In this way, Tagaq takes on activist approach to Ret- ribution rooted in ecofeminism. In a 2016 interview with Kronos Quartet, when asked if her work is political, Tagaq replied:
“Once I realized that my daughters and I were more likely to be killed than any other racial demographic in Canada, it would be totally irresponsible of me to not do anything about that. So in that sense, yes, it is—you could say it’s political, but it’s also survival.”19
On the title track, Tagaq opens with a monologue describing the inevitable retribution the earth will enact on those who harm it. She hisses:
“Our Mother grows angry. Retribution will be swiffffft. We ssssquander her sssssoil and sssssuck out her ssssweet black blood to burn it. We turn money into God and ssssalivate over opportunitiesss to crumple and crinkle our souls for that paper, that gold. Money has spent usssss.”
In the music video for ‘Retribution,’ Tagaq delivers the lines with fervent anger and pal- pable venom, over articulating her words slowly and clearly as she stares straight into the cam- era. For this track, Tagaq also collaborates with Inuit Greenlandic mask dancer Laakkuluk
Williamson Bathory, who appears in the music video alongside Tagaq. Greenlandic mask danc-
17 Woloshyn, Alexa. (2016). “‘Welcome to the Tundra’: Tanya Tagaq's creative and communicative agency as political strategy.” Journal of Popular Music Studies, Vol. 29, no. 4.
18 Mertens, Max. (2016). Interview with Tanya Tagaq. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ wny3ww/tanya-tagaq-retribution-video-premiere
19 Tanya Tagaq quoted in an interview with Kronos Quartet, 2016. http:// 50ftf.kronosquartet.org/composers/tanya-tagaq 9 ing, known as uaajeerneq, is a form of traditional Greenlandic Inuit dance, serving as expression, entertainment, and education.20 In the beginning of the video, we see Williamson Bathory pre- pare a black paste; after applying a thick coating from her hairline to her chin, she drags her fin- gers horizontally across her cheeks to reveal three lines of skin on each cheek. The black paste that forms her mask provides an imagery of the “sweet black blood” Tagaq refers to in her spo- ken word; the image of Williamson Bathory slathering the paste on her face with glee provides a visual representation of Tagaq’s lamentation on the worship of oil and money. Additionally, the black material of the mask represents the “beyond-human spiritual forces” the Indigenous tribes turn to when surviving in the harsh conditions of the Circumpolar North.21 The negative space created within the lines of exposed skin corresponds to “clarity, purity, and the ancestors.”22 Gal- loway also explains that the lines of exposed skin “symbolizes the time in which the ancestors lived, when humanity had a relationship to the land founded on reciprocity and respect.”23
After Tagaq’s spoken word ends at [1:58], Tagaq and Williamson Bathory engage in an intimate, physical call and response, feeding off one another’s energy and anger over the destruc- tion of Indigenous land. All the while, Tagaq’s sound world harkens to the apocolypse, with her katajjaq sounding out growls, howls, and wails alongside an aggressive web of drums, strings, guitars, and electronic sounds. In a 2016 interview, Williamson Bathory states:
20 Galloway, Kate. “The Aurality of Pipeline Politics and Listening for Nacreous Clouds: Voicing Indigenous Ecological Knowledge in Tanya Tagaq's Animism and Retribution.” Popular Music 39 (2020). p. 134.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid. 10
“[Retribution is] about the cross-pollination of Tanya's voice and uaajeerneq—my mask work—a denial of the linear progression of past, present and future, a reminder that the earth's strength is a part of our culture. It's about feminism and Inuit women.”24
The track following ‘Retribution’ is titled ‘Nacreous’, named after the nacreous clouds which hover in and around the Circumpolar North. The clouds, while rare and stunningly beautiful, are violent and destructive forces that contribute to the further dissolution of the ozone.
Galloway explains, “their iridescent surfaces act as catalysts that convert benign forms of human-made chemicals (e.g. chlorine) that have dissipated into the atmosphere into harmful free radicals.”25 In ‘Nacreous’, Tagaq sonifies the virulent beauty of nacreous clouds, evoking with her vocals the simultaneity of the clouds captivating beauty and their toxicity, as well as the reason for their existence. Tagaq features Tuvan throat singer Radik Tyulyush, who enters the track after Tagaq’s extended opening growl, juxtaposing the beautiful simplicity of Tuvan throat singing against the brutality of Tagaq’s vocals, serving to symbolize the duality of nacreous clouds. Tyulyush’s vocals provide an auralization of the stunningly beautiful and peaceful imagery of the clouds, while Tagaq’s beautiful, yet brutal, vocals remind the listener of the toxicity hidden within the beauty.
Tagaq closes Retribution with a haunting cover of Nirvana’s ‘Rape Me’. In it, Tagaq sings with a sickeningly sweet voice, layered over whispers of ‘hate me’, ‘kill me’ and ‘beat me’ at
24 Mertens, Max. (2016). “Inuk Throat Singer Tanya Tagaq Demands "Retribution" in Aggressively Kinetic New Video”. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8q7dqz/tanya- tagaq-retribution-video-premiere
25 Galloway, Kate. “The Aurality of Pipeline Politics and Listening for Nacreous Clouds: Voicing Indigenous Ecological Knowledge in Tanya Tagaq's Animism and Retribution.” Popular Music 39 (2020). p. 122. 11 each new verse. Woloshyn states “the song's appropriateness lies not only with Tagaq's own painful past with sexual abuse but with her broader message of ‘I'm not the only one.’”26 When speaking about the track in an interview, Tagaq stated:
"I thought I was going to be more aggressive with it. But when I recorded the cover, I was just so sad. I'm devastated that this is how we live. It came out very soft. I am in mourning of all the women who have been taken.”27
In this, Tagaq is referring to the 1,200 murdered and missing Indigenous women whose names Tagaq displayed on a rolling screen during her gala performance at the Polaris Prize Gala, generating a global discussion of the missing women. Her striking cover refers again not only to the symbolic and literal rape of the non-human environment through climate change, pollution and destruction expressed through other tracks on the album, but also to the cultural and systemic rape of Indigenous people through Relocation Initiatives and Residential School Systems as well as the literal rape of Indigenous women.
Sivunittinni
In 2015, Tagaq was commissioned by Kronos Quartet as part of their Fifty for the Future commissioning initiative. This second collaboration between Tagaq and Kronos Quartet resulted in Sivunittinni, a work composed for the quartet that Tagaq composed by transcribing her own voice. Through extended techniques and performative directions, Tagaq extends her katajjaq to
26 Woloshyn, Alexa. “'Welcome to the Tundra’: Tanya Tagaq's Creative and Communicative Agency as Political Strategy." Journal of Popular Music Studies Vol. 29, no. 4. (2017). p. 5.
27 Tagaq, Tanya, quoted in Carly Lewis, “Tanya Tagaq finds inner peace in new album Retribution.” The Globe and Mail. 2016. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/ tanya-tagaq-finds-inner-peace-in-new-albumretribution/article32418950/ 12 the string quartet, using it as an embodied extension of her voice to sonify the environment. Her artist statement found on the quartet’s website regarding the piece states:
“Sivunittinni, or ‘the future ones,’ comes from a part of a poem I wrote for my album, and is the perfect title for this piece. My hope is to bring a little bit of the land to future musicians through this piece. There’s a disconnect in the human condition, a disconnect from nature, and it has caused a great deal of social anxiety and fear, as well as a lack of true meaning of health, and a lack of a relationship with what life is, so maybe this piece can be a little bit of a wake-up.”28
Sivunittinni begins with long, slow scratch tone glissandi that harken to Tagaq’s low, rumbly growls. This gesture is repeated at a faster rate as the quartet falls into a rhythmic pattern that mimics the rhythm of Tagaq’s breathing in many of her tracks. This opening section is denoted by the text “Ice Groaning, slow and free” (figure 1), connecting the sounds of the quartet to the sonification of melting ice.
Figure 1, Sivunittinni, m. 2.
28 Sivunittinni artist statement. http://50ftf.kronosquartet.org/composers/tanya-tagaq 13
Figure 2, Sivunittinni, m. 30.
Figure 3, Sivunittinni, m. 46.
Later in this section, Tagaq instructs the quartet to mimic rapid inhales that become more
“choked” over time (figure 2). Another section of the piece is denoted with the directive “Sawing
Through Bone - for Bone Marrow”, which serves to sonify the sustainable practice of Indigenous hunting (figure 4).
Figure 4, Sivunittinni m. 129-130.
14
Over the course of the piece the momentum ebbs and flows, building in intensity and de- escalating, often miming the sounds of breath, growls, cries, and groans. The scratch tone remains present throughout the entirety of the piece—only sparsely offering moments of recognizable pitch.
Conclusion
Through the persistent environmental activism she expresses in her work, Tanya Tagaq has brought Indigenous and environmental issues to a scale of international recognition. In
Animism and Retribution, Tagaq personifies the non-human environment and brings attention to environmentalist issues with an ecofeminist lens, giving voice not only to the non-human environment but also the violence wrought upon Indigenous people and culture as a result of setter-colonialism. Her continued work in bringing forth Indigenous Ecological Knowledge serves to actively resist the narrative of Indigenous people existing as an artifact of the past, and provides Indigenous culture space at the forefront of contemporary environmental debate. 15
Works Cited:
Allen, Aaron S., and Dawe, Kevin. 2016. “Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature.” New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Allen, Aaron S. “Ecomusicology: Ecocriticism and Musicology.” Journal of the American Musi- cological Society , Vol. 64, No. 2 (2011).
Dibben, Nicola. "Music and Environmentalism in Iceland." In The Oxford Handbook of Popular Music in the Nordic Countries. Oxford University Press, 2017.
Feisst, Sabine. "Music and Ecology." Contemporary Music Review: Music and Ecology 35, no. 3 (2016): 293-95.
Galloway, Kate. 2020. “The Aurality of Pipeline Politics and Listening for Nacreous Clouds: Voicing Indigenous Ecological Knowledge in Tanya Tagaq's Animism and Retribution” Popular Music Vol. 39, no. 1. Cambridge University Press: 121–44.
Lewis, Carly. (2016). “Tanya Tagaq finds inner peace in new album Retribution.” The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/tanya-tagaq-finds-inner-peace-in-new- albumretribution/article32418950/
Mertens, Max. (2016). Interview with Tanya Tagaq. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ wny3ww/tanya-tagaq-retribution-video-premiere
Mertens, Max. (2016). “Inuk Throat Singer Tanya Tagaq Demands "Retribution" in Aggressively Kinetic New Video”. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8q7dqz/tanya-tagaq-retribution- video-premiere
Mistry, Anupa. “Grimes’ Miss Anthropocene.” Pitchfork, 2020. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/ albums/grimes-miss-anthropocene/
Pettigrew, Aaron. (2014). UBC School of Music's Aaron Pettigrew on Tanya Tagaq. Retrieved from https://chancentre. com/news/ubc-school-of-musics-aaron-pettigrew-on-tanya-tagaq/
Schlanger, Talia. (2017, May 2017). Tanya Tagaq on World Cafe. NPR. Retrieved from https:// www.npr.org/sections/world-cafe/ 2017/05/17/528657318/tanya-tagaq-on-world-café
Tanya Tagaq quoted in an interview with Kronos Quartet, 2016. http://50ftf.kronosquartet.org/ composers/tanya-tagaq
Tanya Tagaq’s artist statement/program note for Sivunittinni. http://50ftf.kronosquartet.org/ composers/tanya-tagaq
Woloshyn, Alexa. "“Welcome to the Tundra”: Tanya Tagaq's Creative and Communicative Agency as Political Strategy." Journal of Popular Music Studies Vol. 29, no. 4. (2017).