Classical composition includes ravens, throatsinging

Vivaldi had his four seasons. Derek Charke has six to work with.

Charke was in Iqaluit this past March collecting sounds for a piece he's composing for the Kronos Quartet, a California-based string quartet who are as close as it comes to stars in the world of classical music these days.

The composition is to be part of a program entitled "Nunavut," which the quartet will perform with Cambridge Bay throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis in Los Angeles next April.

The Kronos Quartet is "pretty much scouring the globe for anything and everything in terms of integrating world music into their repertoire," Charke said from his home in Kentville, Nova Scotia.

Charke was just sitting down to start work on the piece June 1 when a reporter called. Its working title, for now, is "The Seasons." Relaxed and affable, Charke's demeanour stands in contrast to the image of the tortured composer tearing his hair out over a score. He works at a drafting table, with a computer to one side and a piano to the other.

"I was actually combing through literature this morning and trying to figure out the whole idea about the seasons and the Inuit mythology about the seasons," he said. "It's very different, obviously, than the southern seasons."

Armed with an array of microphones and escorted by Iqaluit outfitter Matty McNair, Charke set out to find sounds that will serve as accompaniment for the Kronos Quartet's strings and Gillis' throat singing. Charke collected the sounds of sled dogs, wind, and skidoos and even stuck a microphone under the sea ice.

But even out on the sea ice, while taping McNair's dog team, Charke found he couldn't escape the creep of high technology.

"I get 20 minutes of great sounds and then I get about an hour of the airplane engines starting and taxiing, with a few raven sounds in between," Charke says, laughing.

"But then there's something that's typically northern: transportation in the north now. And the whole thing about this is not just keeping it historical because that's not what Tanya does with her music either."

The professor of composition at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia also collected the sounds of local storytellers and drum dancers which will all be melded together to create a backing track that will morph from sound to sound, drifting in and out of rhythm. When he's finished writing the score, Charke will send the completed soundscape and string parts to the other musicians who will overdub their tracks.

"It's basically very advanced karaoke."

Gillis and the Kronos Quartet have performed together several times, including two shows last month in Paris and Koln, Germany. Charke has also written music for the quartet before: 2005's Cercle du Nord III involved similar experimentation with Arctic sounds, tape loops and stringed instruments and was broadcast on CBC Radio Two.

And while Charke says some might resist the integration of traditional forms like throat singing with contemporary sounds, he restates the rock musician's maxim of stealing from everybody.

"This is happening all over the world now," he says. "[Artists are] begging, borrowing and stealing from every culture in the world and mixing it. It's one of the ways forward for music as a whole."