Celebrating Native American Heritage: Raven Chacon

As Curtis continues its celebration of Native American History Month, we highlight Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon, one of the six extraordinary composers whose works are featured in Ensemble 20/21’s sold-out November 18 concert, “Music of the Earth.”

Born in 1977 in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, Arizona, award-winning Diné composer and artist Raven Chacon studied at the University of New Mexico (BA, 2001) and the California Institute of the Arts (MFA, 2004). A former member of the interdisciplinary art collective Postcommodity (from 2009 to 2018), the 2023 MacArthur Fellow is an internationally renowned solo performer of experimental noise music and a remarkable visual artist whose chamber music compositions and site-specific opera Sweet Land, with fellow composer Du Yun—exploring the history and the American myth of Manifest Destiny—have been met with widespread acclaim.

Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Music—the first Native American in the award’s 105-year-history—for his epic work Voiceless Mass, scored for pipe organ, chamber orchestra, and sine tones, Chacon’s work has been exhibited, performed, or been presented at venues such as the Kennedy Center, the 2022 Whitney Biennial, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and the Borealis Festival, Bergen, Norway. His work is praised for exploring “relationships among sound, space, and people…[as he breaks] open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined.” In addition to his own musical and artistic endeavors, since 2004, Chacon has mentored more than three hundred Native high school composers in writing new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP).

Visit Raven Chacon’s official website.

This month, Ensemble 20/21 is excited to feature Raven Chacon’s 2016 composition, The Journey of the Horizontal People, which was originally commissioned for the Kronos Quartet’s 50 For The Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire project.

The Journey of the Horizontal People, Composer Notes

“The Journey of the Horizontal People is a future creation story telling of a group of people traveling from west to east across the written page, contrary to the movement of the sun but involuntarily and unconsciously allegiant to the trappings of time. With their bows, these wanderers sought out others like them, knowing that they could survive by finding these other clans who resided in the east, others who shared their linear cosmologies. It is told that throughout the journey, in their own passage of time, this group became the very people they were seeking.” –Raven Chacon

Ensemble 20/21 presents “Music of the Earth,” this Saturday, November 18, 2023, at 7:30 p.m., in Gould Rehearsal Hall at the Curtis Institute of Music. The eclectic program features selections that celebrate the sights and sounds of the natural world, with works by Raven Chacon, John Luther Adams, Allison Loggins-Hull, Gabriella Smith (’13), Gulli Björnsson, and Luciano Berio. This sold-out concert features the talents of Curtis’s extraordinarily gifted musicians under the batons of mezzo-soprano Micah Gleason, the Rita E. Hauser Conducting Fellow, who will be conducting and singing Berio’s Folk Songs from the podium.

You may join the waitlist should seats become available at Curtis.edu.

Photo Credits: 1.) Portrait of Raven Chacon; Adam Conte/Courtesy of the artist and NPR. 2.) Image courtesy of John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. 3.) Raven Chacon accepts the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Music from Columbia University President Lee Bollinger; Eileen Barroso/Columbia University.