Score for performance

American Ledger No.2 is a site-specific score for the city of Tulsa Oklahoma and surrounding areas. Through its symbology and subsequent sound, the score recounts episodes of the region’s forced migrations, both into and out of the city, and violence towards Black and Native communities. To be performed by many people walking a circular path, American Ledger No.2 utilizes drums, whistles, megaphone, trumpet mallet percussion, and matchsticks, in an unstable system of equity and exchange. The score can be presented as a flag, a billboard, railroad debris, or any pyrographed object sourced from the region.

Commissioned by Atomic Culture and first performed and displayed as a billboard at I-244 in the parking lot of the Oklahoma Eagle in the Greenwood District, with the support of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

Music composition

Performed amongst the collapsed ruins of the failed Sutro Baths in San Francisco’s Lands End, but can be performed by any ruins near a large body of water.
Instruments include quarter-tone guitar, bathroom sink, floating cello, narrator, dowsing rods, bird calls, amplified tile, stirred broken mirrors, amplified fishing rod, homemade feedback ukulele, oxygen tank, student guitarists, and 13+ percussionists. Not a work to bring awareness, but a proposition for imagining when we are already gone.

Movement I. Estuary

Movement II. Tributary

Movement III. Delta (featuring guitarists Theo Moss, Izzy Spanswick, Nathan Marks, and Marcus D’Avignon)

Movement IV: Channel

Movement V: Distributary (featuring percussionists Willie Winant, Jack Van Geem, David Lechuga, Pétur Eggertsson, Lula Asplund, Samuel Regan, Philip Agbayani, Colton Ransom, Elizabeth Hall, Doug Chin, Ayden Bradley, Jimmy Chan, and Caleb Smit)

Movement VI: Sound

Composer: Raven Chacon

The Living Earth Show: Travis Andrews (guitars), Andy Meyerson (percussion)

Narrator and Text: Ashley Smiley

Costumes and Regalia: Rashad Pridgen

Production Manager: Cath Brittan @ Sutro Baths/lands End Lookout

Video 22min Color 16:9 stereo or 5.1

Written and Directed by Raven Chacon and Cristóbal Martínez

Featuring Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Nacha Mendez

In a search for the mythological Cities of Cibola, a horseman finds himself in a race against another rogue seeking the valuable metals of the New Mexican desert. Spurred by the justification of moralistic ‘dichos’, the rival explorers come to learn about what truly brought them to this land, understanding their true identities, and finding that they were only stealing from themselves.

Score for performance

American Ledger No. 1 is a narrative score for performance, telling the creation story of the founding of the United States of America. In chronological descending order, moments of contact, enactment of laws, events of violence, the building of cities, and erasure of land and worldview are mediated through graphic notation, and realized by sustaining and percussive instruments, coins, axe and wood, a police whistle, and a match.

To be displayed as a flag, a wall, a blanket, a billboard, or a door.
For many players with sustaining and percussive instruments, coins, axe and wood, a police whistle, and a match.

For at least 13 minutes

For any number of musicians with any number of non-musicians

Each line is a minute or longer

Line 1 is for both percussive and bendable tones

Line 2 begins with a warbly long tone crossfading into waves of harmonic or dynamic increases. X = chop wood

Line 3 is for police whistle(s).  Other instruments may join

Line 4 is for coins to be thrown. Two instruments may accompany.

Line 5 is a line

Line 6 is a grand decelerando ending with the striking of a match

Line 7 is for acknowledging groupings of 5’s and 4’s. Chop wood. End with everyone and everything.

for 4 — 8 docked ships with fog horns

Sound Installation / Reclaimed sound

Still Life No.4 is a recording of old Pueblo drum stewarded in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center collection. The location and date of the drum’s origin are not known. A single drum hit was captured and inserted repeatedly into multiple accelerated audio timelines, allowing the instrument to align with the ‘speed of life’ of other living beings in the building.

Candice Hopkins and Raven Chacon

Sound installation, speakers, text, timed lights

This work retells the Diné Bahaneʼ, the Navajo story of creation and emergence into the current world. Using timed audio and delay systems, the speech of a woman telling the story in Navajo language is transferred through a series of connected speakers activating future and past parts of the same story, revealing instances when long history repeats itself. As words emanate from the speakers, voices overlap, blurring the linearity of the story.

Score / Music Composition (2001)

Video: Raven Chacon (shot with Blackhorse Lowe and D.E. Hyde) (2015)

Report is a musical composition scored for an ensemble playing various caliber firearms. The sonic potential of revolvers, handguns, rifles, and shotguns are utilized in a tuned cacophony of percussive blasts interspersed with voids of timed silence. In the piece, guns – instruments of violence, justice, defense, and power – are transformed into mechanisms for musical resistance.

Full score available upon request

Candice Hopkins and Raven Chacon