Tivaner Inngernerlu

Inuit music encompasses the traditional vocal, rhythmic, and ceremonial sound practices of the Inuit across the Arctic, including drum-dance songs (qilaut or frame-drum traditions), game songs, and the distinctive women’s throat-singing (katajjaq). It is primarily vocal and percussive, built on repetitive patterns, vocables, and a strong sense of breath and pulse rather than on Western harmony. Its aesthetics mirror Arctic life: timbral play (imitations of animals, wind, and ice), interlocking rhythms, and communal participation. Songs often serve social and ceremonial functions—storytelling, communal games, healing, and celebration—sung in Inuit languages (e.g., Inuktitut), with melodies of narrow range, steady pulses, and textural interplay instead of chordal development.

Indigenous North American music encompasses the diverse musical practices of Native American, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples across what is now the United States and Canada. It predates European contact by millennia, and is rooted in ceremonial, social, and storytelling functions rather than commercial or entertainment-only aims. Across regions, performance practices differ markedly: Plains powwow songs feature high-pitched leads, vocables, terraced melodic descent, honor beats, and the "incomplete repetition" form; Eastern Woodlands styles favor call-and-response and antiphonal textures; the Arctic is renowned for Inuit katajjaq (throat singing) and game songs; the Southwest (Pueblo, Navajo/Diné, Apache) includes complex ceremonial repertoires with water drums and rattle accompaniment; and the Northwest Coast employs box and log drums with intricate dance/song cycles. While typically monophonic, the music often layers voices and percussion in a rich heterophony. Instrumentation centers on large powwow drums, frame and hand drums, water drums, rattles (gourd, turtle shell), whistles, and Native flutes, with voices as the primary vehicle for melody, language, and vocables. Songs carry cultural knowledge, spiritual meaning, and social cohesion, and are performed with strict attention to context, protocol, and community ownership.

Greenlandic music encompasses the traditional and contemporary musical practices of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), spanning Inuit drum-dance songs (qilaatersorneq/ajaajaa), Moravian/Lutheran hymn and choral traditions, and modern popular styles such as rock, pop, folk, reggae, and hip hop. At its core are communal, vocable-rich songs accompanied by the frame drum (qilaat), storytelling lyrics about environment and daily life, and call-and-response performance practices. Since the 18th century, missionary hymnody introduced four-part choral singing and European tonal harmony, which blended with local practices. From the 1970s onward, Greenlandic-language rock and pop became a vehicle for cultural identity and political expression, with bands like Sume shaping a distinctive sound that remains influential. Today, artists mix drum-dance timbres, hymn-like harmonies, and global genres while foregrounding lyrics in Kalaallisut and themes of place, language, and community.

Uaajeerneq is the traditional Greenlandic Inuit mask dance, a hybrid of music, movement, and theatre that revolves around a single performer who confronts the audience with sudden gestures, breathy vocalizations, drumming, and startling facial expressions or face-painting. Rather than being purely decorative, the performance plays with taboo, fear, comedy, and flirtation to test social boundaries and teach resilience. Typically accompanied by a steady frame-drum pulse and percussive footwork, the performer alternates between silence, heavy breathing, and barks or shouts, building tension and releasing it with comic or shocking gestures. The aesthetic is purposely grotesque and playful, using black, white, and red face markings (or masks) to amplify expression and to transform the performer into a liminal figure that is at once human and “other.”