Detail of score for performance, Background Music, 2024, by Raven Chacon. Commissioned by Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
Raven Chacon, Background Music, 2024
Score for performance
Commissioned by Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity
Courtesy of the artist
In part an homage and response to Rebecca Belmore’s iconic work, Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother (1991), and in dialogue with the artist’s later piece, Wave Sound (2017), Background Music by Raven Chacon is intended to prompt the amplification of sounds taking place on Sacred Buffalo Guardian Mountain that Banff Centre is situated on, projecting these back into the sonic landscape. As the title suggests, Background Music invites awareness of the sounds made by the land and its non-human inhabitants that are already present and often not the focus of one’s attention, while also highlighting the increasing scope and encroachment of human-made sounds in many global contexts. Foregrounding the sonic background, the score also has a relationship with Chacon’s prior work, Field Recordings (1999), in which outdoor locations in the Desert SouthWest of the United States that would typically be considered quiet spaces were amplified.
Opening questions of who and what is listening and sounding, Background Music considers the relationality of each individual’s presence on the land and within a group. The work can be undertaken by a variable number of individuals in pairs or more. Each group will make use of a portable amplifier connected to a microphone. The actions of the individuals are informed by a score that is composed of a series of descriptive prompts in both image and text. These prompts are to be internalized by the performers but are not required to be memorized. Over the course of the piece, those undertaking the score may be reminded of different prompts, at which point they are invited to enact them. In this sense the score guides the actions of the person intended to position the portable amplifier towards listeners, and of the second person amplifying sounds both heard and inaudible via the mic. The image and text-based prompts also inform the ways in which both people, as well as any additional members of the group, may make sounds in response to non-human and creaturely beings they encounter or to human noises that are heard during the performance.
The score is accessible for viewing as a part Listening Devices. Intended for performance on Banff Centre’s campus, Background Music requires specific amplifiers to undertake and all future inquiries on activating the score can be directed to Walter Phillips Gallery. While the work invites engagement with our location, Background Music must be respectfully performed in a way that does no harm and without the transportation of natural elements in the landscape to other areas from where they are found. This text has been revised from the event description of the premiere on August 23, 2024.
Raven Chacon
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and The Kennedy Center. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile long land art installation Repellent Fence.
A recording artist over the span of twenty-two years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from The LA Times, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America.
Since 2004, he has mentored over three hundred high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022), the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022), and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.
His solo artworks are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.