COMPOSER RAVEN CHACON TRACES coordinates in the air above the dining table of his Albuquerque bungalow. He triangulates the house his father built in Corrales in the early 1970s; the Navajo Nation of northeastern Arizona, where his pregnant mother moved the family to give birth to him; and the transit of Route 66 through Albuquerque, where many of his musical influences took root.
“You had Buddy Holly playing on Central back in the day,” he says, smiling. “There have always been bars and clubs here.”
Chacon is relating different parts of a complex and often personal narrative that he continues to investigate through the musical concept of dissonance, via compositions that make use of the tension between sounds—or noise—rather than conventional harmonies. Created with Chinese-born composer Du Yun, his 2020 opera, Sweet Land, for example, critiques colonialism and Manifest Destiny by phasing through chaotic and discordant sequences to find moments of serenity in the midst. The Los Angeles Times called it “an astonishment.”
In 2022, Chacon became the first Native American artist awarded the Pulitzer Prize. As Joy Harjo was completing her tenure as the first Native poet laureate of the United States, Chacon’s achievement similarly elevated extraordinary Indigenous Southwestern talent into the nation’s mainstream cultural and academic circles.
