Pulitzer prize winning composer and experimental musician Raven Chacon was set to perform at Skaņu Mežs last year, yet he could not attend due to personal reasons. In the meantime, he has been awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, the “Genius Grant”, and will perform at Skaņu Mežs 2024 as one of the most highly regarded – and awarded – American experimental musicians of our time. 

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.

“Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among sound, space, and people. In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined.”

– The MacArthur Foundation on Chacon’s work

Supported by Trust for Mutual Understanding.