An evocation of space both physical & sacred
VOICELESS MASS GETS ITS NEW MEXICO PREMIERE
IN2022, the Albuquerque-based Diné composer Raven Chacon became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music, for his 2021 composition Voiceless Mass. It receives its New Mexico premiere on Saturday, March 4, as the featured work on a program titled Encountering the Spirit.
In awarding the Pulitzer Prize, the jury (which was chaired by The New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross) described Voiceless Mass as “a mesmerizing, original work for organ and ensemble that evokes the weight of history in a church setting, a concentrated and powerful musical expression with a haunting visceral impact.”
Chacon was born in 1977 in Fort Defiance, Arizona, which is part of the Navajo Nation, on the Arizona-new Mexico border northwest of Gallup. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of New Mexico and a Master of Fine Arts in music composition from the California Institute of the Arts.
Voiceless Mass was commissioned for performance at Milwaukee’s Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, which for Chacon was an opportunity to write a site-specific work, making use of its celebrated pipe organ, and one which allowed him to address a central aspect of the relationship between Native American communities and Western religions. As he wrote in his notes for the piece, “In exploiting the architecture of the cathedral, Voiceless Mass considers the futility of giving voice to the voiceless, when ceding space is never an option for those in power.”
When asked what it will take to change that dynamic, Chacon replies, “Part of it is in providing actual space, giving land back or giving the space back. It’s not hopeless, but very complicated. What I’m talking about with this piece is institutions of power that tend to be more equitable than they are.”
The piece is scored for an ensemble of flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, two percussionists, and strings, in addition to the pipe organ. The organ represents the institution of the church, and the other instruments, which are scattered around the sanctuary, the voices of individuals questioning its authority.
“The idea isn’t just the antiphonal nature of the music,” Chacon says, “but the individuality in the voices of the ensemble. I want the audience to be able to hear each instrument, even though they’re playing as a group.” The composer hopes the orchestra-throughout-the-sanctuary approach will happen with the Albuquerque concert, saying, “We’re going to try it. That’s the goal, but we won’t know until we do a rehearsal.”
The titles of Chacon’s works often convey multiple meanings. Voiceless Mass is at once a literal description (there are no singers in the piece), a reference to a religious rite, and an evocation of mass as space and volume. “A gathering of people anywhere is a mass,” he points out, “and the actual architecture has a presence, often in the center of a town.”
Chacon often makes use of what are known as aleatory techniques in his compositions, which means they’re designed to change with each performance. In Voiceless Mass, “Everything is notated, but there are moments that allow for fluidity,” he says. “Even though it’s conducted, and it follows a tempo, sometimes the conductor shifts to a ‘Cage clock,’ [named after composer John Cage], where the arms become the hands of a clock. So time can shift and change based on how each player responds to it.”
Friends of Cathedral Music Artistic Director Maxine Thévenot, started working to secure Voiceless Mass‘ performing rights the day after the Pulitzer Prize decision was announced. “Raven replied to my email the very next day,” she says, still sounding a bit surprised. “I was very touched that he got back so quickly, and with a copy of the score and an audio file of the first performance.”
From there the challenge was putting together a program that matched Chacon’s orchestration. “Movements three, four, and five of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time worked really well for this purpose,” Thévenot says, “and the piece fit our theme.” The deeply religious Messiaen wrote the quartet while in a German prisoner-of-war camp during the winter of 1940-1941 and dedicated it “in homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who raises his hand towards Heaven saying, ‘There shall be no more time.’”
The hour-long concert opens with Distance, a 2015 piece by Michael Barnes for five-octave marimba, crotales (a set of small, tuned brass disks), and ocean drum. (Messiaen created the first ocean drum, inspired by the Native American water drum, for use in his 1974 12-movement epic From the Canyons to the Stars …, which was in turn inspired by his visit to Bryce Canyon, Utah.)
Distance evokes the emotions generated by the separation and termination of interpersonal relationships, through visual as well as musical means. In his program note, Barnes wrote, “the marimba player’s hands spread apart throughout the piece until they are separated a great distance at the climax. The smooth, sweeping phrases suggest the roads traveled between two people, while the ocean drum accompaniment represents rainfall, change, and cleansing.”
Thévenot is the group’s organist, as well as its music director. She describes Walter Piston’s Prelude and Allegro for Organ and Strings as “a superbly composed 10-minute concerto that’s super challenging and also very fun to play.” Projections of her hands and feet will be displayed during its performance, to give attendees a better sense of what’s involved with playing the solo part.
Music by another Pulitzer Prize winner, Joseph Schwantner (1979, for the orchestral work Aftertones of Infinity), is also on the program — his “Black Anemones” for flute and piano — as is Michel Galante’s “Flicker,” a short piece for clarinet and piano that involves challenging techniques for the clarinettist such as circular breathing (taking a breath and playing simultaneously) and producing chords with the instrument.
Encountering the Spirit will be preceded by a conversation between Chacon and Ana Alonso Minutti, a UNM associate professor of musicology, at 9:30 a.m. Admission is free for ticket holders on a first-come, first-served basis; space is limited.
details
Encountering the Spirit
Presented by the Friends of Cathedral Music
10:30 a.m. Saturday, March 4
Cathedral of St. John, 318 Silver Ave. SW, Albuquerque Tickets $20 in advance ($25 at the door), fcmabq.org/tickets