The sky is massive. The breadth of the horizon overwhelms the eyes. The land is dry, open. Rocky. Strange. Beautiful.
The music is slow. Expansive. Undulating. Ever unwinding. Punctuated with rumblings that evoke approaching thunder and distant cannons. Bisected with sustained high notes that bring to mind weeping and smothered screams.
The music is “Voiceless Mass,” an epic work for organ, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, percussion, strings, and sine tones by composer Raven Chacon. For its creation, he was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
“In the past when people tried to link my music to the place that I come from it used to bother me—I just thought that was sort of being lazy,” says Chacon, who was born in 1977 in Fort Defiance, Arizona, within the Navajo Nation, and is the first Native American—and the first noise musician—to win the Pulitzer for music. “But now I see that it’s true, it makes sense. The sounds, the sparseness…that’s all in there.'”
Chacon’s parents weren’t musical, but his grandfather enjoyed music and encouraged the musical interest he spotted in his young grandson, giving him an accordion. “My grandpa was always singing,” remembers Chacon. “It’s been a lifelong thing for me, trying to understand and learn Diné [Navajo] music, and he would sing these songs that were in the language. But I was never sure if the songs he was singing were actually old songs or songs that he was just making up on the spot. Later, one of my uncles gave me tape of my grandpa singing and I’d listen to that all the time. I was able to figure out that some of the songs were his and some, I believe, were from the Long Walk [the 1864 deportation and attempted ethnic cleansing of the Navajo people by the federal government]. Other than that, I’d hear whatever music was on the radio and on MTV once we got satellite TV, and all my relatives were into heavy metal—Iron Maiden, Ozzy Osbourne.”
Left Turn at Albuquerque
When he was eight Chacon’s parents relocated the family to Chinle, another Arizona reservation, from where they could both attend college; next came a move to Albuquerque and piano lessons. “My dad met this woman who was getting her piano degree and offered to give me lessons, so I did that for three years,” he says. “One day she told my parents, ‘I’m giving a concert at the university, you should come and bring the kids.’ So we got all dressed up and went, expecting it to be this formal thing. But when it started, she came out on stage in a bathrobe with a bunch of rubber duckies and started dropping them into the open piano and plucking the piano strings with her fingers and doing all this other stuff instead of just playing the piano keys. After she finished, she introduced us to the composer, and it was John Cage. [The piece was Cage’s 1960 composition “Water Walk.”] Seeing that gave me the idea that music was something you could break and bend, it could be conceptual.”
He started playing in high school bands (“rock bands, mariachi bands, anyone who would have me”) and, with the Cage experience rattling around in his memory, took his first steps into the experimental music realm—although he didn’t realize it at the time. “We’d drive out to the desert and get all wasted and just make noise,” he says, with a laugh. “It was just something we did because we were bored, nothing about it would’ve told me it would ever be a viable career. There was a strong visual arts scene and a small music scene in Albuquerque then, but there wasn’t really a noise scene yet.” After getting a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University of New Mexico, he went west to initially study film and video at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles—and ended up on a much different path.
City of Angels and Art
At CalArts, Chacon found himself pulled back into sound while learning about recording in the music department’s studio. In LA he met and collaborated with experimental musicians and contemporary multidisciplinary artists via the city’s deep-seated avant-garde scene, a lineage that includes outsider collectives like Asco, Smegma, and the Los Angeles Free Music Society. “I was meeting a broader community, artists who were incorporating different tactics in their work, and it allowed me to find a way to address my own concerns as an Indigenous person through my sound pieces,” he says. Chacon studied under influential teacher-composers James Tenney, Morton Subotnick, Wadada Leo Smith, and Michael Pisaro; earned an MFA in music composition; and was a core member of the large ensemble Dog Shit Taco.
He returned to Albuquerque to find a more energized underground scene that brought together young artists working in noise, punk, thrash metal, and performance and installation art. Chacon opened a performance space called Spirit Abuse and began performing and releasing stacks of DIY cassettes, CDs, and vinyl under his own name and with a long list of projects that includes the Death Convention Singers, Black Drink, Tenderizor, Mesa Ritual, Cobra//group, Endlings, KILT, and others. He also became a member of the Native American art collective Postcommodity, which, in addition to making experimental electronic music, creates visual and installation art with a modern take on traditional Indigenous art forms.
“I met Raven in 2012 when I was doing a tour and hit him up for a show in Albuquerque,” says Nate Young of Detroit experimental band Wolf Eyes, with whom Chacon has performed. “He was on the bill, and he did this crazy set using deer antlers and pieces of metal with contact mics on them. I’d heard of KILT, and I knew about him from that band. But I wasn’t aware until later that he had studied music formally. Raven really encompasses the full spectrum of music.”
During his time with Postcommodity, Chacon met his wife, Tlingit curator Candice Hopkins, who is the director of the contemporary native-led arts organization Forge Project (she assembled “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969,” which is on view at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art through November 26). His own installations have been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Kennedy Center, and other prestigious venues.
The Expanding Chamber
As Chacon continued to grind out noise records, he also was building his name as the composer of conceptual works that have been performed around the world. These include such genre-expanding pieces as 2021’s “Chorale” for docked ships with foghorns, 2015’s “Report” for firearms, and 2010’s “Drum Grid” for numerous drummers, each positioned on a street corner. Among his works for chamber instrumentation are a 2016 commission from the Kronos Quartet, and, most notably, the aforementioned “Voiceless Mass,” which was co-commissioned by the Milwaukee organization Present Music to be premiered at the city’s Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist using its massive pipe organ as part of the group’s annual Thanksgiving Day concert. But as a Native American artist, the idea of accepting the latter proposition—a Thanksgiving event in a Catholic church—gave him pause.
“When I got the invitation, I was hesitant,” recalls the composer. “It seemed like [the concept] was loaded with so many things, and I wasn’t sure at first of the full reasoning behind my being invited. But I was brought up in a semi-Catholic environment—the history of Indigenous people in the Southwest is intertwined with Catholicism because of the Spanish colonization—and I wanted to respond to that history. And when I was writing the piece the pandemic was going on and the election and Black Lives Matter and of course Standing Rock had happened, so I wanted to respond to that, too.”
“Voiceless Mass,” its title a powerful, music-befitting allusion to the church as well as the long-silenced voices of Native Americans, elicited instant and stunned praise when it debuted, but Chacon, whose works have brought him an American Academy in Berlin Prize; a Creative Capital award; and United States Artists, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and Mellon Foundation fellowships, among numerous other adulations, didn’t think much about the piece again after the performance. Until his phone started ringing. A lot.
“I was at home, trying to work, and my phone kept ringing and ringing,” says Chacon, who moved with Hopkins to Red Hook in January 2023 and teaches young Indigenous people in the Southwest to compose concert music with the Native American Composers Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). “I thought it was just some telemarketer, so I didn’t answer. Finally, I looked at my texts and that’s how I found out [about winning the Pulitzer Prize].”
As he navigates the craziness of attention that’s followed the award, Chacon is working on a piece for an eight-voice choir and eight hyperdirectional speakers to be premiered at the Perelman Arts Center in New York, a collaboration with poet Natalie Diaz, and other projects.
“It has been crazy, yes,” he says. “But I’m extremely grateful to be able to do what I do. And I always hope that whatever I do ends up in some form for an audience.”
This article appears in August 2023.
