Composer Raven Chacon's New Work for Double Bass

We sat down with the first Native American recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Music to learn more about his new work

Diné composer, musician, and artist Raven Chacon recently brought his work to Yale University's Schwarzman Center as part of a free, multi-day engagement titled "Raven Chacon at Yale."

This week, Chacon's wide body of work was featured in a range of performances, including a new work for double bass. Commissioned by Yale, it was written for and performed by Ross Wightman, who is also a faculty member at Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media. You can hear a portion of the work below:

"The piece is called Dį́į́ʼtsʼáadah, Chacon told The Violin Channel. "That, in the Navajo Language, means the number 14. For the past 25 years, whenever I'm writing a piece of music and I can't think of a title, instead of calling it 'Untitled,' I assign it a random number. The title of the piece is often the last thing you know that happens in the compositional process.

"The invitation came from Ross Wightman and the Schwarzman Center to write a new work for this concert at Yale. I'd known Ross for some time, and it was an opportunity for him and I to get together and try out a bunch of techniques. Some ideas I'd had worked out on the cello, but wanted to apply them to the contrabass. For me, the compositional process is rarely something where I'm doing it all alone and sending it to the performer, and they play exactly as I envisioned it — it's never that.

"It's more of a back-and-forth of trying things out, seeing what works. A lot of it doesn't work. You go back and try it again and you learn from the people who know these instruments best. Then it's a matter of putting it down on paper, developing some kind of notation that's going to make sense for myself and the person I'm collaborating with."

"There are two ways to describe a piece of music for me. I think one is what it sounds like, which is an extremely difficult thing to do. It's just very hard to talk about sound, as it says the words that we don't have words for.

"The other way to describe a piece is how the performer is engaging with it. I like to write a lot of 'situations for musicians.' What I mean by that is: writing gestures or actions that may be in conflict with other actions or gestures. Oftentimes, there's a prompt for a performer to do two or three things at once. All of these result in some kind of unique sound.

"For instance, with string instruments, one uses the left hand to press down the notes and then uses the right hand to bow. But there are all these other digits. There's also an opportunity for the bow to play lightly or with heavy pressure, play quickly or slowly, etc. You start realizing that you can do multiple 'events' at the same time.

"This work sees the performer go through a sequence of these actions that are compounded upon themselves or work in different layers throughout the piece."

"Ross and I have been working for months on this piece together. The space at Yale is sonically special, and I'm just excited to be here in New Haven to hear it.

"This is the first time I've written for solo contra bass. I myself am an electric bass guitar player, so the instrument isn't completely foreign to me. I'm working with a lot of extended techniques and harmonic content. For example, Ross is lightly pressing the strings in different places to allow the partials to emerge. He is sliding around and letting these high pitches emerge and then fall back into other noises in the composition.

"Another part of this is playing with creating multiphonics, and usually with orchestral string instruments, it depends on how the bridge is shaped. Because of this curvature, some strings have to be pushed down at certain points to be able to play three strings at once. Sometimes, I'm having Ross pull the strings outward so that the bow can slide across three or four strings.

"Another thing that we've been doing is pressing down on the bow itself so that it arcs a bit and can play all four strings. A lot of times, they're not going to produce what we might consider a favorable tone, but like a lot of my music, it's noisy. It's going to have a kind of harshness to it.

"I think the character of this piece is very much in line with a lot of the improvised noise music that I make in my own solo practice."

Born at Fort Defiance Navajo Nation, Chacon’s recordings span 22 years, and his work appears on more than 80 releases on national and international labels. He has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Whitney Biennial, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, The Kennedy Center, and more.

As an educator, Chacon is the senior composer mentor for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP). In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass, and in 2023, was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship.

The Raven Chacon at Yale was a series of multidisciplinary engagements initiated by the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) Sound Art Series and produced in partnership with Yale Schwarzman Center, the Yale Peabody Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale School of Music, the Music in Schools Initiative, and the Yale College Department of Music’s New Music Fund.