Issuu

Listening to Silence and Hearing History: The Shapeshifting Music of Raven Chacon Listening is the foundation of Raven Chacon’s wide-ranging artistic practice. “I am a listener,” he simply declares, but the attention he gives to sound is complex and vast, encompassing far more than what is immediately audible.1 From his earliest works, Chacon has been dedicated to amplifying the unheard, calling attention to what is absent or unknown. In Field Recordings (1999), for example, he recorded quiet outdoor spaces that held meaning for him, then he amplified the playback. “In the studio, I turned the volume up to the max. It’s not about the pristine anthropological capturing or listening to this place. It’s about letting this place speak and scream.”2 More recently, in one of his most powerful sound installations, Silent Choir (2016/2022), Chacon recorded the moment of silent protest at the Oceti Sakowin camp, near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, during the No Dakota Access Pipeline Resistance in 2016–2017. “The sonic trace not only describes what can be sensed,” Chacon indicates, “but also what may be imagined, and amplifies the echo of a movement that stood unshakable.”3 Affirming the multidimensional nature of listening, Chacon embraces physical and metaphysical aspects of sound that surround and permeate us. Since music unfolds over time, past, present, and possible futures are in constant dialog within the listener. There is also an empathic component that is too often overlooked: listening is the act of paying close attention not just to the sounds and oneself, but also to the environment and to those sharing our time, our physical space, and our history, many of whom do not have the privilege of being heard. “My belief is that sound work cannot be made in isolation,” Chacon states. “These are acoustic, conceptual responses to land; they seek to acknowledge the people who have history in those places.”4 This confluence of “sonic traces” creates a resonant hyperreality, a rich polyphonic and polytemporal network that situates, shapes, and guides us. For Chacon, the most important musical parameter reflecting this network is counterpoint, not in traditional terms of melodic polyphony, but on a much grander scale. I am speaking about the contrary motion of navigating a world that assumes where you are going because of where you come from. Before that contrary motion is discovered, the switching of course, running parallel with whatever is chasing you or whatever you are chasing, at a dissonant interval and distance. It is the zigzagging into crevices where you are not allowed, maybe you bring a friend with you, another species, and you zigzag together. And you gather more, changing forms and formations, mimicking each other’s voices to confuse the listeners who want to trap you in your position.5 Chacon’s expansive concept of counterpoint is relational, subversive, and transformational, taking on a shapeshifting quality that is evident throughout his work, which seems to “zigzag” across different media platforms. Chacon categorizes his work according to three distinct genres: experimental noise studies, sound installations, and instrumental chamber music. “Those three modes are all very separate parts of my practice,” Chacon explains, “and they rarely overlap, but I think, at the end of the day, they’re all some form of music.”6 At a young age, Chacon took piano lessons and learned the fundamentals of Western music notation. Thinking that writing notes on paper was the proper