In recent years, accomplished artist, musician and composer Raven Chacon has been busy with multiple large-scale installations and performances that propelled him to the forefront of America’s experimental music scene, a trajectory emphasised by a Pulitzer award win this spring. I spoke to him while he stopped in Tulsa on his way back to Albuquerque from NYC, a trip he makes often these busy times: most recently he completed several major commissions: among them, a trio of works at the Whitney Biennial in New York City and the award-winning Voiceless Mass at The Cathedral of St John the Evangelist in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Born in Fort Defiance in Navajo Nation, Arizona, Chacon studied with James Tenney, Wadada Leo Smith and Morton Subotnick at the California Institute Of The Arts. As a composer and performer he works through classical chamber music and noise music – but his multi-form practice also includes art installation, publishing, composing, recording, scoring and much collaboration. Formerly a member of the art collective Postcommodity, Chacon creates works that respond to the sites and sonic traces of undisclosed colonial violence. These compositions and installations often reveal how historic injustices carried out by European settlers in America set the scene for an ongoing invasion and destruction of Indigenous land by contemporary settler interests.

Xenia Benivolski: I’ve been excited about your recent Pulitzer win and what that means for the US. Your works in recent years – specifically the piece Voiceless Mass (commissioned by Present Music and composed specifically for the Nichols & Simpson organ at The Cathedral of St John the Evangelist in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) and Several works at the Whitney Biennial (The Whitney Museum, NY) – are beautifully intertwined; more so, they share some commonalities in addressing uncomfortable truths in American history. I’m curious about how that came about. I read that Voiceless Mass started as an invitation to compose a new work for a large ensemble at a church at Thanksgiving, which you initially were not sold on, but then you changed your mind?

Raven Chacon:The invitation that came was for a concert to be held on Thanksgiving, and that part I was sceptical of. I talked it through with them. Luckily, Present Music understood that it was something to respond to, rather than just blindly inviting an Indigenous artist to present. It's such a contentious holiday. I then learned that the venue was to be a cathedral that houses this massive pipe organ. I started thinking of the colonial history and the Church's role in it, and here was an invitation to create a work inside of a building representing that institution. The organ is an instrument I've never composed for and I've always wanted to. My first instrument was the piano, but of course, that’s different. I wanted to think of how I would compose for my noise rig: mixers pedals, and microphone, and was not interested in composing anything virtuosic like a Bach fugue, with thousands of notes. I wanted to compose drones that drift in their timbre.

I was just reading about how in its inception the piano in Europe was a domestic version of the organ: a privileged form of furniture. The works composed on them expressed the social hierarchies of the time. Certain compositions make people behave in certain ways. When I was watching Voiceless Mass I was wondering about the structure reflected there – the anti-orchestral de-ordering of the ‘mass’. I'm curious what affected your decision to have the performers interspersed among the crowd.

Well, I began by thinking about what you're saying. What the organ was probably made for: it was made to be an instrument that was going to be embedded into the building. It's part of the architecture of the space. In that Cathedral, there are dual organs, dual sets of massive pipes framing the entire building. It's an instrument that needs air, a massive wind instrument, and it got me wondering if it intends to substitute for the choir: for voices, that the organ itself might have its own lungs: a mechanical system that replaces singers. And the cathedral itself is made to amplify and magnify voice, whether that is the choir, the sermon from a priest, or whoever is delivering the second-hand word from God. And it got me to wonder, is this an effect that is replicated in other places of the cathedral? Can someone speaking at the back of the room be heard? Is there equitability across the room? So then I wanted to spaced the performers out across the room. So that the viola, the quietest instrument of the ensemble, would have a chance to compete with the bass drum or the organ itself.

The organ is sort of this Wizard Of Oz thing, you know “the voice of God”, a little keyboard producing a sound that’s larger than life, it's a bit uncanny.

Yes, the tone of the organ can sound like when Dracula appears in the movies, it’s funny to think about what it implies, always in antiquity. But it's used, of course, to signify the monstrous. I grew up halfway in the Catholic Church in New Mexico. Of course, as time has gone on, we found out more about the Church as a colonising institution that has been in collaboration with residential schools: institutions that took it upon themselves to violently uproot Indigenous children under the guise of reeducation; recently thousands of victims were found buried in unmarked graves on their premises. This is well known in Canada but it hasn’t been covered very much here in the US. And just this year the Pope apologised for the Catholic Church's role in it. All of this spurred me to want to write this piece, to think about the suppression of voices by the institution: the organ and the building that speak on behalf of that oppressive entity.

Is it the first time that you've worked with a Christian institution?

In collaboration yes. But there have been other works of mine that speak to colonisation in the southwest. There was a Postcommodity work that was a sonic representation of an event that happened in 1680 when Indigenous tribes in New Mexico revolted against the Catholic Church and took the city of Santa Fe back from so-called New Spain. Of course, that was met with violent retaliation. That runs throughout much of my work, especially my contributions to Postcommodity and other works that are site-specific to the US/Mexico borderlands, such as Repellent Fence (2015) and A Very Long Line (2016).

Does it also connect to your exhibition at the Whitney Biennial?

One of the connections is that the sound work in the Whitney is called Silent Choir, a field recording that I captured while I was at Standing Rock during the NO DAPL (2016) protests, where Indigenous people were protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in North Dakota. After months of yelling at the police, expressing their frustration and anger, Water Protectors from the camp, led by Elder women decided to go up and confront the North Dakota State police and the NO DAPL Security, who were barricading the freeway to get off the reservation. Silent Choir is a recording of 300 or 400 people, standing in absolute silence, waiting for the police to respond as to why they are aiding in abusing the land and its water.

The curator’s installation includes a vial of air: supposedly it contains Thomas Edison's last breath. It’s a relic that was in the collection of Henry Ford: the inventor of the automobile. It sits in this dark room, with the field recording. So you have all of these women who are using their breath as protest, and meanwhile, you have Thomas Edison whose single breath seemed important enough to contain and be kept by Henry Ford. And of course, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are two men courting energy, Thomas Edison as it relates to electricity and Henry Ford being an inventor of the automobile which needs the very pipeline running through Standing Rock. It echoes the church organ in Milwaukee too, the priority that the organ takes up over all of these other voices, just by virtue of being built into the structure itself.

Of course, this is all done at the expense of the land that the oil comes from in the first place. At the expense of land and water, communities, places where people are buried or living and encroaching on people's sovereign rights and health.

There are three videos too, of women drumming, and sheets of scores on the wall.

It is a new work called Three Songs, a three-channel video with three women from different territories singing songs in their Indigenous languages. The songs are about massacres and displacement, those that happened 100 years ago and those that are still happening. One speaks of people during the trail of tears when they were forcefully relocated (1830-1850), another about the Navajo long walk (1864), which is when the US military displaced Navajo people, and in the third, and elder is singing about the removal of Seminole people from their lands (1800s). In the videos they are singing at the places where these events happened, but also places where currently there is coal mining, extraction, or the damming of waterways. the songs are about ongoing battles with the United States government.

Normally these would be songs that you sing with a traditional drum, but because they are contemporary songs, it was improper. So we're using a snare drum which is an instrument of the US Calvary military instead. It is my attempt to redeem that instrument from its association with its captors.

You’re often using instruments bringing their context to the work, like the military drum and the organ. Could you tell me more about the context of your scores?

The scores at the Whitney are a series called For Zitkala-Ša (2022). She was a Yankton Dakota woman who lived at the turn of the twentieth century: a poet, an activist, a writer a teacher, and also a composer. I was writing a dedication to her in the form of a symphony, but changed the project to honour thirteen contemporary Indian women sound artists, such as like Suzanne Kite, Laura Ortman, Joy Harjo, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and others. The form of these are one-page graphic notation scores.

So the thread between all of these works, the scores, the standing rock sound piece, and the drum piece is honouring matriarchal tribal view and leadership.

Do you think of scores as forms of recording?

Recordings are different from other projects, there are very specific reasons for them to exist. Same with performances. The score, independent of the performance of the recording, is its own conceptual vehicle. In this case, I like to think of them as both transcripts of how I perceive these women’s work and as a form of dialogue with them. They're portraiture, in that sense of being transcriptional. But at the same time they're prompts for other people to consider the narrative inside.

Much has been written about the significance of your Pulitzer win: you are the first Indigenous American person to receive the award. What were some of the reactions from your community?

I'm very honoured. I hope I'm not the last Native artist to receive one for music. But there have been other parts to this that have been really nice. For example, all the different communities that I belong to are represented, and that's very special. The Chamber music people now claim me, it was nice to be recognised for that, but that’s not all I do: it was also nice to be able to represent other, smaller communities and musicians, for example, the noise community.

An interesting thing about the Pulitzer is the association with journalism and truth-telling. Do you feel that implication sticks to the work?

I appreciate that this was the piece that was acknowledged that can speak to this ongoing relationship that Indigenous people have with the Christian church, and the suppression of many voices in the Americas. It's a very current and ongoing discussion that's raised by the piece, and music can’t always do that.

Instrumental music is not necessarily the best vehicle for discussion. It is often in a position where it doesn’t have to say anything, it can just exist. But in this piece I was fortunate to find that all of the elements; the instruments and the building and the date of premiere and the eventually the tones of the actual music, was able to prompt a discussion about these institutions. Which is to also say that collaboration is crucial. The continual learning of new tools and new techniques through collaboration with others is what motivates me. I learn a lot from other people, and we make things together. We share authorship and that's the way for me to understand others, that's my continuing education.

Wire subscribers can read an interview with Raven Chacon in The Wire 406 from December 2017 via the digital archive.