“You may feel the rush of the dog sled, hear the call of the snow goose or experience eternity in the flow of the river.”
Or so reads a program note for “Take the Dog Sled,” a unique Centrediscs album of a unique Canadian composition by Toronto composer Alexina Louie.
It was for a 2008 tour of three Inuit communities in the most northerly region of Quebec that the Montreal Symphony Orchestra commissioned Louie to write this 23-minute piece, asking her to use the same seven players the orchestra would employ for its performances of Stravinsky’s “L’ Histoire du Soldat.”
Stravinsky’s score does not, as the commission did, call for Inuit throat singers, and Evie Mark and Akinisi Sivuarapik would not have been able to read the music anyway. So Louie spent months listening to recordings of what is really a traditional vocal contest between two Inuit women facing each other and improvising on musical motifs…
