On Sunday, April 1, 2012, Acadia music professor Dr. Derek Charke won a Juno award for Classical Composition of the Year. Freelance writer Rachel Cooper (’89) spoke with Dr.Charke last summer and offers this story about his work. 

Under the ice in Pond Inlet, Nunavut, at the northern end of Baffin Island, the descending musical notes made by the ringed seal sound unearthly. The voice of this small creature, the most common seal in the Arctic, was captured by musician, composer and Associate Professor Dr. Derek Charke last June. Camped out on the ice, he lowered a hydrophone to record the underwater sounds.

Acoustic ecology, the study of soundscapes, means for Charke an artistic use of natural sound. He captures “found sounds” and uses technology to transform them. As a musical piece goes along, the sounds are activated and integrated into the orchestra. “That’s where I’m approaching this from,” he says. “The sounds become an instrument, part of the orchestration of the work.”

At Pond Inlet, along with the sounds of ringed seals, he captured sounds of narwhals, migrating birds and shifting ice. “It’s not a scientific study of sound,” he says. “I can tell you about all the instruments in the orchestra; I can’t tell you about the animals I record.”

Charke teaches theory, composition and orchestration in Acadia’s School of Music. “When I was hired to come here, I don’t think they necessarily knew exactly what I did,” he says with a laugh. Now many of his students have explored acoustic ecology and used it in soundscapes and in their own compositions.

Multiple awards, commissions and grants

Charke’s interest in acoustic ecology developed in 2001, when he began his PhD. “I took two years of courses on computers and electronics and music so I could actually teach the history of electronic music, and I think that’s where it got started,” he says. Although many of his musical compositions do not involve soundscapes at all, he enjoys going out and recording sounds and then using them in compositions. His music has been heard throughout Canada, the USA and Europe, and he has received multiple awards, commissions and grants.

Using found sound and electronic creations in music is not new, Charke says. It dates back to the 1940s and 1950s with pioneers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen. “Fast-forward to today and you’ve got computers and laptops, and it’s very simple for anyone to go out now with a little zoom microphone. It really has become ubiquitous in contemporary music to use sound from other sources.”

The world-renowned Kronos Quartet, based in San Francisco, commissioned a piece from him in 2005 called “Cercle du Nord III”. “It’s a piece that uses the sounds from the north and throat-singing,” he says. “It has sounds of ice cracking and of the dogs howling and dog-sledding and all kinds of bird sounds.” Kronos commissioned another northern piece called “Tundra Songs” that uses the music of throat-singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis.

In 2006, his second year at Acadia, Charke used sounds from the Bay of Fundy in “Song of the Tides,” which was commissioned by Mark Hopkins for the Acadia Wind Ensemble. “It’s a piece that has received a lot of play and is still being played across Canada and the U.S.,” he says.

Showcases new music

Charke and Hopkins also set up and have co-directed Acadia’s annual Shattering the Silence festival of new music for the past five years. The festival showcases new music by Acadia music faculty and students as well as by other composers.

Charke’s “Symphony Number 1 – Transient Energies” premiered last April with Symphony Nova Scotia at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium in Halifax. A 45-minute work with four movements, the symphony incorporates sounds of energy production and use around Nova Scotia. It can be heard online, free, at CBC Concerts on Demand (this and other web links are listed at the end of the article).

For the first movement, “Highways,” Charke stood on Highway 101 near Exit 12 and recorded the sounds of the traffic. “That’s a way we’re using energy,” he says, “but the sound itself of the cars going by is very melancholic.”

The second movement, “Dis-shovel’d,” is about coal and incorporates sounds of shoveling, rocks, and the train. The third movement, “Rotations,” starts with the sound of wind turbines in the auditorium; by its end, the sound transforms into sounds of turbines under water. The last movement, “Crude,” transitions the sound of water to a sound of burbling, primordial oil.

“It’s fascinating,” Charke says. “We hear these sounds and they resonate with us.”

Acadia research funds helped pay for him to go to Pond Inlet. “I’ve had a lot of support from my colleagues and from the university as a whole,” he says.

The Arctic holds a fascination for Charke, and the trip to Pond Inlet is still on his mind. “We had a pack of narwhals come in; it was just an amazing clicking sound. Under the water, the constant sound of the ringed seals, the descending tones, would go on for hours and hours.”

Links:

Audio samples from Pond Inlet, Nunavut, June 2011

http://www.charke.com/ecology/pond/pond.htm

Symphony no. 1 – Transient Energies (CBC Concerts on Demand)
http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/cod/concerts/20110407chark

Song of the Tides

http://www.charke.com/comp/comp/band/tides.htm

Shattering the Silence – Annual Acadia New Music Festival
http://www.shatteringthesilence.ca

Note: for more on Dr. Charke's Juno win, please visit: http://www2.acadiau.ca/acadia-news-reader/items/acadia-composer-thrilled-with-juno-award.html