Aural Poetics | Raven Chacon, Cecilia Vicuña, and Michael Nardone in Conversation
December 5, 2024
To celebrate the publication of Aural Poetics (OEI #98-99, 2023), an edited volume on listening practices and their relation to composition across the arts, I had the great pleasure of being joined by two of the book’s contributors – Cecilia Vicuña and Raven Chacon – at the Poetry Project in New York City on the 30th of October, 2023. With thanks to the curation of Ethan Philbrick, the evening begun with the performance of three of Chacon’s compositions: “Whisper Trio” (2008), performed in two separate variations by vocalists devynn emory, Isa Crespo Pardo, and Samita Sinha; “Quiver” (2018), performed by cellist Ethan Philbrick; and “Ella Llora” (2002), performed by vocalist Isa Crespo Pardo. Following this series, Cecilia Vicuña performed a reading that operated in relation to her Libro Venado, which has recently been published in Daniel Borzutsky’s translation as Deer Book (Radius Books, 2023). The sheer presence of these performances – the space for listening they manifested in their sounding and movement – established a singular ground for the dialogue that followed.
I will note, as a preface, that Aural Poetics comes out of a desire to learn about and think with how writers, composers, artists explore and integrate techniques of listening in their compositional practices. The edited volume is an initial move in a larger research project of mine to consider modes of writing and inscriptive practices as an extension of oral technologies. There’s a detour here through a theoretical history that I’m tracing out – one that begins with the work of Milman Parry and his writings both on Homer as well as his fieldwork in Yugoslavia in the 1930s, and how that is misinterpreted by figures such as Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, two figures who have put forward a Christian spiritualist and, ultimately, colonial articulation of the relationship between orality and literacy that remains discursively central in our time. In wanting to consider more deeply modes of orality and inscription that trouble and exist in opposition to the McLuhan-Ong framework, I’ve turned to artists like Chacon and Vicuña, among many of the others whose works, performance texts, and theoretical writings can be found in Aural Poetics. Their contributions negotiate this complex theoretical terrain in fascinating ways and, in their instantiation, open up a different and more complex ground for thinking with orality, aurality, and the written.
It is an honour to collaborate with and think in the presence of Cecilia Vicuña and Raven Chacon. Their practices are foundational to the overall undertaking of Aural Poetics. Every time I encounter Cecilia Vicuña in performance, it’s mesmerizing. The evening at The Poetry Project was no exception. Beginning from her seat in the middle of the audience, she began to compose the audience – threading them physically together with string while also weaving them together as she navigated their bodies in her movements, her breath, her utterances. As always, her works exceed any kind of written score or documentation, yet the relationship between body, performance, audience, and text is always singular. Chacon, too, in the 14 scores of his that begin Aural Poetics, followed by an extensive dialogue on his compositional practice over the past two decades, is exceptional for the ways in which he experiments with cultural memory, embodied techniques, and modes of listening across time and space. The following conversation begins with Chacon discussing the scores of his works performed that evening at The Poetry Project, then shifts to Vicuña’s extended engagement with the sonic, and ends on the two of them considering the construction of anti-colonial, anti-extractive spaces for listening.
– Michael Nardone
Raven Chacon
The first piece we heard this evening is called “Whisper Trio,” which I wrote in 2008. There are two versions of the piece. Nobody touched the first version for a long time, but it was finally performed a few years ago. And the second version of the score has never been performed before until tonight. The first version is a poem I wrote. I didn’t start writing it in English, I started writing it both in English and in Dine, the Navajo language, where I’m from. And the reason I started writing the words and the phrases is that I had come upon a dictionary that was written by missionaries in the 1800s to translate Christian concepts in the Dine language. So, it was my way of learning some of these phrases and writing them down and then phonetically writing them out so I could speak them back. A lot of these words were ones I didn’t know. I’m a lifelong learner of the language. And so that’s how the piece was at first composed – me writing out these phrases in phonetic single syllables in Dine.
It became a music composition when I started thinking about well, first, what might be the timbre of this, what might be the most forgiving to somebody who is trying to learn a language? And that would probably be the quietest sound that they could make, so it became whispering. And the more that I practiced doing this as whispering and the more confident I became in uttering some of the words and the phrases, then some of those whispers became louder. So, I imagined a group of three people performing this language together.
The reason it had taken ten years to be performed is that people are afraid to speak Navajo. Isn’t it World War II or something that there were the Navajo code talkers? It’s a hard language. I think people are intimidated by it. Whenever someone decides to take on this piece, they will say “How do I pronounce this?” And I say “I’m not going to tell you. It says it right here. It’s spelled out, written out.” The idea in “Whisper Trio” is to learn the language, it’s to have confidence in learning it, to do this with other people, and, most importantly, it’s to listen to the other two people who are doing it with you, to try to line up with them. The instructions of the score are that each of the three whisperers will have a solo, and that they should end together. That’s it.
The instructions of version two say to find three languages in danger of being extinct and translate the poem I’ve written into the languages, and each of the three whispers does that. So, tonight, you heard Isa performing it in Quechua language, and devynn had translated the poem into Lenape, and then Samita used again the Navajo version.
Michael Nardone
I want to ask Cecilia a question about recording, but before I do, one of two pieces we heard between the two versions of “Whisper Trio” is called “Ella Llora,” and it’s related to tape recording. Can you discuss that one?
Raven Chacon
That’s right, there were two other pieces we heard tonight. “Ella Llora” I wrote way back in 2001. I had a tape cassette label in Albuquerque, and I would go around town putting up flyers for concerts that I was performing in or my friends were performing in. So, I’m walking around on the streets of Albuquerque and I find a cassette tape on the ground and I think, Oh, great, free cassette – I’m going to take it home and dub over it and put out somebody’s tape. A few months later I find that tape and I listen to it before I dub over it, and the cassette turned out to be a woman giving some kind of statement or deposition. She was crying. She was telling a story and, to be honest, you don’t want to know what that story is. I did not want to hear the words of the story she was telling. But the reason I kept listening was that her crying was oddly musical. So, I transcribed the crying. I got out a sheet of blank staff paper and I wrote the notes down. The original recording is 90 minutes long, and the composition itself is only about three minutes. So “Ella Llora” is, of course, condensed, an extraction of the story out of that crying, some of the pauses, arranged into a continuous vocal piece. I then gave the score to an opera singer. It was a study to see how that would sound through the extra filter of a trained musician. There are a lot of things notated in it, not just the vocalizations, but also the inhalations and exhalations of both the mouth and the nose.
And I’ll talk briefly about the final piece, “Quiver.” It’s one of three pieces I’ve written for solo cello that are about hunting. This one is the last of the three, written in 2018, and it’s about hunting a deer with a bow. You see the performer pulling the string of the bow of the cello as if it’s a bow, as if it’s shooting a deer to the right of them. They’re also using the bow as if it’s the arrow that they’re going to fire. There’s other times where the performance instructions state it’s as if the performer is shooting a deer behind them or, then, a deer inside of them. These instructions are also solutions for playing multiple notes and getting sounds that I think are also part of that narrative. Like a lot of my pieces there’s these transformations that happen within a tone. So the performer is resolving one sound into another sound in a way where the pitch doesn’t really change but it creates a different shift in the character. All of this is speaking about time. It’s speaking about waiting. There are long pauses in this piece. There’s a lot of waiting around and silence.
Michael Nardone
Cecilia, you have been thinking of these issues for such an extended time. Alongside of the painting, alongside of the fibre-based works, the quipu-based works, there has always been an attention to sound. Can you discuss some element of that in relationship to these other sorts of inscriptive practices?
Cecilia Vicuña
It is true. For many, many, many, many years nobody took notice of all of the wonderful things that, Raven, you’re doing in this piece where the exhalation, the inhalation are such important aspects of the composition. Everything is form, everything is language. Everything has purpose, everything has an agency. Everything is interacting, forming, deforming, transforming. Hearing your works today, hearing the voice of Isa perform your score – it was, for me, like a dream.
I used to have a boyfriend when I was a teenager, and this man he wanted to be a drummer, a jazz drummer. That was his dream. He got together a group of people to be a band and I would join them, too. Nobody invited me. I put myself there. And when they would play I would make these strange cries. This was long before I ever heard of Yoko Ono, but when I did eventually hear her, her cries gave me permission to experiment in this way.
These sounds, for me, have something to do with colonialism. In Chile, the class division is huge. It is monstrous, like everywhere else. The upper middle class and the highfalutin people are speaking very high and fast [she imitates them] like that. Horrible. And the poor people and the mixed people, like me, or the Indian people speak in a completely different way. My mother – she never knew she was an Indian but she is – and when my mother speaks with the animals or with the plants, she doesn’t speak Chilean, she speaks another language. The language of her ancestors was “extinguished” three centuries ago. So what language is she speaking with the plants? In witnessing her I realized it was the plants that talk to her, and she’s merely responding. And I think it is this voice – the woman speaking in her own way of being – that is suppressed by colonialism. And I realized, too, that this was why the sounds I made in performances were inaudible, just as my work was invisible, because there is no concept or paradigm or way of understanding what is being carried by a woman speaking to herself, to her girlfriends, to her baby, to the little creature that she’s holding, to the food she’s cooking. There’s always a little sound. So these little sounds everyone was despising was me, and that’s how I began.
The first time I performed my cries and little sounds in public, I was terrified. This performance was in a gallery in Santiago, Chile. This was in the late 1980s. I asked the gallery to turn off the lights completely and I began in a different room from where everyone was listening. I started with my wailing and crying. Everyone was a bit shocked or uncertain, and I slowly moved into the room and, in the dark, I continued to make these sounds. That was the only way I could get the courage to be there, because in my imagination no one saw me. My grandma, who was at the time almost 100 years old, was in the audience and when the performance was over, she said, “Mijita, don’t ever do that again, it’s terrifying.” That gave me a clue. If it’s terrifying, it’s like shitting in public. It’s like being naked and caught while you’re peeing. Something that you’re not supposed to ever show. That’s who we are, women.
Michael Nardone
Thank you for this story, Cecilia.
There’s something I want to ask about because it relates to something perhaps many of us are thinking through in this moment, and it’s in regard to modes of settler colonial listening, and I think many of Raven’s works speak to this. Are people here familiar with Dylan Robinson’s book Hungry Listening? It’s an incredible and important book. Dylan offers many exceptionally precise concepts for us to work with in this book. One of them is this concept of an “aural blockade.” He’s developing this line of thought from the work of Dene political theorist Glen Coulthard, and also through the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, on the creation of obstructions for settler colonial listening.
One of the things that I was able to see throughout your works and compositions, Raven, is something we discuss in our dialogue, this element of social counterpoint. I’m interested in hearing you talk about both how your works create an occasion for listening and hearing certain dynamics and contexts resonate in the work, while at the same time creating obstructions for certain modes of settler colonial listening. Here, I’m thinking particularly here of the work you did with Candice Hopkins, “Dispatch,” that is included in Aural Poetics, which I see as a kind of culmination of various elements of your work over a long arc of time. Also, there’s another work of yours that comes to mind, “Silent Choir” (2017), which is based on a set of recordings you made at Standing Rock.
Raven Chacon
“Silent Choir” is a field recording that I was fortunate to be in the presence of this event while at Standing Rock of a protest that had happened. I mean the whole place was a protest and during the time that I was there, about 10 days, there were people yelling at the cops the whole time. They were justifiably angry at the situation. They were yelling at the construction crew, the private security of the pipeline. Thousands of people screaming at the top of their lungs and exhausting their voices. The Sunday after Thanksgiving there was a gathering on what was called the Backwater Bridge. It was the bridge that the state police had barricaded so that water protectors couldn’t easily make it up to Bismarck, North Dakota. This event that I was witness to was the Elder women of the encampment, the leadership, gathering others behind them and walking up to this line of police and just facing them, not saying a word. I’d had a field recorder in my pocket the whole time. That’s just something I travel with, but I didn’t have a boom mic or anything. I didn’t know what I was expecting. Perhaps I was expecting more vocal anger or more of this frustration to be expressed. And nothing happened. I mean, at least sonically nothing happened. All these women did was just stare at the cops. And in this recording, I play it at a volume where you can at least hear some sniffles and some people shuffling around, and the more I turn it up the more you hear the power of what those women are not saying or don’t have to say. I think you can hear the police looking down, averting their eyes away from the stares of the women.
The other work that Michael is talking about is the score I did with Candice Hopkins called “Dispatch,” which also has its origins at that same profound visit that I had made to Standing Rock. Myself as a visitor going there because I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know what was happening. I mean I heard all these stories. There was a pipeline. There were Native people being arrested. There were allies being hurt. There were a lot of people gathering. I went there during Thanksgiving and people said Jane Fonda had rotisserie chickens she was passing out. [laughter] I didn’t know what was truth and what was made up, you know. I didn’t find the rotisserie chickens. [laughter] But the problem was I couldn’t trust even the people I trusted. So I was trying to decode the noise of information and misinformation. That was my main reason to go there. Of course I was there to be another body in support, but it was for my own learning to go. “Dispatch” is me going to try to decode and understand the situation but at the same time, like “Ella Llora,” it’s another transcription – a transcription of what I encountered there, of different dynamics of different groups of people. After going through all these field recordings I had made over ten days, listening to those over several years, Candice and I made this transcription. I call this transcription a critique of Deep Listening, or, I should say, of the privilege of meditative Deep Listening. I didn’t go over to Standing Rock to go meditate, but this is me trying to listen deeply while the cops are on megaphones telling people to leave their own land. It’s the sound of drones flying in the air, both cop drones and counter-cop drones. And the sound of helicopters and the sounds of people singing, and all of these things happening. The score is deep listening in a state of emergency.
Michael Nardone
I like very much this uncertainty and instantiation as both a transcription and a score that occurs often in these works. There’s something with “Dispatch” that provides a kind of tool for listening in spaces of convergence and spaces of uncertain political alliances in moments of protest. You said something that’s interesting, and I didn’t expect to ask this to Cecilia, but you commented on the fact of being there and listening as a visitor. This is something I’ve been thinking about with Dylan Robinson for a little while now: protocols of listening as a visitor on other peoples’ lands. This strikes me as something that’s elemental to your work as well, Cecilia, of both speaking with and speaking as a visitor in so many different political contexts, social contexts, working through various traditions. I’m curious of the way that you think of listening as a visitor in your works.
Cecilia Vicuña
It’s a beautiful question. It’s a question I have never been asked. In many places, the word visitor is a put-down. In the way that you’re presenting it, it is real. It’s true that I have had always the impression that the poems are visiting us. I take my cue from the poems, from the way I remember my little brother, he would say, “No, Cecilia está tocada por el arte.” So, for him, art was something that touched you. I thought it was a very particular way of seeing art as non-Western. The idea that this art or this sound has agency, has its own life, its own being is absolutely crucial. When you acknowledge that you are visited, you can also visit, you see. There’s an equality and there’s a sort of leveling of the field, as you say, which is the idea that you are not above or below.
To see the visitor, it has to do with the displacement. For example, my mother, when I was a little girl and I spoke, she said: “But you don’t speak normally. You speak like you are savouring the words. The words are not fruits, mijita.” [laughter] So, it’s not that I was displaced by exile. I was always displaced by a sort of way of following my own sensitivity and my own imagination further further further and further. It is a question of delight, of the erotic. It’s delicious and it’s unstoppable. It’s a way of giving yourself to that. Therefore, when I visit a different tradition – for example, like in Deer Book, which comes out of a thirty-year love affair with a completely foreign universe to me, which is the Mesoamerican culture that has a root of thousands of years in Mexico but is now displaced in Tucson, Arizona, which used to be called Yaki and now they call themselves Yoeme. So, in the book, in the poems you see there, is my visiting their universe. I know it’s a transgression and I know that asking permission is not enough because, first of all, you may not get permission and perhaps I did never get the permission but how could I not be in awe of that universe. So, what I have done is not a translation, it’s more like a transcription in the sense that Raven is speaking of transcription, because it’s a leap. It’s a transformation.
For example, the first poem that is in the sequence that appears in Aural Poetics is a misunderstanding. This misunderstanding became the root of many poems. I began studying the Yoeme language, which is of course impossible to understand, but I became so familiar with so many expressions that they started entering my bloodstream. And one of them is the way they refer ritually to sound, which blew my mind completely. It is yo-i. Yo, in Spanish, is I. So, I thought, what an incredible idea that sound would be the only real I. I began encountering ancient traditions in different parts of the world, very many of them in South America itself, from criollo (creole) mestizo, or even white people, where the I takes a role that is completely unlike the Western idea of I. I intended to sing you the song of this I that is not I but is sound, and the adjectives that the Yoeme people use for it to try to make sense of it is “lo inmensamente bello” in Spanish: “what is immensely beautiful.” It’s adjectives that don’t confine it. They release it. They just let it be nowhere and everywhere at the same time. To me, that kind of quality of relationship is what a true respectful visitor wants.
Copyright 2024 by Raven Chacon, Cecilia Vicuña, and Michael Nardone.
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist born at Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. A recording artist over the span of 22 years, Chacon has appeared on over eighty 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.
Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, activist, and filmmaker whose work addresses ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the 1970s, after the military coup against President Salvador Allende. She coined the term “Arte Precario” in the 1960s to describe her works made of debris and disappearing structures, including her quipus – poems in space inspired by the ancient Pre-Columbian knot system. Her creations bridge art and poetry, exploring interconnectivity and the roots of language. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at major institutions, including the Tate Modern, London (2022); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2022); and Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago (2023). Her poetry has been celebrated internationally, and she has authored over 30 books, such as PALABRARmas (2023) and New & Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña (2018). Vicuña has received numerous honors, including the 2023 Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas and the 2022 Venice Biennale Gold Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
Michael Nardone is a poet and editor based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Never settling on a single genre, practice or mode, his works often explore and experiment within histories of literature, techniques of embodied performance, and cultures of mediation. Nardone’s recent and forthcoming works include: Aural Poetics (an edited work on sound and composition across the arts), Convivialities (a book of dialogues), Yellow Towel: A Score (a collaboration with Dana Michel), Border Tuner | Sintonizador Fronterizo (a monograph on Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, co-edited with Edgar Picazo), the Documents on Expanded Poetics book series (which he co-edits with Nathan Brown), The Tranatlantic Conversation (a translation of Abigail Lang’s monograph on contemporary French and US poetry), The Ritualites (a book of poems), as well as a range of essays and editorial works concerning the literary arts and other inscriptive practices. Beginning in 2024, he is a writer-in-residence at the SETI Institute.
