The libretto of Lera Auerbach Symphony No. 4 incorporates a wide constellation of Indigenous Arctic languages and related sub-dialects.

• Kalaallisut / Greenlandic — Greenland.
• Inuktitut — Nunavut and Arctic Canada.
• Avanersuarmiutut / Inuktun — North Greenland / Thule region.
• Iñupiaq — Alaska.
• Yupik — Chukotka, Alaska and the Russian Far East.
• Aleut / Unangam Tunuu — Aleutian Islands, Alaska and the Commander Islands.
• Alutiiq / Pacific Gulf Yupik — Alaska.
• Nenets — Arctic Siberia.
• Eskaleut sub-dialects — including Malimiutun, Unangam Tunuu, Atkan, Sireniki and others.

Orthographic variation reflects authentic dialectal diversity and is preserved intentionally.

Arctica is the choral-symphonic spine of a larger creative project that also extends into Arctic diaries, photography and painting. Its world joins the geological and geographical Arctic — the polar land- and seascape — with the peoples who have lived there since time immemorial.

The work’s overall structure is modeled after the spirit flights of the Angakok, the shaman. Time proceeds in reverse: from the arrival of the White Man, represented by the Viking sólarsteinn or sunstone, back toward the time before humans.

From the myth of the Angakok’s journey to Sedna, the ocean, the shaman travels to bring life back. He begs for pity, but Sedna laughs. He becomes cunning and appeals to her vanity by combing out her tangled hair, but she remains unrelenting. Finally, he steps back and, with the drum held high, sings of life. In a world where neither reason nor strength prevails, where cunning counts for little and pity least of all, art becomes the final appeal.

Auerbach’s libretto reflects her immersion in Indigenous Arctic languages and folklore. The work acknowledges that some worlds cannot be translated in any ordinary sense: the Angakok and the work of art become the means of connecting people, languages and realities that would otherwise remain irreconcilable.

Arctica is both a climate work and a ritual work: not a documentary in sound, but a ceremony of attention to a vanishing world, its cultures, its ice, its waters and its spiritual imagination.