Raven Chacon at City of Albuquerque
Raven Chacon "Tiguex", XVIII – Cantata, (composed with Marisa Demarco): A sound system and eight singers are positioned underneath a vehicle overpass where that bridge intersects a river. Sounds of the traffic overhead are amplified. The singers start at least twenty feet from an agreed-upon marked center point, distant from one another, dispersed. (The singers could be on both banks of the river if desired). Each singer holds a tuning fork with a pitch belonging to the chord on the score map. To begin, the singers sing the pitch of their fork as a vocable tone while standing in place, synching with the speed of traffic. They begin to sing words from the following phrases, starting with only the outer words that align with their nearest cardinal direction. North-South line: A million years old, the years flow through these banks until there are none. West-East line: Still, now, hundreds of machines flow overhead as pylons tremble. The singers begin to move slowly toward the center. As they do, they fold in more words along the line they traverse. When they meet in the center, they find a unison drone pitch, maybe what’s dominant in the traffic, on “flow.” They drop the consonants and sing overlapping “pure-tones” of the same pitch. Their voices sink back into the flows. Cantata will be performed under the I-40 freeway where the Rio Grande intersects. Sung by Antonia Montoya, Szu-han Ho, Marya Erinn Jones, Monica Demarco, Mauro Woody, Liz Rincon, Ana Alonso Minutti, and Marisa Demarco. Freeway amplification by Kenneth Cornell.