DESCRIPTION:
Fertility Rites for five-octave marimba and tape is part of a series of works all written in the 1990-ies. The connecting thread that runs through all of these works is Inuit throat singing. My fascination with the Inuit and their culture started in 1992 during the course of creating a radio documentary/composition for CBC Radio called The Idea of Canada. That was the first time I heard this strange and haunting music. A few years later I got myself involved in a similar project this time focusing entirely on Inuit culture and throat singing in particular. This latter project took CBC producer Keith Horner and me to Baffin Island in arctic Canada where we spent two weeks recording throat singers and interviewing elders of the Inuit communities in Iqaluit and Cape Dorset. The recorded material was eventually used in four compositions (including this one) the other three being Footprints in New Snow, a thirty-eight minute radio documentary/composition, Nunavut for string quartet and tape and Hunter's Dream, an one-minute miniature commissioned by rock keyboardist Morgan Fisher for a compact disc of miniatures he was producing at the time in Japan.

The title of the work derives from the throat songs themselves. In one of our interviews in Iqaluit Keith and I learned that throat songs were originally a fertility ritual, a shamanistic mating call which the women performed while the men were out hunting. The katajjaq (vocal games) in this piece are used to evoke this primordial practice. Their sexual suggestiveness is further enhanced by electronic processing (lowering the pitch by an octave or more transforms the original sound into a semblance of heavy breathing), or through juxtaposing the katajjaq against other types of amorous music stylistically more familiar to the listener, such as the 'French-sounding' second movement or the tango-like music of the third. In addition to the katajjaq samples, the tape part consists of prerecorded marimba sounds (normal, 'bent' and bowed) which both in terms of timbre and musical treatment represent a virtual extension of the instrument's abilities. In a programmatic sense they represent the performer's 'thoughts' or 'instincts' in contrast to the instrument on stage which represents the performer's 'voice'. Sometimes what is being 'felt' and what is being 'said' are diametrically opposed, like in the first movement where the gentle, non-possessive music for the marimba and the dark, longing calls on the tape contradict each other. But in the end both inner and outer worlds merge into uninhibited abandon and celebration of sexuality and life.