Who: Raven Chacon
When: October 4, 17:00
Where: Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of music (Krišjāņa Barona street 1), LMT Chamber Hall
Topic: Composition, interpretation, site-specific performance
Attendance: Free of charge
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. His work ranges from chamber music to experimental noise to large scale installations, produced solo and with the Indigenous art collective Postcommodity. At California Institute of the Arts Chacon studied with James Tenney, Morton Subotnick, Michael Pisaro and Wadada Leo Smith developing a compositional language steeped in both the modernist avant-garde and indigenous cosmologies and subjectivities. He has written for ensembles, musicians and non-musicians, and for social and educational situations, and toured the world as a noise artist. As an educator, Chacon has served as composer-in-residence for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project, where he taught string-quartet composition to hundreds of American Indian high-school students on reservations in the American Southwest.
In his artist talk Raven Chacon will discuss the relationship of music to presence, both in time and in space — whether that’s an immediate and present interpretation of a score that may require a high degree of improvisation, or whether a particular installation requires engaging with a specific site in the moment of encounter. He will discuss how pushing the boundaries and definitions of score, performance, or installation can put both performers and audience members at the bounds of their comfort levels, allowing them to engage more deeply with the realities of the present moment and location, and the histories and conflicts contained within.
Raven Chacon will play a solo show at the Skaņu Mežs festival on October 5 at concert hall “Hanzas Perons”.
Supported by: The Trust for Mutual Understanding, The State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, project “tekhnē”, co-funded by the EU and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, and the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music.
