Consonance and Dissonance

By Michael Haederle

He has been turning musical convention on its head ever since, creating a unique body of work that culminated in the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2022 for “Voiceless Mass,”

a haunting piece for pipe organ, woodwinds, strings, percussion and sine tone. Last fall, his work won further recognition in the form of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship, often referred to as a “genius” award.

Chacon, who graduated from The University of New Mexico with a bachelor of arts in music, incorporates film, performance art and other media into his work as he mixes dissonance, environmental noise and other elements in precisely notated compositions. He straddles two worlds, veering from high-culture performances at the Whitney Biennial and the Kennedy Center to machine-gun riffing on recordings with his metal band Tenderizor.

His inventiveness ranges from the playful “Meet the Beatless,” 10 songs created from fragments of Beatles songs, to “Field Recordings,” which eerily captures ambient outdoor sound at Window Rock, Canyon de Chelly and the Sandia Mountain foothills, and “Chorale,” a video recording of dueling cruise ships blasting their horns in a Norwegian fjord.

“This practice is constantly evolving,” Chacon says. “It’s considering the extension of collaborators and mediums that I can work with, thinking about what happens when you include other voices or other tools to use to tell that story or relay that concept.”
Chacon was born at the Fort Defiance Indian Hospital in Arizona, and spent his early years living on the Navajo Nation before his family moved to Albuquerque. His father, Lawrence Chacon (’83 MA, ’86 JD), a lawyer, was from Mora, N.M., while his mother, Gayle Dineyazhe Chacon, (’93 MD), a physician and emerita professor in the UNM School of Medicine, grew up in Chinle, Ariz.

Music was his passion from Day One. He obsessively listened to the entire Beatles catalog. In Albuquerque, his parents met Dawn Chambers (’88 BMusEd, ’92 MMus), a British woman who was pursuing her master’s degree at UNM in keyboard accompaniment. “She offered to give me and my sister free piano lessons, and that’s what started it,” he says. Chacon only studied with Chambers for a few years, but the lessons had sparked something. He was inspired to learn as much as he could about music and taught himself to play the guitar and other instruments. “That’s why I read music. And that’s what got me interested in the classical instruments,” he says. “I’m completely indebted to her.”

Chambers remembers Raven and his sister Nanibah — now a painter and muralist — as “very serious people at a young age.”

She taught her students to sight-read complex scores, sending them home each week with pieces to practice. “One of the most amazing things is he actually did the work,” she says. “Little 10-year-old boys generally don’t like that.”

She also invited Raven and his siblings to a performance at UNM by John Cage on the occasion of the avant-garde composer’s 75th birthday. As he grew older, Chacon became deeply interested in experimental music and contemporary classical composers like Robert Ashley, Iannis Xenakis and Alvin Lucier.

“You could make very raw, ugly-sounding music, and that would be another way of making sound,” he says. “That fascinated me, too. That’s what got me into improvisation and got me interested in making noise music — rejecting virtuosity and trying to be the fastest guitarist on Earth.”

After graduating from Cibola High School, Chacon followed in his parents’ footsteps and enrolled at UNM. Despite his love of music, he didn’t think it was likely to be a viable career, so he took lots of film studies and art classes. But he also learned sound recording from Manny Rettinger, a staffer and adjunct faculty member who ran a studio for the Department of Music, and later studied music composition with Christopher Shultis, now an emeritus professor.

“You could make very raw, ugly-sounding music, and that would be another way of making sound.”

“Manny was teaching recording, but also very encouraging of other kinds of experimental sound,” Chacon says. “I think that started getting me to think about film recordings, sound installations and other components that I still use today.”

Rettinger says that when they met, Chacon had a shaved head and was unusually reticent. “He just didn’t say a word. I thought, ‘OK, that’s great. I can handle this.’ But he started doing this music that was just amazing stuff — almost Zappa-esque stuff. I just thought, ‘This guy is really talented.’”

Chacon at the time “was more like a rock’n’roller,” Rettinger says. “He wasn’t completely into the classical thing, but he had to do it because it was in the program.”

Chacon says his formal musical education at UNM gave him a grounding and formal vocabulary for expressing himself musically. “It is a framework that has been helpful for me to understand concepts of counterpoint as much as it is the understanding of consonant tones, and then being able to counter that with dissonance.”

After graduating from UNM in 2002, Chacon audited visual art classes and applied to graduate schools. “As far as the music I was interested in making, which was something that would be outside of the university, and something maybe more DIY noise-making, I wasn’t finding that in Albuquerque,” he says. He soon moved to Los Angeles for his master’s degree in Music Composition at the California Institute of the Arts.

He lived there for six years while getting commissions to produce and perform his music. But in 2008 he moved back to Albuquerque, where there was now a thriving experimental music scene. He lived for a while in an informal music venue near Downtown located in a former church, and he soon became part of a loose-knit group of collaborators known as the Death Convention Singers, which advertises itself as “a free jazz psychedelic harsh noise collective.”

Chacon also participated in Postcommodity, a collective of Southwest Native American artists collaborating in the use of sound, video and other media to challenge the “commodity” era of Native American art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

And, he started his own record label to distribute the music he was making with his friends. (He came up with the name — SickSickSick Distro — when he was a teenager after playing a cassette recording of Yoko Ono’s “Kiss, Kiss, Kiss” backwards.) “The first six releases or so are just me under different names,” he says. With the help of the MacArthur fellowship, which comes with a grant of $800,000 over five years, Chacon says, “I hope to be putting out a whole lot more from New Mexico musicians.”

For Chacon, the creative gesture lies in the conception and performance of a piece. “I make something and get it to a point where I’m satisfied with it,” he says. “It’s not even to say I like the music itself. There are pieces I’ve made where I’m not sure I would listen to them too many times. As conceptual pieces of art, that’s their reason for existing.”

He has often blended his compositions with other forms of artistic expression, including film and performance art.

“It makes sense to me to zigzag through these different mediums for my own interest and my own momentum,” he says. “I am afraid of somebody pigeonholing me. They automatically have an assumption when they hear the label of ‘Native American composer,’ for instance. It’s not that I’m not proud of some of the labels that are assigned to me, especially because they are very few of us Indigenous composers who are able to do this as a living — and my job is to make more of us, to mentor more and more young artists and composers. But at the same time, a large portion of the public doesn’t understand their own label.”

Bringing along the next generation of Indigenous composers has been a longstanding passion of Chacon’s, especially his annual participation in the Native American Composer Apprentice Project. He visits communities on the Navajo, Hopi and Salt River reservations, teaching high school students to write a string quartet.

“Whether they know music notation or not, they undertake that assignment and produce a composition that’s two to three minutes long,” he says. “Every year we have about 20 to 30 students, and on Labor Day weekend, there’s always a concert at the Grand Canyon Music Festival with a professional string quartet playing those compositions.”

These days, Chacon lives in upstate New York with his wife, Candice Hopkins, a Carcross/Tagish First Nation citizen and curator who serves as executive director of the Forge Project, a Native-led initiative that advances Indigenous leadership in arts and culture. He commutes to New York City twice weekly to teach a course at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, and teaches an MFA class at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe via Zoom. He still has a home and roots in Albuquerque and returns regularly.

Chacon is grateful for the recognition the Pulitzer and MacArthur awards have brought to his early work, and with the MacArthur award he expects to have more time to rest, read and recharge.

“I won’t slow down in the sense of making work, but it affords me an opportunity to not have to travel so much, or do every gig and every artist’s talk and every concert,” he says. “I hope to have more time to grow from the things that artists need to grow.”

Dawn Chambers, who has stayed in touch with Chacon through the years, marvels at his new level of recognition. “I remember thinking one day, ‘Oh, Raven has suddenly become something in the eyes of the world,’” she says. “I want to jump up with joy every time I hear a new piece of his. I love what he writes. It’s just so beautiful.”