Music Matters

Kate Molleson visits the world’s largest island to explore the role of traditional and new music for its communities today. Greenland's small population has navigated centuries of colonial tensions and attempts at modernisation. Today, as an autonomous territory of Denmark, the issues facing its mostly Inuit people include one of the highest suicide rates in the world, and pervasive alcoholism. In this special edition of Music Matters, Kate discovers how musicians are responding. In the capital of Nuuk, the actor and singer Kimmernaq Kjeldsen talks about the influence of nature and the politics of language, and Varna Marianne Nielsen performs a drum dance, a traditional practice she received from her ancestors on Greenland's east coast. At Atlantic Records, owner and musician Christian Esler tells Kate about the subjects which bands deal with in their music, from Sumé social protest songs of the 1970s, to Christian's own band Nanook reflecting on the impact of climate change on polar bears. At the Nuuk Nordic festival, a series of intense theatre pieces set in one of the town's social housing blocks explore the legacy of Danish re-housing projects in the 1960s, and today's social issues including domestic abuse, alcoholism and suicide. Kate meets director Hanne Traap Friis and some of the young local actors. And those issues are the subject of hip-hop artist Josef Tarrak's music, who Kate encounters at a young artist showcase. And further up the west coast in the smaller town of Maniitsoq, Kate experiences the power of music to offer sanctuary, from a music school providing a safe space to young people, to the local choir singing traditional Greenlandic hymns at the town church. Kate meets the music school's director Ida Mortensen, heads out onto the fjord with its caretaker Karl Nielsen, and hears Greenlandic polka and more drum dancing at the home of Hanne and Leif Saandvig Immanuelsen.