‘A String Quartet in Her Throat’: Arranging Tanya Tagaq’s Sivunittinni for String Quartet

The Kronos Quartet and Tanya Tagaq have had a longstanding collaborative partnership, which began in 2006 with Nunavut. David Harrington, the founder of the quartet, has said that Tagaq, who is an Inuk throat singer and avant-garde composer, has a ‘string quartet in her throat’ (Lawrence 2007). With this in mind, the Kronos Quartet commissioned Tagaq to compose a piece for its Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire collection. Tagaq’s compositional style is heavily rooted in improvisation and recording technology, so while composing Sivunittinni (2015), she made a two-channel recording, performing all of the parts herself. Jacob Garchik, a composer and arranger, then transformed the recorded vocal composition into a written piece for string quartet. In this analytical essay, I compare Tagaq’s original performance of Sivunittinni to the string quartet arrangement by Garchik as performed by the Kronos Quartet. I detail the extended techniques used by the strings to imitate Tagaq’s throat singing, analyze the timbral similarities and differences between the string instruments and Tagaq’s voice for individual sounds and as the timbres change throughout the entire piece, and consider the arrangement choices that transformed Sivunittinni from a two-part vocal duet into a piece for string quartet.