Raven Chacon
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Full Score and Parts -
Violin 1
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Violin 2
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Viola
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Cello
Program Notes
The Journey of the Horizontal People
(2016)
Raven Chacon
(b. 1977)
Composed for
50 For The Future:
The Kronos Learning
Repertoire
Artist Statement
“The Journey of the Horizontal People is a future creation story telling of a group of people traveling from west to east, across the written page, contrary to the movement of the sun, but involuntarily and unconsciously allegiant to the trappings of time. With their bows, these wanderers sought out others like them, knowing that they could survive by finding these other clans who resided in the east, others who shared their linear cosmologies. It is told that throughout the journey, in their own passage of time, this group became the very people they were seeking.”
Raven Chacon
Instructional Video
Members of the Kronos Quartet discuss and demonstrate key techniques for Raven Chacon's The Journey of the Horizontal People.
Composer Interview
Raven Chacon discusses his musical background, his relationship with Kronos, the piece he wrote for Fifty for the Future, and more.
Artist’s Bio
Raven Chacon
Navajo Nation / USA
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and The Kennedy Center. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile long land art installation Repellent Fence.
A recording artist over the span of 22 years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from The LA Times, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America.
Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022), the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022), and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.
His solo artworks are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.
Support Kronos’ 50 for the Future
Help support Kronos’ 50 for the Future as we commission fifty new works designed expressly for the training of students and emerging professionals.
Raven has given us something that, as far as I know, doesn't exist anywhere else in music. This piece is to be guided by the eldest woman in the group, and if there is no woman in the group, then by the eldest man or person who most identifies as a woman. So from the very first note, there is a whole different way of thinking about life and about sound, and about responsibilities in a group of people."
David Harrington
Artistic Director, Kronos Quartet
