North Pacific Rim

Andrews, Ivan

About the work

This chamber work was commissioned by Devon Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Memorial Museum in Exeter, Devon.  Its first performance was given by the Orchestra on Saturday March 7th 2020.  The piece was commissioned as part of the Contemporary Music for All (CoMA) Festival of 2020.

The music was inspired by Inuit Bone Mat, an artefact displayed by the museum.  The bone man is a piece of antler carved so that in the long dark winters when paper maps were hard or impossible to read Inuit hunters could find their way around the coast in their canoes by feeling the contours of the carved bone.

The music is influenced by recordings of Inuit cultural throat singing. No attempt has been made to replicate the sound the throat singers make but I have drawn on the themes and rhythms of the music heard in their recordings. The land is not only a land of ice and cold, it is also the land of the Aurora Borealis, but again I have not attempted to describe this phenomenon in musical terms.  Not having witnessed the Aurora Borealis personally, I have instead tried to incorporate within the music how I felt when watching films of these spectacular ‘Northern Lights’.

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