Ayagaurluanga New York-ami-qaa

"Ayagaurluanga New York-ami-qaa" (Traveling to New York) is a composition for sampled Yup'ik voice and drum, created in collaboration with Gary Beaver, a Yup'ik singer and drummer from Kasigluk, Alaska.

During Beaver's month-long residency in Brooklyn for his first visit to New York, we built a collaborative framework. Beaver wrote simple lyrics about travel in Yup'ik following his cultural tradition of storytelling through song: "Traveling to New York / Walking in New York / Walking over and I stare." He performed these on traditional Yup'ik drum and voice.

I composed the 1:41 work using only these recorded performances as source material. Using the Roland VP-9000, I converted Beaver's acoustic performances into sampled instruments, which became my compositional palette. I orchestrated the piece in Logic Pro, creating harmonies from the monophonic voice, polyrhythms from the single drum, and building from sparse solo drum to dense polyphonic texture.

The composition uses limitation as generative constraint—all harmonic content, rhythmic elaboration, and textural development emerges from creative orchestration of voice and drum. The three-section structure follows Beaver's three-line lyric, allowing linguistic form to determine musical architecture. The work investigates how traditional instruments can serve as complete instrumental palette for contemporary composition while honoring their cultural origins.