A certain multiplicity is ever-present in the many works of Raven Chacon. His projects are often a finely tuned mix of expression and investigation into the linguistic modes of music: conduits for instruments to reveal their histories, for the land to tell its own tales, and for vehicles through which music can reach any audience in any way possible. It can be seen in his scores, which make use of text instruction and graphic demonstration as much as they do music notation. It can be seen in the instruments or performers he writes for, which might be chamber ensembles or families, and for strings, woodwind and reeds or dog whistles, docked ships and firearms. There’s even multiplicity in Chacon himself, keeping his compositional practice entirely separate from his underground noise scene proclivities.
Chacon was born in the Navajo Nation, a Diné artist now living in Albuquerque where the region’s complex history informs his myriad of practices. His engagements situate him somewhere between the worlds of chamber music composition, experimental music performance, visual installation art, mentoring, teaching, collaborating and running a label. Both in his early days of heavy metal and now as a celebrated composer – winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Music, no less – Chacon centers his work around the violent, racist legacy of settler colonialism and its continued impact on indigenous people and land.
The Pulitzer was for his 2021 composition Voiceless Mass, written for the pipe organ of a Milwaukee church for a Thanksgiving performance. Chacon was initially apprehensive about the request given the contentiousness of the occasion, yet the opportunity to speak to the situation of indigenous people through music was a challenge he embraced. Much was made possible in this act. There he was, Diné, composing in a Christian church architecturally built to carry voice while institutionally stifling of dissent, working with pipe organ for the first time and discovering how it amplifies or smothers other sounds within a large ensemble. Speaking to NPR about his process, Chacon tells of his fascination with instruments – how they’ve evolved over centuries in a plethora of ways, traveling across many geographies yet somehow claimed by a certain few.
This same consideration of instruments is applied in Chacon’s new work, Call for the Company in the Morning, co-commissioned by hcmf// and BBC Radio 3 for a World Premiere at this year’s festival. Written ‘for a variety of 8 trumpets’, the composition responds to the question posed by renowned trumpeter Marco Blaauw’s Global Breath Composers Project: ‘Is the sound of the trumpet part of a language all humans have in common?’ The trumpet as signal instrument is investigated in this piece, as Chacon references fox-hunting horn calls to create an open landscape of drones. Its role in the marking of time passing, of hunting, sport and ecological balances are explored, its tone corrupted into a timbre of fear. Blaauw’s trumpet ensemble, The Monochrome Project, will perform the work, demonstrating this deeper understanding of the instrument’s adaptability.
Chacon also appears alongside Blaauw at this year’s hcmf// shorts in the mode of experimental improv. Having first met each other in the summer of last year, the pair will reconvene in Huddersfield to dish out electronics and noise with unconstrained abandon. With over two decades of basement shows, underground releases and and collabs under his belt, Chacon will be just as at home in this sort of chaos, still expressing meaning, still investigating sound.
Profile by Tayyab Amin