Acting Strangely

Students in Dr. Woloshyn’s North American Indigenous Music Seminar have prepared three works by Raven Chacon, exploring Indigenous classical music through an embodied and sonified dialogue with Indigenous worldviews—in this case, Navajo, or Diné.

Pulitzer-prize winning and former MacArthur Fellow Raven Chacon is a composer and artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. The compositions in today’s performance allow for a range of instruments and participants. They include graphic notation, some of which incorporates Navajo iconography (about which Chacon withholds translation), and rely intensely on listening, improvisation, and collaboration.