On a Tuesday evening in late September, a former church in the Spenard neighborhood of Anchorage will fill with a sound that has never quite existed before: the voice of Quinn Christopherson, the Athabaskan and Iñupiaq songwriter who won NPR's Tiny Desk Contest in 2019, threaded through a chamber ensemble, alongside experimental films, and anchored by a birch-wood violin carved by his own great-grandfather.
The concert is the Anchorage stop of Wild Shore New Music's thirteenth season, a program the organization describes as foregrounding Alaskan voices through interdisciplinary collaboration, improvisational practice, and chamber music as a site of cultural dialogue. It is billed as a single multidisciplinary work in three parts, and it runs for one night only at The Nave.
Wild Shore itself is a homegrown institution. It was founded by Alaskan musicians who had left the state and wanted to bring something back. The flutist Katie Cox, the violinist Andie Tanning (who performed for years under the name Andie Springer), and the composer Conrad Winslow all grew up in Alaska and built careers in contemporary classical music in New York and beyond. Cox's own account dates the founding to 2012, while the organization's current presenter biography and other materials cite 2013; either way, the impulse was the same. As Cox has described it, the mission was to bring adventurous new chamber music, with an emphasis on living composers, to the communities in and around Kachemak Bay, and to foster collaboration between classically trained musicians and the songwriters, artists, and musicians of the Kenai Peninsula. The organization has since partnered with the National Park Service, Bunnell Street Arts Center in Homer, the Anchorage Museum, and the University of Alaska Anchorage, and it commissions works inspired by Alaska's people and place. It is one of the few organizations in the state dedicated to contemporary chamber music.
For its thirteenth season, Wild Shore has assembled a program that travels across Alaska. It opens in Homer at the Bunnell Street Arts Center on Friday, September 25, 2026, moves to The Nave in Anchorage on Tuesday, September 29, and closes at Davis Concert Hall at the University of Alaska Fairbanks on Saturday, October 3, as part of the Circumpolar Music Series. The ensemble for the season includes Cox on flute, Tanning on violin, and two new guest musicians: the Alaskan percussionist Sean Dowgray and the New York City bassist Eleonore Oppenheim.
The first part of the program belongs to Christopherson. He will reimagine his songs for chamber ensemble, including new material from an album due out later in 2027. Christopherson's path to this stage began with a borrowed guitar. Before music became his life, he was working with youth at Cook Inlet Tribal Council, a tribal nonprofit serving Alaska Native and American Indian people in southcentral Alaska, and writing songs as a hobby. In 2019 he entered NPR's Tiny Desk Contest with a video filmed at the Anchorage Museum in front of the museum's enormous Sydney Laurence painting of Mount Denali, wearing a thrift-store baby-blue suit. The song was "Erase Me," and it was his second attempt at the contest. It beat out more than 6,000 entries from around the country.
NPR Music's Bob Boilen, who announced the win on Morning Edition, called Christopherson "a vulnerable performer with a powerful voice and a mighty message," adding that the song "comes from his unique perspective. It is thoughtful and heartfelt." The judging panel that year included Boilen, Rodney Carmichael of NPR Music, Abbie Gobeli of KEXP, Raul Campos of KCRW, and Tiny Desk alumni Lucy Dacus, Jason Isbell, and Ledisi. Christopherson told Alaska Public Media's Casey Grove that the song grew out of his experience as a transgender man. "I had lived my life as a woman for 25 years," he said. "And so after I transitioned I just noticed that there was so much more misogyny when people thought that women weren't around. So I just kind of wrote that song. Let people know that, you know, I'm still here." He recalled getting an email that he assumed was about the legalities of filming in the museum, then a phone call from Boilen telling him his day was about to get a lot better. He had to keep the secret until the public announcement that Thursday.
Since then, Christopherson has become a full-time artist. A 2024 Aywaa Creative artist fellowship, part of an Alaska Venture Fund effort to invest directly in Alaska Native artists, helped make that possible; he has toured, written songs for other musicians, and recently wrote a song for the Alaska rock band Portugal. The Man.
The second part of the evening pairs live music with experimental films by the Alaskan filmmaker Michael Walsh. Among them is "Braking Breath," a 35mm silent color film, for which Wild Shore has commissioned the percussionist and composer Matt Evan to reimagine his work "Still Live" as accompaniment. Walsh is a longtime figure in the Alaska art scene; more than a decade ago he was one of four artists in "Unalaskana," a 2013 exhibition at Bunnell Street Arts Center in Homer that set out to challenge romanticized images of the state, and his work has long circled the tension between Alaska as it is lived and Alaska as it is sold.
The third and final part brings every artist on the program together for the early stages of a larger work-in-progress, one that combines film, composition, and improvisation. And it is here that the evening's most unlikely element enters: a birch-wood violin made by Christopherson's great-grandfather, Frank Hobson.
Hobson was a self-taught instrument maker known as "The Eskimo Violin Maker." Christopherson has spoken about him plainly and with pride. "My great-grandfather was a really well-known violin maker who went by Frank Hobson the Eskimo Violin Maker," he said in a conversation published by Atmos. "His instruments—violins, violas, cellos—were and still are some of the best instruments ever made." Wild Shore's program notes use the same nickname. Now a violin carved by his ancestor, from birch, will be played in the same room as the songs of his great-grandson.
The venue adds its own layer. The Nave sits on the land of the Dena'ina, in the heart of Spenard. It was formerly known as Love Church, and became known as the "Church of Love" when local artists activated the empty building through large-scale projects and events rooted in the surrounding community. Between 2019 and 2021 the building underwent major renovations, including making its event spaces fully accessible. Today it operates as a community and culture hub, working with artists, neighbors, and local businesses, and it is owned in connection with the Cook Inlet Housing Authority. It offers a stage and a film-quality projector—both of which this particular program, with its live ensemble and its 35mm film, will need.
That the concert is happening in a decommissioned church repurposed by artists, in a neighborhood with a long and complicated relationship to the rest of Anchorage, feels less like a coincidence than a fitting frame. The whole evening is built on the idea of things being carried forward and remade: a song reworked for instruments it was never written for, a silent film given new music, a family craft revived after decades, a great-grandfather's handiwork meeting a great-grandson's voice. Wild Shore's stated aim is to treat the chamber ensemble not as a museum but as a site of cultural dialogue. On September 29, that dialogue will include a conversation across four generations of one Alaska family, conducted in birch and gut and breath.