Raven Chacon’s 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Voiceless Mass” is a mass without sung voices in the guise of an organ concerto. Written for the large organ in Minneapolis’ Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, where the instrumental ensemble can be spread over a grand space, the concerto gives individuality to instrumental voices surrounding the audience while in dialogue with the resonant, spiritually uplifting organ.
The effect, as Chacon has described it, is meant to give voice to the voiceless. Not only was this a commission specifically from a Native American composer for the annual Thanksgiving concert by Minneapolis’ Present Music, but the performance also happened in the midst of racial justice demonstrations. Two days before the premiere of “Voiceless Mass” last year, Kyle Rittenhouse had been controversially acquitted of all charges in the fatal shooting of two men and the wounding of a third during a protest in nearby Kenosha, Wisconsin. Yet a livestream of that performance revealed an almost miraculous atmosphere in the cathedral, in which “Voiceless Mass” released tension by magnifying unsung voices into the realm of the sacred.
The first Native American to win the Pulitzer music prize, the 44-year-old Chacon is a composer, performer and multimedia installation artist from Fort Defiance in the Navajo Nation in Arizona. He is best known in Los Angeles for his revelatory contribution to the celebrated 2020 opera “Sweet Land.” Created by The Industry, it too served as a radical rethinking of Thanksgiving. Chacon, moreover, graduated from CalArts, where he studied four of the more progressive and provocative composers of our day — Morton Subotnick, James Tenney, Michael Pisaro and Wadada Leo Smith — each one of them representing a different avant-garde tradition.
