Jeremy Dutcher (BA’13) reaches across generations and rediscovers ancestral voices.
Alum Jeremy Dutcher (BA’13), an operatic tenor and composer, is releasing an album called Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa that combines his ancestral voices with classical and electronic music.
Jeremy Dutcher’s new album reaches across generations to a nearly forgotten history and brings ancestral voices back to life. Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, or Our Maliseets Songs, started as a seed planted by one of his elders more than five years ago.
Dutcher said it was an elder by the name of Maggie Paul, who encouraged him to learn more about traditional Wolastoq songs. She told him to find out about a collection of recordings housed in the archives of the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que.
“And when your elders tell you to do something, you listen. So that sent me on a path that is culminating in this upcoming record,” Dutcher said.
Dutcher a member of the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, travelled to Gatineau and spent weeks listening to the recordings.
“That moment when I first heard these recordings was a pretty profound one. These recordings aren’t really known in my community except for by the very few people that are the song carriers,” Dutcher said. “I had never heard these songs growing up at all and most people in my nation don’t even know about them.”
Read more in: Voices from the past: Musician Jeremy Dutcher gives new life to wax cylinder recordings of his ancestors on cbc.ca.