Sustain Music & Nature, a national nonprofit that makes music a force for nature, collaborated with Alaska’s US Fish &. Wildlife Service to create Refuge Alaska, an 11 minute film featuring stunning videography set to evocative music composed by four U.S. based independent artists: Sam Kassirer (Josh Ritter and the Royal City Band, Board Member - Sustain Music & Nature), Akie Bermiss (Lake Street Dive), Matt Douglas (The Mountain Goats), and Derry deBorja (Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit).

Unable to travel or gather during the height of the pandemic, the composer-musicians met across time and space to virtually connect with northern places most had never visited in person. An assemblage of video captured in previous years by multiple videographers became the inspiration for an artwork of music and film. Four chapters take the audience through the air over vast landscapes, across the land with close floral and faunal encounters, beneath the water with fish and marine mammals, and finally into the winged world of birds.

 Alaska’s 16 National Wildlife Refuges span from the edges of the high Arctic to the outer islands of the Aleutians, and provide some of the best places in the world for wildlife and people to thrive. These are the homelands of Alaska Native peoples from time immemorial, and we honor their centuries of stewardship and deep connections with these lands.

Sustain Music & Nature

Sustain Music & Nature is a nonprofit that makes music a force for nature. Using the emotional hook of music and cultural sway of bands, Sustain generates new audiences for our public lands. Sustain produces music videos for our national parks, wildlife refuges and forests, hosts Trail Session hikes and concerts in natural areas.

US Fish & Wildlife Service Alaska

At the US Fish & Wildlife Service Alaska we are shared stewards of our nation’s last true wild places and world renowned natural resources. The lands and waters of this place we call home nourish a vast and unique array of fish, wildlife and people. We cultivate a reverent awareness and respect for all things, from Alaska’s smallest plants and most iconic animals to its diverse communities and cultures. Today and for generations to come, we live with, live from, enjoy and learn from the wildness of this awe-inspiring land and the people who love it.

Reflections From The Artists

From Sam Kassirer, composer for the aerial chapter

Music with picture is one of my favorite art forms. What you're hearing is a live reflection of, and guide for, what the viewer is seeing. In addition, you are also experiencing this piece as a unique point of view through the artist's lens. "Refuge Alaska" is a meditation and reflection on the beauty, value, fragility and importance of not only Alaska but of all of our natural surroundings.

 The concept for this project came to me during a meeting with Sustain Music and Nature in the height of the pandemic in early 2021. How can we continue to raise awareness for public lands when we can't physically be together? How can we continue to be connected to nature when many living in cities can't even get to an airport or train station? The musician-composers for this project come from four different states including Massachusetts, Tennessee, New York and North Carolina. Over Zoom meetings, we chose who would compose for each "chapter" and also decided to have musical segues where one composer would pick up where the other left off, a musical baton handoff overlapping all four works to produce one piece of music.

 Views from far distances of our planet, be it of a river, a mountain or a forest, puts anyone’s perspective in check. It's almost a subconscious feeling. When I see these aerial points of view of Alaska, I am at once taken back by how big and how small our world is at the same time. The sounds I’m using in this first piece attempt to mirror not only the breadth and depth of this wondrous land, but also how tiny and fragile each subject is in reality.

 As a traveler, and touring musician I've been to every single state in our country except for Alaska, which made composing for it all the more dreamlike. I sincerely hope to visit in person one day.

 From Akie Bermiss, composer for the land flora and fauna chapter

I have never been to Alaska, but I have always longed to visit. I’ve spent my entire life in a city of metal and concrete and people packed in, so something about the remote beauty, the wide open space and the expansive wildness has always been alluring to me.

We often portray wilderness as a quiet place but it can be quite loud – “wild” is in the name, after all. I think of that cacophony as a kind of chorus, from the sounds of animals, to leaves in the wind, to rushing water, and I attempted to emulate that sound of natural discord and harmony.

 From Matt Douglas, composer for the underwater chapter

There’s something fitting about a wind instrument expressing the motion of an underwater creature. Maybe it’s the juxtaposition of the two things... something that depends on air versus something that wouldn’t survive out of water?

 There’s also a 2020/2021 parallel in the composition, but maybe the music expresses that better than I can in words. Repetition, simplicity, joy, but a thread of sadness running through it. It could also reflect the work of conservation: hopeful, but with some grief at the same time. I have yet to travel to Alaska, but this project has given me a resolve to change that. 

 From Derry deBorja, composer for the winged worlds chapter

The landscape of Alaska can be overwhelming. Nothing drives this point home like the first time you stand at the foot of a glacier, and can’t judge how close or far away it is. Something about the magnitude makes it a difficult estimation for our human perception.

Composing music for Refuge Alaska reminded me of that initial sense of awe, but it also afforded me the opportunity to take a closer look at the creatures that inhabit this extraordinary landscape. There is an inherent sense of drama and romanticism in the panoramic scenes of birds soaring across the sky, but every close up of these same animals hints at a sense of personality, determination, and character you might find while observing people on a street corner. I tried to capture this duality within my score, and found a comforting sense of familiarity within these wilds in the process.

 My time spent scoring this film has narrowed my scope from the macro of Alaska’s humbling vastness to the lively and often comical microcosm of bird life nestled within the stillness. Looking onward to future trips to Alaska, it would be a disservice to myself to overlook this reassuring lesson in balance nature has to offer. There is a beauty on all sides.

Press

Track-by-Track: The Composers of ‘Refuge Alaska’ Break Down the Ambitious Project - V13

Juneau Afternoon: Refuge Alaska - KTOO NPR

Project Credits