Raven Chacon, For Zitkála-Šá series

Raven Chacon: I’m Raven Chacon. I’m a composer and artist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The project is thirteen scores dedicated to contemporary Indigenous women musicians and sound artists and composers.

The scores then took on a bit of a portraiture form in thinking about the work that each of these women make. And so, some of them might use Western notation: clefs, and note heads, and staff lines. Others might incorporate more of the tribal geometries that these women are from. And others are other kinds of symbology, other kinds of maybe mathematical or numerological symbols. Other kinds of maybe ambiguous designs that can take on both sonic meanings, but also meanings of world view. Maybe of landscape, maybe the cardinal directions of the earth.

One of my favorite ones of the series is the one I wrote for a violinist who’s an Alaska native. Iñupiat musician named Heidi Senungetuk. And Heidi is one of the women that I wrote for that does have a classical music background and has that kind of training. And so, that score uses the staff lines and five line staff and system to make a kind of subversion of that notation. And the way that score works is one has an opportunity to compose a melody onto a traditional staff line, but you see the subsequent lines are misshapen. In fact, some of them look like birds or look like slopes of a hillside, or of a mountain. And one is to then transpose that melody back onto those new staff lines.

They’re all different and they all have meaning, all of these symbols, but at the same time, they’re not totally open to interpretation or expression. In fact, a lot of them are very specific in their instructions. I think they are welcoming.