Pulitzer Prize Winning Composer Raven Chacon Premieres New Work with the TSO

by Tucson Symphony
Pulitzer Prize Winning Composer Raven Chacon Premieres New Work with the TSO

Pulitzer Prize winning composer Raven Chacon from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation premieres his first orchestral work, Inscription with the TSO on the Dvořák and the American Experience program, February 21 and 23. The work is a TSO co-commission with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and the American Composers Orchestra and will have its world-premiere with the Dallas Symphony on February 6. Chacon, also a musician and artist, connects Diné worldviews with Western classical traditions exploring the relationships between sound, space and people.

“My career started as a composer, as being a person who experimented with sound and who also had an interest in trying to play. I say try because I think I never ended up developing a virtuosic practice on an instrument. Rather, I think I spent most of my time exploring all the instruments I could and tried primarily to just understand how they worked and then in turn having enough information to write for those virtuosic players,” said Chacon on a Zoom call in early January.

The concept behind Inscription comes from Chacon’s years spent developing a collection of gestural graphic notations in his scores. “It began with collecting and redrawing some of these notations and developing those into these clouds of sound, if you will. They became the kind of building blocks of this piece that I would move around and try different configurations.” The piece explores the concept of microtonalism: the use of intervals smaller than a semitone, or half-step, which allows for subtle tones that elude the five lines and four spaces of the Western music staff.

Chacon described his process of composing Inscription as non-linear, “It was such an immense project that I definitely worked on it over a year, adding bits at a time. Adjusting, editing, trying different configurations until I ultimately found what it was to be. I think writing in this manner allowed me to find a form that I wouldn’t have guessed could exist. I’m not going to say it’s randomization; I’m not rolling the dice and saying this is what it’s going to be, but rather it’s rolling the dice and saying this is something I could try, and that’s very liberating.”

He went on to say “for Inscription, I wanted to really think of trying a lot of different extended techniques at the same time. So, thinking of combinations of sounds across all of the musicians that I’m writing for. A lot of the work is written as divisi, giving each individual player a task instead of each section, which was time extensive, but allowed me to really think of detail as I was composing. I thought of each player as an individual maker of sound and how they would fit into this larger timeline.”

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This project is underwritten by Shirley Chann with additional support from Linda Staubitz. Tickets for Dvořák and the American Experience on February 21 and 23 start at $14.