It's already episode 4 for this season, and today DECLASSIFY welcomes onboard the remarkable activist, tenor, composer and musicologist Jeremy Dutcher. Jeremy's music transcends boundaries: unapologetically playful in its incorporation of classical influences, full of reverence for the traditional songs of his home,and teeming with the urgency of modern-day struggles of resistance. A member of Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, Jeremy first did music studies in Halifax before taking a chance to work in the archives at the Canadian Museum of History, painstakingly transcribing Wolastoq songs from 1907 wax cylinders. As he listened to each recording, he felt his own musical impulses stirring from deep within. Long days at the archives turned into long nights at the piano, feeling out melodies and phrases, deep in dialogue with the voices of his ancestors. These “collaborative”compositions, collected together on his debut LP Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, are like nothing you’ve ever heard. Listen to this episode as Jeremy and Victoria unpack the practices of listening deeply, bringing Indigenous voices to the table and the challenges of rematriation and repatriation.
RESOURCES
Jeremy Dutcher: https://jeremydutcher.com/about/
Listen and Purchase to Jeremy's album 'Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonama' : https://jeremydutcher1.bandcamp.com/album/wolastoqiyik-lintuwakonawa
Keeping Language Alive: https://thewalrus.ca/how-jeremy-dutcher-keeps-his-ancestors-language-alive/
An Interview with Jeremy Dutcher: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/mar/26/jeremy-dutcher-interview-canada-first-nation-indigenous-arias
Pauline Oliveros 'Sonic Meditations' Downloadable here: https://monoskop.org/images/0/09/Oliveros_Pauline_Sonic_Meditations_1974.pdf
Oliveros 'Listening as Activism': https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/listening-as-activism-the-sonic-meditations-of-pauline-oliveros