Katharina Guhlmann was a last-minute addition to the Northern Lights Showcase Saturday and judging by the crowd’s reaction, she was a welcome one.
The roving violinist who hails from Dresden, Germany opened her set with an original piece, “The Song from the Sea.”
“It’s funny,” she said during a later interview. “When I don’t say anything about this, people will listen and say ‘Oh, I hear the water and the waves.’”
She told the Northern Lights crowd that the song came together during her first trip through Southeast Alaska in 2015. She paddled a kayak, carried her violin from community to community and eventually wrote a piece that, when combined with her clear soprano, sounds much like the rhythmic movement of water.
She also played a Bach violin sonata in C Major.
The journey
Guhlmann’s trip started in Inuvik, on the east side of the Mackenzie River delta. It’s the most northerly town one can drive to in Canada. But then, as traveling without any specific agenda often yields, she said she met a woman on the plane who said she was traveling to Tuktoyaktuk, a small Inuvialuit community in the Northwest Territories. Guhlmann tagged along.
“I had the chance to see the frozen Arctic ocean and spend a night there,” she said. “It felt like ‘this is the beginning of my journey.’”
From there, she made her way to Whitehorse using word-of-mouth and social media to find connections between communities.
“It’s quite hard to travel here. There are no buses, there are no trains,” she said. “It’s kind of slow traveling. I really need the help of people.”
But these chance encounters with strangers can be intimate and artistically fruitful. Guhlmann said she was once in a meditation center in Spain practicing when a woman came in and asked if she could listen.
“This song just came through me somehow,” Gulhmann said. “And she started to cry so much, and when I was finished, she looked at me and said ‘You played my song.’”
That moment – connecting with a stranger over the pressures of life – and the improvised song stuck with Guhlmann. During her performance at the Northern Lights showcase, she ended with an original piece, “Just Be You – Sonja’s Song.”
She felt stranded for a time in Whitehorse but then caught a ride with Haines locals Rachel Saitzyk and Rachel Kukull. From Haines, where she is staying with Anna and Jim Jurgeleit, Guhlmann said she’ll head to Juneau. She has a place to stay lined up — and a place to play: Holy Trinity Church at 6 p.m. Saturday.
She emphasized that the small, intimate shows she has been playing on her trip are not for work or money, but just community gatherings and a way to connect with people.
Guhlmann said after her time in Juneau, she may head to Wrangell for a few days before ferrying to Ketchikan by March 19. There, the journey gets even murkier. Ideally, she’d like to catch a ride to Prince Rupert where she can then travel to the rural communities of Oona River and Dutch Cove. She found herself in those places during her trip a decade ago.
“People were enthusiastic, like ‘Come on you have to play us a concert in the community house tomorrow evening!’ So, I was kind of drawn into this concert thing,” she said. She would like to go back and play again.
The atmosphere
Altogether, Guhlmann plans to travel for three months, until about the beginning of May. Her plan is to reach California. She acknowledged that it is an interesting time to be traveling in the United States as a foreigner.
“I heard this from the Canadians. They said ‘I wouldn’t like to travel to the U.S. right now.’”
But she said she does not often focus on the big discussions happening at the national and international level.
“I’m really interested in what people experience right here, right now,” she said. “So I ask, ‘Hey, what is happening in Haines, what are the changes, what are you experiencing?’ she said. “I’m more interested in the personal stories.”
So far, people in Haines have told her about federal funding for the recycling center, for social causes and for natural resource preservation being in limbo.
“It’s a tragedy to hear,” she said, but “I see people have to kind of deal with it, to work with it, to live with it.”
Guhlmann said that in her experience, people project a lot on each other when they don’t have a personal connection.
“I think it’s a problem that we reduce people,” she said. “With this news, you reduce the U.S. to this one thing and then we make an image and disconnect ourselves from actually really meeting someone and connecting.”
She sees it differently.
“I’m just with people. People are still people,” she said. “They are friends or not yet friends.”