Series Notes Contact Rehearsal Hotel
Series Notes Contact Rehearsal Hotel
43.
Convivir | Convivialities | Contrary Motions
Michael Nardone (Questions)
& Raven Chacon (Answers)
Convivir | Convivialities | Contrary Motions
Michael Nardone (Questions)
& Raven Chacon (Answers)
by Joshua Clover, © 2022.
Chacon, photographed
by Adam Conte, © 2022.
by Adam Conte, © 2022.
An excerpt from a book called Convivialities—Dialogues
on Poetics, a collection of conversations, with contemporary
writers and artists. A collection featuring dialogues with ...
Dana Michel,
Joshua Clover
& Jasper Bernes,
Shanzhai Lyric,
Cecily Nicholson,
Raven Chacon,
Divya Victor,
Carlos Soto Román,
Tanya Lukin Linklater,
Gail Scott,
Kevin Davies,
The Culture & Technology Discussion
& Working Group,
and Ryan C. Clarke.
A publication collated
and edited by Michael Nardone.
on Poetics, a collection of conversations, with contemporary
writers and artists. A collection featuring dialogues with ...
Dana Michel,
Joshua Clover
& Jasper Bernes,
Shanzhai Lyric,
Cecily Nicholson,
Raven Chacon,
Divya Victor,
Carlos Soto Román,
Tanya Lukin Linklater,
Gail Scott,
Kevin Davies,
The Culture & Technology Discussion
& Working Group,
and Ryan C. Clarke.
A publication collated
and edited by Michael Nardone.
* * *
Back to Rehearsal.
* * *
Back to Rehearsal.
* * *
An excerpt (care of Talon Books) ...
* * *
Language is nothing but meanings, and meanings are noth-
ing but a flow of contexts. Such contexts rarely coalesce into
images, rarely come to terms. They are transitions, transmuta-
tions, the endless radiating of denotation into relation.
—Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry
Through a desire to enter into exchange with others—out of a sincere curiosity, in the study of poetics, to question and contemplate what we do when we write and make artistic works, to learn deeply and expansively about the details and shifting structures of this vast mesh of culture and sociality we find ourselves a part of—I began to experiment with dialogue as a form. At first I was drawn into its capaciousness: how it can hold critical inquiry beside chit-chat, how it registers moments of cacophonous thinking as well as the improvisational attunement between individuals, how it sometimes occasions utterances inexpressible when solo or incidental blurts that are surprisingly resonant. I wanted my writing to exist within such a place. I wanted it, too, to be somehow more than writing, for it to be more thoroughly conjoined with living. Through the practice of making dialogues, I began to consider how writing might thrive with living, how it could mark and be marked by the interplay and co-composition of numerous others, how it might even ‘disappear,’ in Fred Moten’s words, ‘into anaxeroxic nothingness, [and] be at ease in the general and generative unease of social call, social rub, social hum, social mmmmm, social muah, social music.’ *
In short, ways for writing to be convivial.
I first took up this word—convivial—to describe a condition of textuality. I was intrigued by the ways that poets, since the 1960s in particular, experimented with composing poems in an iterative way that traversed different contexts of publication and that materialised across different media. A poem, for example, might exist as a text in a mimeographed journal, as an act of speech at a site of protest, as a reel-to-reel audio recording, as a hand-scrawled text with illustration, as a score for performance by one or several performers, as a site-specific sculptural work, or as a video installation in an arts space. Convivial, in my mind, intoned the sociality of a poem in its traversal through various instantiations and publics. The word also spoke to a sense of interdisciplinarity at the core of making such a poetry: that the poem exists at the nexus of many cultural forms and enters into dialogue with compositional practices beyond the frame of literature, that it could be informed by and interact with these other modes of creating, organising, articulating. I sought to cultivate this dual sense of conviviality in the works I wanted to critically engage with, in the books I aimed to edit and publish, and in the works I myself desired to make.
More recently, I’ve been struck by radical educator Ivan Illich’s use of the term. In Tools for Conviviality (1973), Illich envisions it as an antidote to readymade relations. Writing against the industrial productivity and consumability of his moment, against the ‘technocratic disaster’ of the few who manage from above what is possible for the many, ** he warns of commodities and commodifying processes mediating every aspect of our lives. Against this destructive force (one so often opposed by poetry and art), Illich proposes conviviality: an ‘autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment,’ which he considers ‘to be individual freedom realised in personal interdependence.’ *** For him, a ‘convivial society’ could come to be by means of ‘social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community’—by tools, importantly, Illich means not simply instruments, but also techniques, processes, social forms, and institutions—‘and limit this freedom only in favour of another member’s equal freedom.’ **** Conviviality, in Illich’s sense of the word, is thus a repertoire for attending to the commons of culture, for nurturing its robustness and capacity for difference.
Though Illich’s social vision and prescription extend beyond my engagement here, there is a resonance between his thinking and the social-materialist poetics at the heart of mine. Like Illich, I swerve away from the English usage of convivial that situates the term merely within the setting of a feast or banquet and ‘seeks the company of tipsy jollyness.’ ***** Instead, I direct my thinking towards a discourse initiated in the word’s Spanish cognate, convivir, to coexist. There is much to say about visions of coexistence in the time of ever-expanding war, climate crisis, ongoing settler-colonial dispossession, and the financialised obliteration of social life we are witnessing, in varying degrees of proximity, each day. Unlike Illich, I could never presume to propose the antidote to such a condition; yet, in conviviality, I recognise a fundamental means—a way of encountering, of listening, of reciprocity.
I connect this sense of conviviality with the Greek term ξένος / xenos—a word Emily Wilson singles out in her translation of Homer’s Odyssey as the crux term of the epic’s narrative—which can refer to being both ‘stranger’ and ‘friend.’ In my thinking, this dual sense in the word moves towards the being of conviviality. The ‘xenos figure,’ as Lyn Hejinian describes it, ‘is one of contradiction and confluence. The stranger it names is both guest and host, two English terms that are both derived from the single Greek term and are thus etymologically bound in affinity. The guest / host relationship is one of identity as much as it is of reciprocity.’ Hejinian continues:
I vividly remember reading this passage over fourteen years ago—in my first months living in Montréal, upon confronting an anglophone critical culture then all too present in Canada that seemed as if it wanted to keep poetry in a locked box beneath one’s bed, only to be lorded out whenever convenient to display one’s mastery over the subject. Such positions and perspectives in this critical culture seemed to be yet another extension of the hegemonic forms of our era: ongoing settler-colonial appropriation, a profuse surveillance of difference and violent antagonism with it, the neglect and outright devastation of cultural and environmental commons, all set within a landscape of continuous war and perpetually manufactured crisis.
In the resonance of Hejinian’s words, a different paradigm for critical practice felt palpable—one composed from the position of a ‘xenos figure,’ an interlocutor who works in relation with others to conduct inquiries into language and its encounters.
Convivialities collects moments of these ongoing inquiries in the form of a book. Each one of its twelve dialogues stages an encounter—with a writer, an artist, a researcher, sometimes even a number of people working from various backgrounds and occupations. Each dialogue focuses on questions of poetics—many concern poetry (its forms, histories, categories), yet all of them concern poiesis (making), a larger field that draws the study of poetics beyond the boundaries of the literary. Almost all of the dialogues revolve around issues of language and notation, which in their consideration extend into questions of performance, music, sound, listening, geography, politics, the transmission of cultural memory, and the overlapping crises of the present. In this undertaking, the form of the dialogue stages encounters: as face-to-face exchanges, correspondences, live forums, and all sorts of other inscriptive techniques that live between the verbal and the written. In its textures and intertextuality, my approach to the dialogues also allows for a certain critical intervention: the poet-critic as interlocutor. This is a position-taking central to critical discourse, yet it is a position-taking that welcomes—or perhaps more aptly, refuses to refuse—relation. In Convivialities, we are friends and strangers, guests to one another as well as hosts, visitors coming together in inquiry, in the momentary encounter of thinking and questioning and figuring together, to consider what it is we do when we compose, however it may be done.
Even if their perspectives are not unified under a single sign, the writers, artists, and researchers of these dialogues share contexts, subjects, and approaches. They are concerned with the state of the world in the twenty-first century, with the way language and art might respond to the shifting, crisis-saturated conditions of the present, at scales that extend from the planet to the neighbourhood. And they are concerned with ways we might find common ground or conviviality in these shared struggles. Throughout, they conspire to articulate tactics, poetics, contexts, and modes of relation to navigate these times and, perhaps, in the words of Ryan C. Clarke, propose a counterarchitecture. Just as each dialogue stages an individual encounter in poetics, this book stages a collective encounter between its interlocutors—their subjects, contexts, perspectives, and ways of making. It is my hope that it coheres in its refusal to be contained within a singular domain or methodology, in how it instantiates a practice of poetics that can encounter and engage with as vast an array of poiesis as possible. Such an array seems necessary to meet the needs of these present times, and to be of potential relevance to any possible future. To this extent, it is, above all, my hope that Convivialities be generative—towards future acts and understandings of making, towards ensuing critical dialogues, towards the conversations, encounters and relations to come.
(Michael Nardone, 2025.)
* Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Duke University Press, 2018), p.240.
** Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (Harper & Row, 1973), p.25.
*** Ibid., p.24.
**** Ibid., p.25.
***** Ibid., p.8.
****** Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000), p.326.
* * *
Language is nothing but meanings, and meanings are noth-
ing but a flow of contexts. Such contexts rarely coalesce into
images, rarely come to terms. They are transitions, transmuta-
tions, the endless radiating of denotation into relation.
—Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry
Through a desire to enter into exchange with others—out of a sincere curiosity, in the study of poetics, to question and contemplate what we do when we write and make artistic works, to learn deeply and expansively about the details and shifting structures of this vast mesh of culture and sociality we find ourselves a part of—I began to experiment with dialogue as a form. At first I was drawn into its capaciousness: how it can hold critical inquiry beside chit-chat, how it registers moments of cacophonous thinking as well as the improvisational attunement between individuals, how it sometimes occasions utterances inexpressible when solo or incidental blurts that are surprisingly resonant. I wanted my writing to exist within such a place. I wanted it, too, to be somehow more than writing, for it to be more thoroughly conjoined with living. Through the practice of making dialogues, I began to consider how writing might thrive with living, how it could mark and be marked by the interplay and co-composition of numerous others, how it might even ‘disappear,’ in Fred Moten’s words, ‘into anaxeroxic nothingness, [and] be at ease in the general and generative unease of social call, social rub, social hum, social mmmmm, social muah, social music.’ *
In short, ways for writing to be convivial.
I first took up this word—convivial—to describe a condition of textuality. I was intrigued by the ways that poets, since the 1960s in particular, experimented with composing poems in an iterative way that traversed different contexts of publication and that materialised across different media. A poem, for example, might exist as a text in a mimeographed journal, as an act of speech at a site of protest, as a reel-to-reel audio recording, as a hand-scrawled text with illustration, as a score for performance by one or several performers, as a site-specific sculptural work, or as a video installation in an arts space. Convivial, in my mind, intoned the sociality of a poem in its traversal through various instantiations and publics. The word also spoke to a sense of interdisciplinarity at the core of making such a poetry: that the poem exists at the nexus of many cultural forms and enters into dialogue with compositional practices beyond the frame of literature, that it could be informed by and interact with these other modes of creating, organising, articulating. I sought to cultivate this dual sense of conviviality in the works I wanted to critically engage with, in the books I aimed to edit and publish, and in the works I myself desired to make.
More recently, I’ve been struck by radical educator Ivan Illich’s use of the term. In Tools for Conviviality (1973), Illich envisions it as an antidote to readymade relations. Writing against the industrial productivity and consumability of his moment, against the ‘technocratic disaster’ of the few who manage from above what is possible for the many, ** he warns of commodities and commodifying processes mediating every aspect of our lives. Against this destructive force (one so often opposed by poetry and art), Illich proposes conviviality: an ‘autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment,’ which he considers ‘to be individual freedom realised in personal interdependence.’ *** For him, a ‘convivial society’ could come to be by means of ‘social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community’—by tools, importantly, Illich means not simply instruments, but also techniques, processes, social forms, and institutions—‘and limit this freedom only in favour of another member’s equal freedom.’ **** Conviviality, in Illich’s sense of the word, is thus a repertoire for attending to the commons of culture, for nurturing its robustness and capacity for difference.
Though Illich’s social vision and prescription extend beyond my engagement here, there is a resonance between his thinking and the social-materialist poetics at the heart of mine. Like Illich, I swerve away from the English usage of convivial that situates the term merely within the setting of a feast or banquet and ‘seeks the company of tipsy jollyness.’ ***** Instead, I direct my thinking towards a discourse initiated in the word’s Spanish cognate, convivir, to coexist. There is much to say about visions of coexistence in the time of ever-expanding war, climate crisis, ongoing settler-colonial dispossession, and the financialised obliteration of social life we are witnessing, in varying degrees of proximity, each day. Unlike Illich, I could never presume to propose the antidote to such a condition; yet, in conviviality, I recognise a fundamental means—a way of encountering, of listening, of reciprocity.
I connect this sense of conviviality with the Greek term ξένος / xenos—a word Emily Wilson singles out in her translation of Homer’s Odyssey as the crux term of the epic’s narrative—which can refer to being both ‘stranger’ and ‘friend.’ In my thinking, this dual sense in the word moves towards the being of conviviality. The ‘xenos figure,’ as Lyn Hejinian describes it, ‘is one of contradiction and confluence. The stranger it names is both guest and host, two English terms that are both derived from the single Greek term and are thus etymologically bound in affinity. The guest / host relationship is one of identity as much as it is of reciprocity.’ Hejinian continues:
The guest / host relationship comes into existence solely in and as an occurrence, that of their meeting, their encounter. The hostis no host until she has met her guest; the guest is no guest until she meets her host. Every encounter produces, even if for only the flash of an instant, a xenia—the occurrence of coexistence which is also an occurrence of strangeness and foreignness. It is a strange occurrence that, nonetheless, happens constantly; we have no other experience of living than through encounters.
We have no other use for language than to have them. ******
I vividly remember reading this passage over fourteen years ago—in my first months living in Montréal, upon confronting an anglophone critical culture then all too present in Canada that seemed as if it wanted to keep poetry in a locked box beneath one’s bed, only to be lorded out whenever convenient to display one’s mastery over the subject. Such positions and perspectives in this critical culture seemed to be yet another extension of the hegemonic forms of our era: ongoing settler-colonial appropriation, a profuse surveillance of difference and violent antagonism with it, the neglect and outright devastation of cultural and environmental commons, all set within a landscape of continuous war and perpetually manufactured crisis.
In the resonance of Hejinian’s words, a different paradigm for critical practice felt palpable—one composed from the position of a ‘xenos figure,’ an interlocutor who works in relation with others to conduct inquiries into language and its encounters.
Convivialities collects moments of these ongoing inquiries in the form of a book. Each one of its twelve dialogues stages an encounter—with a writer, an artist, a researcher, sometimes even a number of people working from various backgrounds and occupations. Each dialogue focuses on questions of poetics—many concern poetry (its forms, histories, categories), yet all of them concern poiesis (making), a larger field that draws the study of poetics beyond the boundaries of the literary. Almost all of the dialogues revolve around issues of language and notation, which in their consideration extend into questions of performance, music, sound, listening, geography, politics, the transmission of cultural memory, and the overlapping crises of the present. In this undertaking, the form of the dialogue stages encounters: as face-to-face exchanges, correspondences, live forums, and all sorts of other inscriptive techniques that live between the verbal and the written. In its textures and intertextuality, my approach to the dialogues also allows for a certain critical intervention: the poet-critic as interlocutor. This is a position-taking central to critical discourse, yet it is a position-taking that welcomes—or perhaps more aptly, refuses to refuse—relation. In Convivialities, we are friends and strangers, guests to one another as well as hosts, visitors coming together in inquiry, in the momentary encounter of thinking and questioning and figuring together, to consider what it is we do when we compose, however it may be done.
Even if their perspectives are not unified under a single sign, the writers, artists, and researchers of these dialogues share contexts, subjects, and approaches. They are concerned with the state of the world in the twenty-first century, with the way language and art might respond to the shifting, crisis-saturated conditions of the present, at scales that extend from the planet to the neighbourhood. And they are concerned with ways we might find common ground or conviviality in these shared struggles. Throughout, they conspire to articulate tactics, poetics, contexts, and modes of relation to navigate these times and, perhaps, in the words of Ryan C. Clarke, propose a counterarchitecture. Just as each dialogue stages an individual encounter in poetics, this book stages a collective encounter between its interlocutors—their subjects, contexts, perspectives, and ways of making. It is my hope that it coheres in its refusal to be contained within a singular domain or methodology, in how it instantiates a practice of poetics that can encounter and engage with as vast an array of poiesis as possible. Such an array seems necessary to meet the needs of these present times, and to be of potential relevance to any possible future. To this extent, it is, above all, my hope that Convivialities be generative—towards future acts and understandings of making, towards ensuing critical dialogues, towards the conversations, encounters and relations to come.
(Michael Nardone, 2025.)
* Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Duke University Press, 2018), p.240.
** Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (Harper & Row, 1973), p.25.
*** Ibid., p.24.
**** Ibid., p.25.
***** Ibid., p.8.
****** Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000), p.326.
Nardone : ‘Drum Grid’ brings to mind another term that, like context and counterpoint, I see as fundamental to many of your scores: relay. This sense of relay is related to context, because the sounds and the actions to perform them are interpersonal, they are travelling through the musicians. There are often acts of reception taking place from musician to musician—reception, interpretation, and then a retransmitting out into the world to produce some kind of music-making. Another aspect of relay involves different kinds of spatial listening: tuning to a site, an environment, a context of musicking, and sensing out how to interpret the dynamics of that space in a sonic performance. That, too, is a relay. ‘Mirror Quintet’ (2003) does this kind of relay, and so does ‘Echo Contest’ (2005). And there’s ‘Music for Voice’ (2003), which has such an intriguing sense of relay in it. There’s the percussive sounding, coming from the movement of the four performers each rubbing a ball across the surface of the drum in different patterns, and then that sound is relayed through the musician interpreting it by mouthing what they hear. Is that mouthing an actual vocalisation or a bodily-facial gesture they perform as if the percussive sound being made on the drum is, in fact, emanating from their mouths?
Chacon : It’s not to be uttered, but something always emerges. The players always have this urge to let some sound escape when they are mouthing it. It’s bound to happen. There’s a feedback loop with this idea of relay which happens in some of these pieces. I’m thinking of another piece, for amplified piano, ‘Nilchi’ Shada’ ji Nalaghali’ (2008). Initially, the piano player is holding down indicated keys to initiate a drone. They’re not making sound with the keys, but they’re opening up the hammers so the drone changes. But once the drone starts going and there is feedback, then the pianist, in order to keep it from getting out of control, has to find new positions, new ‘chords.’ A pianist who was playing this piece told me that there is a noticeable shift where the drone begins to play the pianist.
‘Music for Voice’ works in a similar way. Once you start vocalising, it becomes something that perhaps you can’t stop. Or it starts becoming its own secondary music, and then the rubbing on the drum has to respond to it. Even though there is a gesture that indicates how the players are supposed to rub the drums, it only refers to motion and not to time or pace or speed, all of which might influence how one performs the mouthing. It’s a physiological feedback loop with the instrument.
Chacon : It’s not to be uttered, but something always emerges. The players always have this urge to let some sound escape when they are mouthing it. It’s bound to happen. There’s a feedback loop with this idea of relay which happens in some of these pieces. I’m thinking of another piece, for amplified piano, ‘Nilchi’ Shada’ ji Nalaghali’ (2008). Initially, the piano player is holding down indicated keys to initiate a drone. They’re not making sound with the keys, but they’re opening up the hammers so the drone changes. But once the drone starts going and there is feedback, then the pianist, in order to keep it from getting out of control, has to find new positions, new ‘chords.’ A pianist who was playing this piece told me that there is a noticeable shift where the drone begins to play the pianist.
‘Music for Voice’ works in a similar way. Once you start vocalising, it becomes something that perhaps you can’t stop. Or it starts becoming its own secondary music, and then the rubbing on the drum has to respond to it. Even though there is a gesture that indicates how the players are supposed to rub the drums, it only refers to motion and not to time or pace or speed, all of which might influence how one performs the mouthing. It’s a physiological feedback loop with the instrument.
Museum of Contemporary Art Tuscon.
This brings up another aspect of many of your scores: the way they create environments or conditions for their players to—well, I’m not sure of a better way to put it—to figure it out. From your scores, the performers receive precise directions that are often wonderfully open to so many degrees of interpretation; the structure affords them a great degree of autonomy in figuring out a singular instantiation or experience by means of the score. How they choose to relate to the score and to one another and to the site and to the extended sphere of those listening is all open to the navigation of that singular encounter. ‘Music for Voice’ is a wonderful example of this.
In this regard, I think of an early piece of yours, ‘Duet’ (2000). In one of our first discussions about your work, you said something about how the rests in that piece are not meant to be considered as silences, or that they’re not exactly ‘rests.’ Can you elaborate on what you meant there?
I believe I said that Duet is not about hearing silence, in the way of John Cage’s ‘4’ 33”.’ Or, perhaps I should say, the idea is not to hear the ambient sounds that compose a supposed silence, which has been the interpretation of Cage’s piece. ‘Duet’ is interested in exploring the interactions that are possible between two people. The score is the organiser of a kind of telegraphing. Normally in a duet, the two musicians would interact completely by listening, but this composition requests nonaction. What this piece seeks is to have other senses be involved in that listening, while respecting the rest events within a shared pace. For each of the performers, there becomes an acknowledgment of their partner’s presence, of every nuance of their nonaction.
Listening becomes more expansive. It moves beyond the ears.
Yes. Even though ‘Duet’ was one of the earliest pieces I wrote, it has a theme that has continued with me all the way to today—the idea of aligning, of something aligning with something else. A more recent piece, ‘Compass’ (2021), also explores this idea of reading the pulses and paces of the world around us. There are things happening in nature, and then there is music. And somehow we can read these things, we can be a part of them and then respond, and the aligning of the musician with the rest of the world is what creates the music.
Duet, as I think about it, also has a complex sense of counterpoint embedded in it.
Yes, there is a counterpoint in Duet, the counterpoint of dynamic. Even though there are no notes being played, there is still an indication of ‘volume.’ There are rests that are forte. There are rests that are quiet. There are crescendos and decrescendos, as if the rests are becoming louder and softer, more and less intense, meaning the performer could intensify or calm whatever it is they are contributing to this shared musical relationship, allowing another inaudible interplay to be read or felt. But there are no actual instructions for Duet, its subtitle ‘for two musicians’ nods to the language of the convention of standard notation; all of the information is there, but it requests an awkward silence if one sees it only as a contradiction of musical symbols.
This kind of exploration of dynamics and alignment appears in other works, too. For example, my piece for the Kronos Quartet, ‘Journey of the Horizontal People’ (2016), has accented rests in the beginning so that everybody can align before they begin. This idea of amplified silences has been important to me. It’s in an early work and installation, ‘Field Recordings’ (1999), where I would find quiet places and make a recording and then turn those recordings up to their maximum volume. It’s also in a recent work I showed in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, ‘Silent Choir (Standing Rock)’ (2017–2022), in which I recorded a silent protest that happened at Standing Rock. It’s the sound of six hundred people on a cold day, quiet and still, staring at the police. You can hear the presence of all of those people as a confrontation. You can hear the weight of them being silent. This is what Duet is also about, about organising those moments of presence and exploring the intensities, or degrees, of how that presence is to be felt more than heard.
In this regard, I think of an early piece of yours, ‘Duet’ (2000). In one of our first discussions about your work, you said something about how the rests in that piece are not meant to be considered as silences, or that they’re not exactly ‘rests.’ Can you elaborate on what you meant there?
I believe I said that Duet is not about hearing silence, in the way of John Cage’s ‘4’ 33”.’ Or, perhaps I should say, the idea is not to hear the ambient sounds that compose a supposed silence, which has been the interpretation of Cage’s piece. ‘Duet’ is interested in exploring the interactions that are possible between two people. The score is the organiser of a kind of telegraphing. Normally in a duet, the two musicians would interact completely by listening, but this composition requests nonaction. What this piece seeks is to have other senses be involved in that listening, while respecting the rest events within a shared pace. For each of the performers, there becomes an acknowledgment of their partner’s presence, of every nuance of their nonaction.
Listening becomes more expansive. It moves beyond the ears.
Yes. Even though ‘Duet’ was one of the earliest pieces I wrote, it has a theme that has continued with me all the way to today—the idea of aligning, of something aligning with something else. A more recent piece, ‘Compass’ (2021), also explores this idea of reading the pulses and paces of the world around us. There are things happening in nature, and then there is music. And somehow we can read these things, we can be a part of them and then respond, and the aligning of the musician with the rest of the world is what creates the music.
Duet, as I think about it, also has a complex sense of counterpoint embedded in it.
Yes, there is a counterpoint in Duet, the counterpoint of dynamic. Even though there are no notes being played, there is still an indication of ‘volume.’ There are rests that are forte. There are rests that are quiet. There are crescendos and decrescendos, as if the rests are becoming louder and softer, more and less intense, meaning the performer could intensify or calm whatever it is they are contributing to this shared musical relationship, allowing another inaudible interplay to be read or felt. But there are no actual instructions for Duet, its subtitle ‘for two musicians’ nods to the language of the convention of standard notation; all of the information is there, but it requests an awkward silence if one sees it only as a contradiction of musical symbols.
This kind of exploration of dynamics and alignment appears in other works, too. For example, my piece for the Kronos Quartet, ‘Journey of the Horizontal People’ (2016), has accented rests in the beginning so that everybody can align before they begin. This idea of amplified silences has been important to me. It’s in an early work and installation, ‘Field Recordings’ (1999), where I would find quiet places and make a recording and then turn those recordings up to their maximum volume. It’s also in a recent work I showed in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, ‘Silent Choir (Standing Rock)’ (2017–2022), in which I recorded a silent protest that happened at Standing Rock. It’s the sound of six hundred people on a cold day, quiet and still, staring at the police. You can hear the presence of all of those people as a confrontation. You can hear the weight of them being silent. This is what Duet is also about, about organising those moments of presence and exploring the intensities, or degrees, of how that presence is to be felt more than heard.
I have a question for you concerning overlapping communities and the possible tensions you’ve experienced through being in dialogue with, but also being claimed by, different communities. I’m thinking of your training, immersion, and response to various strands of twentieth-century new music, and how that connection comes into balance or conflict with the Indigenous contexts you’re immersed in—ones that new music often gestures towards, or even extracts from, without much critical reflection on such engagements. And when I say ‘Indigenous contexts,’ I mean Navajo communities, of course, but also pan-Indigenous communities, too, that you’ve come into relation with through collaborations and other efforts.
The Navajo part of me, if we are talking about musical influences, my entry into that is through my grandfather, who is a singer of Navajo music. The majority of my knowledge of how Navajo music functions is through him. When I think of things like pitch, for example, or scales, these are things I don’t prioritise at all, at least not in my chamber music. Having a sole singer, like my grandfather, singing either a song that is very old—who knows how old, hundreds of years maybe—or one that he came up with on the spot, I don’t see a difference there. It’s malleable or fluid. If he sings the same song twice, it’s going to be different each time. But it’s still the same song. There’s nothing fixed about any of that music for me; I think that, in itself, has become an influence.
As far as my training in music, there were many separate trajectories that I didn’t know could ever overlap. There is one trajectory that’s simply about playing music and wanting to play in a metal band as a teenager. There’s another one that focused on making experiments, and that goes back to being a young person in my bedroom playing around with cassette tapes, trying to build guitars and drums, things like that. And then there’s a third that was prompted by the piano lessons I took as a kid, which developed into this naive or misguided idea that in order to be a professional musician, you had to study music—as in, study notes, study the Western canon, and go into a music program. That’s what I did, because it’s what I thought you had to do.
I had no idea that these trajectories could overlap until I went to a place like CalArts for grad school and found out about sound art installation and, yes, a lot of the experimentation of the twentieth century. There were a few composers who allowed me to see that there could be overlap, like James Tenney, Alvin Lucier. What I learned there was that compositions were experiments, processes, ones dealing with some other kind of phenomenon. Maybe they are more about sound and timbre than musical form. Maybe they are even more conceptual. Maybe they are dealing with something that is extramusical, such as history or even some kind of spirituality. All of this was incredibly intriguing for me and helped me to understand what kind of works I could make.
Raven Chacon, ‘American Ledger #1’, © 2018.
the Wattis Institute (San Francisco, CA.).
Studying your works over these last weeks, I realise that they are constantly founded in a sense of listening. Of course composers are listening, musicians are listening. Yet I think of a body of work that explores the ranges of and possibilities for listening as vast as yours, and I’m curious how that begins to develop as a field of exploration in your compositions.
That’s a really good question. I guess I have a certain skepticism about listening. Perhaps it comes from this discourse that emphasises the listener from the point of view of the audience and focuses on listening for sound, meaning to listen only for the timbre of the composition. Although I am interested in both of these elements, I’m more interested in the interactions between all of the people involved in the site specificity of the performance.
Once I started learning about other composers’ ideas about listening, I became even more skeptical. For example, someone like Pauline Oliveros. I have faith that her intentions for deep listening were aligned with what I think I am trying to work towards. However, there are those who, I think, have perhaps misread her works and have begun to think of deep listening as an opportunity to go somewhere and simply capture the environment. I’m thinking of people who are, like, ‘let’s go to the desert and do mushrooms and, you know, do a ceremony with a shaman in New Mexico.’ My homelands are ground zero for that type of shit, but this kind of mentality is apparent in many other less explicit ways. So I’m skeptical when I hear someone say, ‘Oh, I’m deep listening (trademark) certified, I went to a workshop!’ I want to ask, ‘What are we listening for?’ It’s something I am still thinking through.
Raven Chacon, ‘Silent Choir (Standing Rock),’ © 2022.
Whitney Museum of American Art.
Deep listening is, fundamentally, extractive. It seems to hinge on the concept of a privileged outsider who can show up and guide by means of a well-esteemed methodology, all of which strikes me as being closely related to a colonial epistemology.
Field Recordings addresses this. The work magnifies and amplifies the land, which could mean, by extension, magnifying and amplifying the people who have stewarded those lands. It could then also mean that these places are dealing with encroachment or violence, or that violence has happened in these places. The sonic result of oversimplification could remind the listener of violence. There’s a question concerning fidelity in the work, too, as it’s not really a field recording. A field recording is supposed to contain information, it’s supposed to document. What ‘Field Recording’ does is completely blow out this aspect. There’s a respect for low fidelity in my work. Or maybe I should say that the concept does not need fidelity. In fact, low fidelity can be a vehicle for the concept.
[...]
The Navajo part of me, if we are talking about musical influences, my entry into that is through my grandfather, who is a singer of Navajo music. The majority of my knowledge of how Navajo music functions is through him. When I think of things like pitch, for example, or scales, these are things I don’t prioritise at all, at least not in my chamber music. Having a sole singer, like my grandfather, singing either a song that is very old—who knows how old, hundreds of years maybe—or one that he came up with on the spot, I don’t see a difference there. It’s malleable or fluid. If he sings the same song twice, it’s going to be different each time. But it’s still the same song. There’s nothing fixed about any of that music for me; I think that, in itself, has become an influence.
As far as my training in music, there were many separate trajectories that I didn’t know could ever overlap. There is one trajectory that’s simply about playing music and wanting to play in a metal band as a teenager. There’s another one that focused on making experiments, and that goes back to being a young person in my bedroom playing around with cassette tapes, trying to build guitars and drums, things like that. And then there’s a third that was prompted by the piano lessons I took as a kid, which developed into this naive or misguided idea that in order to be a professional musician, you had to study music—as in, study notes, study the Western canon, and go into a music program. That’s what I did, because it’s what I thought you had to do.
I had no idea that these trajectories could overlap until I went to a place like CalArts for grad school and found out about sound art installation and, yes, a lot of the experimentation of the twentieth century. There were a few composers who allowed me to see that there could be overlap, like James Tenney, Alvin Lucier. What I learned there was that compositions were experiments, processes, ones dealing with some other kind of phenomenon. Maybe they are more about sound and timbre than musical form. Maybe they are even more conceptual. Maybe they are dealing with something that is extramusical, such as history or even some kind of spirituality. All of this was incredibly intriguing for me and helped me to understand what kind of works I could make.
the Wattis Institute (San Francisco, CA.).
Studying your works over these last weeks, I realise that they are constantly founded in a sense of listening. Of course composers are listening, musicians are listening. Yet I think of a body of work that explores the ranges of and possibilities for listening as vast as yours, and I’m curious how that begins to develop as a field of exploration in your compositions.
That’s a really good question. I guess I have a certain skepticism about listening. Perhaps it comes from this discourse that emphasises the listener from the point of view of the audience and focuses on listening for sound, meaning to listen only for the timbre of the composition. Although I am interested in both of these elements, I’m more interested in the interactions between all of the people involved in the site specificity of the performance.
Once I started learning about other composers’ ideas about listening, I became even more skeptical. For example, someone like Pauline Oliveros. I have faith that her intentions for deep listening were aligned with what I think I am trying to work towards. However, there are those who, I think, have perhaps misread her works and have begun to think of deep listening as an opportunity to go somewhere and simply capture the environment. I’m thinking of people who are, like, ‘let’s go to the desert and do mushrooms and, you know, do a ceremony with a shaman in New Mexico.’ My homelands are ground zero for that type of shit, but this kind of mentality is apparent in many other less explicit ways. So I’m skeptical when I hear someone say, ‘Oh, I’m deep listening (trademark) certified, I went to a workshop!’ I want to ask, ‘What are we listening for?’ It’s something I am still thinking through.
Whitney Museum of American Art.
Deep listening is, fundamentally, extractive. It seems to hinge on the concept of a privileged outsider who can show up and guide by means of a well-esteemed methodology, all of which strikes me as being closely related to a colonial epistemology.
Field Recordings addresses this. The work magnifies and amplifies the land, which could mean, by extension, magnifying and amplifying the people who have stewarded those lands. It could then also mean that these places are dealing with encroachment or violence, or that violence has happened in these places. The sonic result of oversimplification could remind the listener of violence. There’s a question concerning fidelity in the work, too, as it’s not really a field recording. A field recording is supposed to contain information, it’s supposed to document. What ‘Field Recording’ does is completely blow out this aspect. There’s a respect for low fidelity in my work. Or maybe I should say that the concept does not need fidelity. In fact, low fidelity can be a vehicle for the concept.
[...]
Michael Nardone is a poet and editor based in Montréal. His recent and forthcoming works include: Aural Poetics (an edition on listening practices across the arts), Yellow Towel: A Score (a collaboration with Dana Michel), Border Tuner / Sintonizador Fronterizo (a monograph on Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, co-edited with Edgar Picazo Merino), the Documents on Expanded Poetics book series (co-edited with Nathan Brown), The Transatlantic Conversation (a translation of Abigail Lang’s monograph on contemporary French and US poetry), and The Ritualites (a book of poems). As of 2024, he is a writer-in-residence at the SETI Institute.
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 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Sonic Liberation, and The Kennedy Center. As a member of Post-commodity from 2009 to 2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, and Carnegie International 57, as well as the two-mile-long land-art installation Repellent Fence. A recording artist for more than 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 for 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 Best New Opera 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 Composers 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 for Contemporary Arts’ Ree Kaneko Award, the Pew Fellow-in-Residence, 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, LACMA, the Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.
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 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Sonic Liberation, and The Kennedy Center. As a member of Post-commodity from 2009 to 2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, and Carnegie International 57, as well as the two-mile-long land-art installation Repellent Fence. A recording artist for more than 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 for 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 Best New Opera 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 Composers 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 for Contemporary Arts’ Ree Kaneko Award, the Pew Fellow-in-Residence, 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, LACMA, the Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.
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