 Well, hi everyone. It's a great honor for me to welcome Raven Chacon here to G-SAP. Raven is an artist, composer and performer and for me it's one of the most relevant artists now. I think his work is incredibly moving but also speaking of specific and enacting specific tensions that are shaping the times we're living. His 2021 work Fussons is composed of three videos of women beautifully singing the history of a landscape. One of the of the songs speaks of the suffering of people who were forcefully relocated from 1830 to 1850. A second song about the Navajo long walk to Bosque Redondo, the 1864 deportation and attempt for ethnic cleansing in the Navajo people of the Navajo people by the U.S. federal government of the time and a third an elder is singing about the removal of the same semi-nolly people from their lands during the 1800s. These words are incredibly impressive but also mobilizing technical decisions as ones that allow to expand the capacity for those stories to to be part of the present. His work Silent Choir is a recording of 300 and 400 people standing in silence against a Dakota access pipeline at Standing Rock in North Dakota waiting for the police to respond as to why they are aiding in abusing the land and its waters. Raven was born in 1977 in Fort Defiance, I hope I'm not revealing something secret, in Fort Defiance Navajo Nation, Arizona. He's a graduate of the University of New Mexico where he obtained his BA in Fine Arts in 2001. He received a master in Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts. His impressive body of work presents territories and land as the entanglement of people's ecosystems and technologies as the site of both occupation and resistance and the sound as a medium that expands the capacity to collectively sense the violence embedded in those entanglements. Sound becomes a medium to operate in the threshold of perception as the medium where histories of segregation manifest their presence as present realities that keep structuring contemporary struggle. Sound is used as a medium to make the acknowledgement of those that have been ordered unavoidable. His work is always collected in many different ways. It unfolds to a multitude of platforms of collaboration. He's a composer in residence with the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project. He developed part of his work as a member of the Native American Art Collective Post Commodity. In 2021 he started the record label 666 to document rural and urban experimental musicians residing in southwest United States. Raven's practice connects to additions, disciplinary boundaries, and medium sound video printing. That reflects in the greatest spectrum of recognitions that he accumulates which is actually quite impressive. I would say that Raven has been recognized by so many different fields of work and cooperation. He has been awarded a creative capital grant. He won the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin, and this year he won a Pulitzer Prize for his monumentous composition, Voiceless Mass. But adding to this, he's also been in the most important art convenience, including Documenta 14, the 2022 Whitney Biennial, or the Sydney Biennale, among many others. Raven will be responded tonight by Lucia Le, Professor here at GESAP and Director of the Ville Center, who is developing an engaging and long-term project to explore land as a relational entity and land being already something that you're discussing as a time and an object. Mario Guden, artist and architect, also teaches here, a professor here at GESAP, whose work explores the fluid interconnection of bodies and territories. This is incredibly exciting for me. Please join me in welcoming Raven Chacon here tonight. Thank you Andres and GESAP for having me and thank you all for coming. I'm going to show some of the works that Andres has spoken about and some works all the way back to the first work that I made back in 1999. And as Andres was saying, most of my work is in sound and music, and that was how I started making work was thinking of composition and thinking of different tactics and techniques for making sound and music. I didn't know that sound art was a thing, I was just doing these experiments independent of knowing that it was years later that I saw, you know, that this was a thing where these experiments would fit into. These slides I have up right here are pages from one of my scores, a graphic notation score called Adelit, Lago, I'm not going to go into this, but it's just an example of one of the graphic notation scores that I make. So that first piece that I had made back in 1999 that I'm not embarrassed to keep showing in artist talks is a piece called Field Recordings, and the idea here was that I wanted to make recordings of places I knew to be very quiet around where I was living, where I come from, the Navajo Nation, and finding a time of day and finding a place where there was nobody around, there were no cars on the road, there were no airplanes in the sky, no animals, no wind, no rain, it's a desert so there's not much rain anyway. So the first one that I took a recording of is Window Rock, Arizona. This is not too far from where I grew up in Chinlea, Arizona, and this is a sacred place. Its name in Dine language is Sega Huzani, and it's considered a portal, and now it's a tribal park, you can go and visit this place. So I went at a time when nobody was visiting and made a recording and after I listened to the recording I kept turning it up and turning it up wanting to hear more. Maybe it was a failed experiment in that I it was so quiet I couldn't hear anything so I had to magnify it and magnify it, and so I took it back into the studio and turned it up to its maximum. Usually in artist talks I play that about twice as loud but there's a streaming at home audience so we didn't want to mess them up. I did the same at the foothills of the Sandia Mountains and also at Canyon de Che, which has the name of Seyi, and this is located between Chinlea, Arizona, and Fort Defiance. Composition for numerous drummers, each position on a different street corner. Beginning with a single drum hit from one player, subsequent drummers imitate the sound of the previous drummer down the block with the gesture evolving as it travels around the neighborhood. Over time the performers misinterpret their cues and source material therefore adding new gestures to the original musical action as nearby buildings and houses create false echoes and polyphony. By performing drum grid a community has agency to change the landscape of their neighborhood activating potential questions and new generative urgencies and so this is a piece that can have up to 20 drummers. I think that's the most I've done with this so far and the score has instructions, text instructions of how it's played and then a map is developed of where the drummers will be situated. Here's a photo of it being performed in Oslo, Norway and this is a video of us doing it in Colorado Springs. In 2009 I joined a collective post commodity which has had a rotating membership over the years and is made up of indigenous artists from different tribes. This is a piece I like to show in presentations called My Blood is in the Water and I like to refer to it as a clock. This was a sculpture that was put up for four days during the Santa Fe Indian market which is a gathering every year where indigenous artists can sell what they make. Oftentimes this is called craft, you know, jewelry, different objects, artworks that get sold on that day and it's not the best conditions to exhibit art either. It's a very commercial space but at the same time Santa Fe has always been a market or it's been a market for 500 years maybe even before that, a meeting place of different tribes and so we put up this sculpture as a way to acknowledge that spot in Santa Fe which is near the Santa Fe Plaza. It's in the courtyard of a museum called the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and the reason I call it a clock is that it tells time in three different ways. First as a sundial, the second is that there's blood dripping out of the deer's mouth every 15 seconds onto a drum that's amplified and the third way is that in all of its elements which were all gathered from the area, the poles, the drum, the deer is telling from top to bottom the story of that place so starting with the sky, a time when there was nothing living in that area, maybe just plants, no animals yet and further down you have the deer representing a time when animals existed but perhaps no humans yet. Inside of the deer you have the blood and that being the indigenous people of what's now known as New Mexico and all of that stirring around inside of the animal depending on the animal's body to survive and then dripping out and having a long uninterrupted lineage until it hits the head of the drum and that being the contact with the Spanish when the Spanish arrived to the area and all of that blood pulling up on the head of the drum and becoming a new people, a mixture of Spanish and Indian blood and then dripping back off into the ground. In the early days of the collective we were experimenting with different objects, different things we would find in sporting goods stores and one of them that we came across was this balloon called a scari balloon. Here you can see an amazon ad for bird x scari bird repellent balloon which you're supposed to put in your trees and they're supposed to scare away pigeons or birds that are eating your crops. They don't work, we tested those but we had this test or this idea if a 10 inch diameter balloon can at least attempt to scare away pigeons then maybe a 10 foot diameter balloon could ward off western civilization and so we made a giant one and we flew it over different sites as experiments just to see what would happen and so this was flown in 2007 the first balloon we made and this is flown over the sheriff's office of Maricopa County his name was Sheriff Joe Arpaio a very racist anti-immigrant man and this was he was the first kind of audience for this. We then made another one up in Canada and this one was less of a guerrilla action this was in collaboration with the Manitoba Hydro Corporation Manitoba Hydro being the company that manages the water in the province that has the most fresh water in North America and so this this one was to function differently this was to consider a watchful eye that everyone in all of the public should have when thinking about who's managing their resources so this was a way to kind of tell the corporation that they are being watched back and that the public is the ones who should be stewarding this land and this water but really these tests and these experiments were all for a bigger purpose of something that we really wanted to do with these these ready-made objects and it was a piece called repellent fence the idea of repellent fence was that we wanted to suture both sides of the U.S. Mexico border together and in doing so would trace corridors and paths longitudinally that have been there since time immemorial tribes that would trade would visit would exchange ceremony would exchange knowledge and all of this of course being interrupted by the border and so this would be a gesture again only four days to to bring those two sides back together symbolically I'm going to talk about where we ended up doing this because this is an interesting story and it's always fun to talk about we we knew we wanted to do it in Arizona partially because half the collective was based there at the time it's also where I was I guess technically born and raised and also of course back to Sheriff Joe Arpaio that that policy that Arizona has of not only anti-immigration but very racist rhetoric and so we had originally wanted to do this on the Tohono O'odham Reservation that is this area right here and their traditional territory extends into Mexico so we went out there actually my godmothers from that that community and we told them our idea and some community members and elders had shared with us they said we really love the the gesture and the metaphor of of what you're saying here and but the truth is that we don't want any more eyes on us and he showed us this man took us out to the desert and showed us this cactus and this cactus had a small hole in it and in that hole was a camera and so he let us know that and we understood that they are under constant surveillance and didn't want even though they wanted the rule to know that their way of life has been interrupted by this border they didn't really want any more attention down there we we're going to go this way there's a Air Force range they wouldn't let us do it there we were going to do it here but there's a bird sanctuary so that wasn't going to fly no pun intended um over here is very mountainous region we thought about doing it there but it was logistically going to be extremely difficult you keep going east and this was it's an it's an area called Sierra Vista and if you look on the Southern Poverty Law Center's website you'll see that this is a hotbed of militia, minutemen, neo-nazi activity and even though that would have been interesting to dialogue with probably get some balloons shot down we we didn't want that to be the audience in fact that was starting to get away from our intention of of the suture and so we're running out of space and we ended up down here in Awaprieta Douglas Arizona and found that that community on both sides of the border had an interest in the arts they didn't have a lot of people who were living there there's not a lot of work in that area but there were a lot of artists who existed there are a lot of artists who exist there in fact on Awaprieta on the Mexico side they have more of an arts infrastructure than Douglas one can go to the Casa de la Cotura and take guitar lessons for free on Douglas there's not so much support but there's a strong interest in having people engage in art and of course artists on the southern side cannot always go to the northern side and they they welcomed a collaborative project like this and so in 2015 with the help of both municipalities we were able to put this artwork together so 26 balloons flying at an average of 100 feet spreading for a mile on the Mexico side and a mile on the United States side in 2016 I was at Standing Rock I was invited to go up there because a friend of mine and collaborator Chinupa Hanska Luger is from the Standing Rock Reservation and so he was going back and forth he lives in Santa Fe he was going back and forth to take supplies to water protectors to support them he was also checking in on his his family and of course his homelands and so I went with him I was curious what was happening I ended up making some work that was inspired by my time there I was there for not too long I was there for about two weeks and but of course this was this was a gathering that happened for months in the second half of 2016 and into 2017 the other reason I wanted to go was that I was researching this thing right here which is called an L-rad which stands for long-range acoustic device and I don't know if you could see this here there's a red it's a red like button and what this is is a sonic weapon which emits a directionalized beam that is meant to cause you to move it's it's intention is that it'll cause you harm it will uh if you're in a crowd that crowd will disperse and so you see it here presumably being used to as a as a public address system saying get off get off of the hill but obviously it has another usage where if they really wanted to could turn on the siren and you would run do everything in your power to run out of that beam and so I was hearing that these might be there and that was another reason I wanted to go because I was doing research on these my sister's actually in that group of people up on the hill and she told me that when they were beaming this up there that she could actually feel heat in that temperature every time they spoke through it so post commodity made a piece in 2017 this was exhibited at documenta 14 it's called the ears between rules are always speaking and it's a long form two channel hyper directional sound work narrative sound work projected upon the ancient ruins of Aristotle's Lyceum broadcasting for 100 days during documenta 14 which took place in both castle germany and Athens Greece the ears between rules was an all-day opera consisting of 22 songs the libretto gathered from the narratives of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan who have arrived in Greece stories from migrants who have traversed the desert of the U.S. Mexico border and stories from the Navajo long walk and the Cherokee Trail of Tears both of those instances being where the U.S. government was trying to remove indigenous people from their homelands and killed them in the process and so this this is a funny story as well there was maybe this is a good picture what you see at the top there is the Athens conservatory of music which was a site of documenta 14 across the way from there this building is the Hellenic armed forces officers club it's where the army the cops go and have banquets pat themselves on the back over here somewhere is the war museum it's a museum that has artifacts from all the wars that Greeks have been involved in all the way back to ancient times and in the middle here was a park and in 1996 the music conservatory was trying to expand and they found the ruins of Aristotle's Lyceum and there weren't many actual buildings there there were some walls there were some things they believe were houses shelter this was a library but the main feature of of the lyceum and this was this when they uncovered this part of it was when they realized what they what the site was is a path that encompasses the perimeter of it and this path is where Aristotle and his students would walk and talk in this this idea of parapetetic learning so our sound work which uses these two l-rads as its instruments is beam stereophonically at this site with the idea that one has to walk around the site to hear these narratives of forced migration walking the earth to hear others speak about being forced to walk the earth and some of these songs are dialogues so one has to walk around to hear both sides one song was a a kind of operetta of a man speaking to his wife on the telephone saying that he made it to the new place and making sure everything is okay back home here's a clip i'll play and this is a song that is using a narrative from the Cherokee Trail of Tears but is translated into greek and sung by a musician in Athens for Zikala Shah is a project i had started working on about 15 years ago i wanted to make a dedication to who i thought was only a composer this woman here her name is Zikala Shah which means redbird in Lakota language she's yanked in Dakota and she was born in 18 in the late 1800s she lived around the turn of the 20th century i had found out about her because i was trying to find american indians who were working with western notation and composing way back then yeah 100 years ago and trying to find pieces that i could perform or program and i came upon her work and learned that composing music and playing music was just one of the very few things that she did her biography was immense she was also a writer a poet a translator an activist she would give speeches on the situation of american indians around the turn of the century she wrote political essays she founded the national council of the american indian which became the american or the national congress of the american indian she taught violin she taught music she taught how to sing and was just an amazing figure that's under recognized in american history and so as i was researching her biography and actually going around the country and looking into different archives that exist when in bringing me on university when earlham college in indiana was still not finding scores i was fine i found the sundance opera and got the score for that that was written in 1913 and was finding that there was a lot of controversy in her life one example is that she was advocating for american indian people to gain the right to vote and was going around the country and trying to gauge if this was something that american indian people wanted she was she was trying to gather a lot of different tribes to voice this to within their own communities that this was something they wanted and a lot of native people were saying no we don't want the right to vote we don't even want to be a part of this country if we get the right to vote what are we opting into she also was had a kind of flip-flopping stance on residential schools herself going to residential schools she saw that it for herself had its benefits of teaching music for instance and that's where she gained the skills to write of course she was aware of abuse that has happened in those places and had kind of gone back and forth about the values of that system ultimately deciding that it was something that was going to be beneficial for american indians and their children another one was a herself being an opponent of certain types of medicine certain types of plants particularly peyote seeing that she thought this was destructive to certain native communities and this was at a time when native people were seeking religious freedoms and so there was some conflict there i start realizing that this is not only a complicated person but somebody who had to navigate a lot of conflict at that time and so i kind of abandoned the project and i also didn't know what the dedication would be i had started this symphonic work i didn't think that was the appropriate musical form for this this biography here's a page of the sundance opera so i decided to change what this project would be this dedication to zik alasha and write 13 graphic notation music scores for 13 contemporary american indian and first nations women composers working today and these scores in a way are portraitures of how these artists who are my friends my heroes people i highly respect some of them collaborators how they have navigated the 21st century and so these were composed in collaboration with each of the people i wrote them for by way of speaking with them about their philosophies on their work on the condition of indians people today and where they see themselves in that in that world both that creative world and that world that we live in of being with our tribal people i'll talk about some of these this is a piece called for barbara cruel barbara is a composer who's based in toronto she's odawa and this is a piece about endurance it calls for playing the flute as long as possible and so the the the black circle is the flute the other shape means that you play the flute while singing while humming while whistling or while hissing this is a piece for a collaborator and musician sharyl lorondale who's cremate from saskatchewan and this asks whoever performs a score this is all for solo performer anyone can play them asks that person to sing these song lines in these shapes so make a melody out of uh in the shape of the contour of those dots and this song should be in the form of advice and should be sung in pitch black darkness i'll talk about this one it's a little bit hard to talk about because it's it's complicated but this is for a violinist named haiti sanungatuk anupiak from alaska and haiti is a violinist she's also an ethnomusicologist her father is named ron sanungatuk he's a woodworker a very famous anupiak woodworker and artist and haiti shared with me that she had always wanted to compose she had always wanted to play violin in the alaskas symphony anchorage symphony and she also wanted to work with wood and somewhere along the lines none of this was encouraged she was encouraged to go into academia and since she loved music so much she decided that path would be ethnomusicology so the way you play this score is you get another sheet of paper and you place it over this score and on that first line staff you compose a melody and then you take the sheet of paper with the dots and place it behind the other staves of this paper and transcribe those dots onto these four skewed staves so the song really hasn't changed but the system has warped the song into something else this is for a composer and vocalist carmena escobar i was trying to find women musicians in mexico to include in this project who identified as indigenous and i could not find any the reasons why is that the history of colonization in mexico is is different than it is here in the states there was a mixture that resulted in people not identifying by tribes but identifying more by the nation or as mestizo celebrating the mixture and so this score has the performer scream as quiet as possible and so those black lines are the shape of the scream and the white shapes are the shape of the mouth sometimes that's a smile sometimes that's a wide mouth i like to think they're masks they're different masks that you're making your face into to produce these screams the triangles are reverse screams to try to undo the other screams this one's too complicated to talk about i'm not gonna talk about it's another one about academia this one's for poet laureate joy harjo three time poet laureate and this one uses diacritics as music notation so there's there's a blend of shapes i mean i drew all of these but they also might incorporate other kinds of text as you see here this one for kandace hopkins or this one using leban notation which is a movement notation combining that with my own vocal notation that i've used in other scores this one this one is for my sister who i spoke about earlier was at standing rock this one is also performed in the darkness it is performed in different corners of a room or the different corners of the united states one finds radios or lamps and or lamps in these corners and one has to go around turning lamps on and off radios on and off navigating and bouncing around all these corners tracing the path of where you've traversed and marking it on the middle of the score when all of the lamps and radios have been turned off one goes to that point that they have crossed the most in the middle and sings the song they learned from all the radios they were turning off this one is for my friend laura ortman the violinist who lives here in new york city and this one is about trying to live in two different places trying to live in your home community and trying to live in a city and the different speeds the oscillation of the speeds of those two different environments is to be played on violin and the last one i'll talk about is this one for composer susan kite la cota she's also a violinist like zik alasha and laura and she shared with me some numerology of la cota philosophy where the number 12 is a very sacred number numbers that add up to 12 and those different combinations can have significance and power and the number three when used has to be approach with caution so susan is also an instrument builder like myself and this can be played as different parameters you could assign these numbers as notes or pitches you could go up four notes on the piano then go down two notes and you make a path and follow a path is how you play this score but she decided to input this as code into one of her electronic instruments so as i was saying i had started that project 15 years ago or so and i was kind of stumped as to how to complete it and when i was at standing rock some there were some profound events that got me thinking about leadership about matriarchal roles and that that got me on to thinking of how to write for those 13 artists one of those events was that while i was there on Thanksgiving weekend in 2016 at the standing rock water protector camp the whole time i was there there was yelling at the police yelling at the DAPL security who were positioned up on what was called turtle hill on the other side of turtle hill is where the pipeline was being built there were people singing the whole time i was there quite beautiful there were helicopters in the sky there were drones flying around constantly not only were some of these drones from the DAPL security or the police the water protectors had their own drones they heard two different types of drones flying around when i travel when i can i try to keep a recording device in my pocket and again back to this this practice of field recording and so i i captured lots of audio over those two weeks which presents itself as justifiable anger at the situation but also a lot of like i said singing a lot of moments of prayer i suppose i wasn't trying to you know stick microphones in anybody's faces but it was just there as another set of ears for me and there was a lot of silence that i captured of rest of people who were exhausted from the day of protest but after that Thanksgiving weekend where it was a critical mass the most people had arrived at the camp maybe 12 000 people again just yelling go home leave us alone leave the land alone after that weekend there was this moment where the leadership of the camp of the tribes that were represented at the camp elder women walked onto the highway onto this bridge called the backwater bridge if those of you remember that from that time there was a barricade that the DAPL security and the state police had put up to prevent traveling up to Bismarck North Dakota where the reservation is linked so thereby cutting off resources travel and discouraging other people from coming to join the camp this group of women who were leading a larger group of about 300 or 400 water protectors walked up to the bridge faced the line of police and security and just stood and stared not saying a word and so this peace silent choir which was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial is the sound of 400 people staring and having nothing to say and it's the sound of the shame of the police and their refusal to look back so i'll stop that there it goes on for about 20 minutes this was a photograph i took of that moment from where i was standing and so you can see the the barricade here and the police vehicles and armored tanks again and then somebody has like a windsock there water is life it says i'm going to end talking about this piece this is the one that won the Pulitzer so i feel kind of obligated to talk about it i haven't spoken about it yet really well i did at this organ festival last week but that was like organ people they had organ questions and i i know nothing about the pipe organ so i'll show the score i don't just make graphic scores i was trained in western music notation i'll read my program notes for this piece voiceless mass is a large ensemble work originally composed for the nickels and samson organ at the cathedral of st john the evangelist in milwaukee wisconsin but can be performed in any space of worship or lecture with an organ though mass is referenced in the title the piece contains no audible singing voices instead using the openness of the large space to entone the constricted intervals of the wind and string instruments in exploiting the architecture of the space of which the organ is connected to that space and building voiceless mass considers the futility of giving voice to the voiceless when seating space is never considered as an option by those in positions of power and so this being indigenous people's day and this nearing the anniversary of when this piece was premiered which was a year ago uh i had written in the last program notes we remember those who survived residential schools and those who did not we recognize the role of the church in founding and administering these schools and their attempt at force assimilation which led to the losses of languages and so here's a excerpt of this piece thank you so much for being with us for bringing your work and thank you to andres for inviting me to respond and for the excuse to immerse myself for the last 24 hours in your work um and i should say that um this work is realized through many so many kind of sensory channels and uh on so many platforms with so many communities that it's hard to kind of respond in a this highly artificial academic kind of setting nevertheless uh one quality that i find most compelling for someone like me who studies the history of the built environment and is this that um raven's work is designed to repel and preempt and defeat a pattern not only of spatial violence but also of what i would say is a kind of second order culturalization um that is everywhere in the history of space and i'll just explain what i mean by that um the west has a history of fighting wars that it claims is are not cultural um and then brandish what it has conquered as a cultural asset to turn all war loot into a kind of thing or person that can be consumed aesthetically um and one example drawn from the history of the united states is the national park system conquest of the western lands um in the 19th century was supposedly not waged against the livelihood and worldview of indigenous people but rather for reasons of modernity productivity governance even progress and yet the transformation of so much tribal land into monuments so-called monuments and the twin history of nature conservation and tribal reservations that ensued tell a different story they tell us that the real prize of dispossession was precisely the ability to claim pristine quiet nature as an american cultural commodity and just so you know that i don't just mean the west in the sense of the western hemisphere there are examples in the history of european cultural um colonization as well so um the so-called scramble for africa which took place around the late 19th early 20th century when the alibi of resource management pushed european powers to draw lines on a map and then retroactively label as cultural or ethnic all of the violence that was produced with the project of making this map into walls and cities and um spatial restrictions on the ground so i mention all this because the history i'm an architectural historian and the history of architecture is full of spatial inventions that it originated in this way as a way to separate and colonize so you could say that the history of architecture as a western discipline has periodically offered itself as a kind of its service to empires and nation states a place where something could be passed kind of laundered intellectually so to speak to receive a clean history and to become a kind of autonomous artistic gesture so in my mind raven's work not only critiques the spatial legacy of wherever it takes place wherever it intervenes they also these works also hail us as participants or as audience to recognize and or maybe co-produce i don't know i have that question kind of alternate spatial and cognitive grammars so i'll just give three examples the repellent fence it was repellent in a sense that the kind of pathetic border fence could never be you know the the border wall pathetically clings to the ground whereas the fence floats across and it anchors itself on the land without making a mark on it it kind of makes this planetary line of stewardship but it also because of the iconography of the balloon and the kind of humor around that and the and the eye it dwarfs all the tactics of psychological warfare that border patrol and security companies trade in silent choir another example if i understand correctly at some point raven composed a libretto that named all of the participants that there were the border patrols and they were the protesters and they were tourists and they were other people and i think that that's you know in no uncertain terms calling the bluff of the of the geopolitical theatrics that are on the ground but at the same time also very powerfully leaving no doubt about what we should do but with silence that we should amplify silence that silence does not signify consent that if there's a western tradition par excellence is the idea that silent is to be silent is to consent um one more example the the recent um composition voiceless mass which you just played it's a piece of immense kind of sonic materiality it kind of confuses you especially if you watch the performance you didn't know that those instruments made those noises you don't recognize the instruments anymore um and yet at the same time there's no doubt that the organ is a wind instrument and actually that this wind is the kind of architectonic breath and that it's the same wind that is flowing not neutrally in air conditioning but in sort of real space um so for architects and designers who are interested in shedding our disciplinary prejudices especially the ones where space is a kind of neutral thing um it's not so much that i think there are lessons but it seems to me that one can embrace instrumentation that we can operate between media and take the repertoire of electronic music or whatever your favorite electronic medium is and apply it to a spectrum of of human environmental signals not only to you know a very pristine little signal that is fed to you so those are my remarks i have many questions but i'll maybe just go with one which is kind of geeky but it has to do with the graphic almost a kind of dissonance between the graphic your graphic work which is very delicate and symmetrical and inventive and beautiful and kind of dances on the page whether it's your own notations or when you're adopting a kind of you know libretto with all the uh the usual markings but there are often suggestions and scores for like really wildly resonant booming you know over amplified notes that the whole building can hear so do you think of that as a difference is the performer's performament to kind of struggle or on the contrary do you think well one is performing something that aims for the completeness that is also on the page do you see what i'm saying that there's a kind of actually two different things so you know in architecture when you draw something eventually it has to be built and it's there's there's this fantasy that there's a transparency in the thing you draw toward the thing that you produce so that would be my first kind of question yeah thank you lucia there's there's a i feel like there's five questions in the one question which is great which is great there's a i mean you saw the score for voiceless mass or parts of it i there's a benefit to working in just western notation in that it can be very exact it can be the building that needs to be built somewhat precisely and that's a benefit to working in that kind of notation is you can get a very precise reading of that composition i think what my reasons for making graphic notation and of course this was something that was developed through the 20th century with other composers is seeking that freedom of interpretation that one can have in music that it can be different every time not quite an improvisation but something that maybe is more open-ended and when i think of my reasons for doing that it extends even further that it's there's a potential there for non-musicians to be a part of these these actions or these situations so when i that's one of the reasons i show drum grid is that that's an invitation for anybody in that community to come and be out on the street with a drum and what i enjoy about that piece is the not only are there misinterpretations it's kind of hard to tell from the video it just looks like they're not listening but they're actually spread out very far and there's traffic and all these things a bus drives in between it becomes very complicated very quickly but not only are there those misinterpretations but the public who has stumbled upon these performers in the streets oftentimes misinterprets us as well as some kind of protest or some other kind of you know single action and then they realize they're surrounded by 20 drummers in this neighborhood so in a way it creates conflict it generates conflict which it was not an intention of the piece it was it was actually to do the opposite it was to get people to walk around their own neighborhoods their own city spaces to engage with things that might be in those places too waterways monuments statues buildings and so the graphic notation i'm back to that it's it's an opportunity for i guess it's a frame that's a duration and inside of that there's pretty specific instructions on what to do at the same time these symbols can have multiple meanings i mean surely they have sonic instructional value but also they they might carry other kinds of history with them even the music regular music notation has a lot of history in it the fermatos the the staff lines as i spoke about in the haiti sinunga took piece all come loaded with with with different meanings and also the this expectation of virtuosity inside of them and so when i use those notations the western music notations inside of something that's maybe more graphic or hand drawn or whatever it's it's to reference that it's to reference that system it's to reference that education and that western tradition of of that notation yeah thanks raven for for that presentation for well the gifts that you've given us tonight and the gifts that are the are your body of work and i like lucia have spent the last several hours or 24 hours a big portion of that on a plane back from venice today listening to your work but i i want to pick up on maybe a little bit of what lucia was getting at but also maybe to talk about the presence of absence in your work and i was struck by the by the score for uh voiceless mass being a little bit of a musician myself of you know of seeing that much white space in terms of where the staffs were broken and what have you and also with the graphic notations just how they yes they hold this page but also there are still lots of absence or lots of white space and one of the works that actually it's i guess it's a trilogy the you did not speak about it this evening but i do want to sort of touch on it the american ledger one two and three which hasn't i don't think anyone's heard three yet i want to sort of talk about that one but what what strikes me about the american ledger particularly american ledger one i think or two and i think you described it to frank or terry as being well it's about force more forced migration but i think you said it was it's like a hot potato versus crabs in a bucket i think i got that quote right fighting for resources the question of does it create chaos or does it create organization and it seems to me that when i was listening to that that that's in let's say acute counter distinction to to peace like you know the great american landscape by someone like erin copeland or something that is so let's say complete or so full in a certain way sweeping and full um and in your work it seems that yeah maybe not incompleteness but absence allows for the kind of another presence to fill something in and i think you even have spoken about voiceless mass and in that way that the you know that the the inaccessibility of space and that the absence makes rooms for voices which have been suppressed so i'm wondering if you might talk a little bit about um your notion of absence and the and the presence of absence yeah thank you mario um i mean first it it's probably an aesthetic a sonic aesthetic for me to work with those voids or those absences to leave space for instruments it's my tactic for orchestrating these things especially a large ensemble piece like voiceless mass or some of the others that have a lot of instruments um but really i mean i mean any instrumentation even the solo pieces might have opportunities for nothing to happen and time to just pass as that is as that silence is filling that that space but also i think there's i mean in a lot of these scores there's also this opportunity for interaction between people who are performing with each other and so i like to when i'm composing these and i'm mostly just talking about the i mean the installations can be a totally different thing but the compositions oftentimes are written in mind that it's only for the people who are playing them so it's an interaction between let's say a string quartet the four people who are playing the piece together and there are things that only they know because they've studied the score because they've spent time in the rehearsal room doing these things together and if there's any kind of difficulty you know difficult passages complexity in the music it's to create a shared experience between those four people and so the experience of those four people my hope produces some kind of result some kind of artifact of that shared experience that then gets relayed on to listeners and i don't know if that's always a case because i'm in a weird position of being the one who composed it but you know it's hard for me to sometimes step out and see if i can have that experience as a listener but that's the intention and so the space facilitates that the the absences that are there for those conceptual reasons especially if the piece is programmatic or narrative those voids mean something they might mean a loss of memory they might mean a time before humans existed which is the case of american ledger one which tells the chronology of this land that's now the united states and so there's voids in that there's voids when things were lost when languages were lost when people were displaced when people were moved here from other continents um american ledger two that one is a really complicated that might be the most complicated score that i've written and it is about all of these american ledger scores are based on flags of the places that they are telling the story of so number one is a kind of abstraction of the us flag as we know it number two is the oklahoma state flag so telling the story of the the forced movement of tribes from the south into oklahoma which was indian territory but at the same time talking about other communities that have ended up in oklahoma in tulsa particularly the successful black community of tulsa that was driven out in in the race riots of tulsa the black wall street event so that being a forced migration out of oklahoma so you have this kind of cycle that's um that the score and the music itself is trying to tell the story of through its resources of its instruments which are drumsticks that get traded between uh participants american ledger three is a dedication to iw wells who was bringing to attention lynchings that were happening in the south she had to move up to illinois to get her writings published and eventually had to go on to england so it was to bring even greater attention to what was happening and so that's modeled after the centennial flag of illinois and is for two women's choirs it's actually being performed next weekend october the 22nd for the first time it was composed two years ago but it was a covet thing where it didn't happen so we're finally going to do it up in verplank at a place called kino sito on the 22nd but um i mean i want to respond more about this this absence i think you know i was thinking i think i can answer something which i also said about had brought up about the standing rock piece and other pieces resulted from my experiencer and it's a score that my wife kandice and i wrote called dispatch and what that is is a tech score it's part tech score it's part transcription of things that i witnessed at standing rock and it's part role-playing game and it's um it's it's a way to consider and analyze the dynamics of any kind of protest or gathering you might engage in so whether that's something here on the streets you know a protest against a monument which was happening also you know all across the country over the past couple years or something like standing rock thinking of who is there with you who are the undercover cops who are the allies who are the people who live in this place that you're gathering at who are you you know are you a visitor or do you live there it's a way to consider all of those things and think of if there's a soul message that needs to come out of this gathering what are the means of carrying that message and reeling that message to others and is that message getting distorted is it spreading adequately is it getting muffled or silenced and um another part of it too is this as we're working on the score it got me thinking about what's called deep listening that's kind of uh opportunity to listen to the environment to perhaps meditate and it's it's a it's something that was developed by composer Pauline Oliveros and it has this relation I think to the ideas of John Cage that you know silence is something that maybe cannot exist when becomes aware of the other sounds in their environment which I fully support until it turns into something that is a new age encroachment in the desert where i'm from and people are going in uh putting up teepees neon teepees in my homeland and doing mushrooms or whatever and doing deep listening hey it's all i get it but um it's a bit of that it's thinking of of um a privilege of silence you know a privilege of quiet environments so dispatch says that one does a deep listening in a place where they have the l-rads where they have water canons where they have the drones and helicopters or where there's a loudspeaker all night saying um you know you got to move out of standing rock just to kind of pick up on that and in terms of those spaces are those also moments in which there's in a kind of let's say attunement of the body that occurs and i'm thinking of the way in which the you know your scores sometimes have instructions for what one should do with one's body or how you should move or um let's say the um uh drum square for example you know that's very much a kind of performance bodily performance there are other works of yours like um i think it's tremble staves um that was uh from a few years ago um in which the the body becomes let's say instrumentalized in the in the work so you know yes there are these absences but that's also a place in which even in the the silence i would imagine that the the body becomes somehow attuned to the space or to that void or to that absence does that make sense it does and i have to admit it's not something i've given much thought to really um i do acknowledge the differences in in who might be performing these let's say a trained percussionist who is going to have a certain physical technique versus um somebody who's who's not you know doesn't have that kind of background how they might play music and and maybe working with that as a musical idea um a lot of these pieces are they're not anti-virtuous uh virtuosity or anything like that they're but i'm interested in the variation that can happen in in different bodies doing these things and that you know it could be a difference between a young person playing the same score or an old person you know older person might not have the same kind of reaction to something i'm not saying the older person is going to be slower or anything like that i'm saying there's different knowledge in in interacting with this this instrument uh one thing i am interested in terms of of the body though and and it is a reason i i make these scores accessible is that i'm interested in who might be on stage representing these pieces it's it can be quite um you know a limited uh presence of of diversity on some of these classical music stages so uh an example i can give is the chrono's quartet piece which demands that a woman be in the string quartet or else it can't be played because it's written in a way that the musicians get lost and it needs a woman to be in the quartet to say okay we're back on track here uh and in and in that sense it it allows drift it allows variation um but it's important to me who who might be in these places who who's on stage drum grid is very much about that um you know allowing people who are from certain communities to be the people on the streets it's not bussing in professional musicians to go out to to uh i don't know the the south of albuquerque and do this thing it's getting the people who live there to do it but i have to think more about about your question because i'm interested in that you know the more i the more i work on different kind of scores the more i collaborate with choreographers different different artists who work with movement i've been interested in that recently recently did a collaboration with choreographer who's also based here emily johnson and that got me thinking a lot about about how to collaborate with dancers and people who work with movement but also have them make sounds so i've been i've been more conscious of of how that that is to take place and also you know making instruments for people and that kind of thing i can follow up on that that i was really struck by that piece you showed um my blood is in the water which is basically like a physical historic timeline but vertical uh you know with where time begins in the sky and then sort of gradually drips onto the drum which is amplified um what's the what's the nature of sort of time because obviously if you're musician your medium is time you're sort of keeping rhythm and yet one sense is that you're you leave the performer quite free essentially to so how first of all how do you how do you instruct or advise your performers to keep time i feel like i i get to answer the previous question with the question that just gets asked we planned it that way your question gets me thinking of a way to answer mario's question about the score i showed with the playing the flute as long as possible and so that's going to be different with every performer right somebody might be able to hold it for like minutes somebody might have a limited time they could do that and in that sense the body is you know the individual and their body is going to be extremely important and it's going to be the the the soul factor in how that piece gets played and so i'm interested in those kinds of fluctuations in time being maybe dependent on that on who's playing it on again the interactions of the people involved in that that dynamic the setting is very important in a lot of these pieces drum grid just being one example but a lot of them are to be performed outdoors or in unconventional spaces public spaces sometimes and so those might determine something like duration or speed drum grid the only instruction for drum grid to end is that something will end it so that could be like a a bus goes between the sight line of two performers it could mean the cops come one ended one time because a neighbor a guy said get off my lawn to a drummer and try to fight him so that ended the piece but those kinds of things i like to to determine something that to me is already fluid you know i the metronomic way of keeping time in these pieces is not interesting to me some of these pieces do have conductors but they're the conductor also has these kind of wrenches thrown in at them that will alter time for them and all of this again is just talking about the experience of the people learning the piece or engaged in sounding the piece of course every person audience is going to have their own idea if i'm successful about how long that piece existed for you know so something like voiceless mass we just did at that organ festival and some people like well there's only 10 minutes i was like no and i didn't tell them how long it was and other people said wow it was 30 minutes no it wasn't it wasn't that either so that's when it's successful when i get that kind of feedback i hope that answered the question i don't know because i was going to say that it's what seems like the rigor that in western music would usually reside in this kind of ideal of regular time of nested scales of time has been shifted somewhere else so that you still make it impossible for it to just be this kind of atemporal without a referent sort of delirious delirium of atemporality like you're very specific this piece is about i'd be well this piece is about or is a you know you do your research on uh Zidkala Shah is that saying that and it seems to me that's a really specific that's also temporal that's like a very specific history which suddenly in your hands deserves its specificity quite aside from so that's time to that's all i'm saying is that there's a kind of there's historical time which then you know gets it's sort of due and i think that's powerful and in a way without it i can imagine the john cage plus mushrooms would lead to something else we should probably take questions if the audience might be time for one or two questions maybe this person in the front had their hands up and then we'll go there there's a microphone coming your way oh okay hi um thanks so much raven and happy indigenous people today um it's interesting that this talk is in the school of architecture makes me think about you know what it would mean for the reception of your work to be informed by indigenous paradigms of things like reception and criticism that are from an indigenous perspective so i guess the question has to do with you know frames of understanding that that may be positive things like relations relations to place specifically maybe land relations that can be defined as you know defining of notions of sovereignty for example so i'm just i'm just wondering if if you think about that if you think about how your work is received whether within this framing of you know the school of architecture art at columbia or it's framed in a different way that is more a more kind of informed by indigenous paradigms of understanding yeah as a whole like all all of the work i mean the the chamber music stuff is weird is a weird place to start from for me because it's venue is so limited really i mean they're they're designed as sonic spaces but really they're they're probably the most inaccessible places one could have music you know they they they don't even look like a place you would want to sit in sometimes um sometimes are too expensive the tickets are too much to go see the symphony or whatever and you know there's reasons for that it's expensive everybody should get paid for what they do but um and i don't know if there's a solution around that at least in this country but um for me to work in that medium or in that tradition does prevent people from my community to go to those things is that kind of what your you know your reference work like dylan robinson's you know development of you know indigenous paradigms for things like notions of listening or silence and things like that so i'm just wondering if if you feel like there's the there needs to be much more development of that kind of theorizing that allows for the reception of your work to to go there perhaps um in in academic institutions or in other I think I feel that constantly again but more mostly with the with the chamber stuff because of of the audiences that are able to see that um and that's probably why I do a lot of these things outside I think there's also a part of what I do that's that's curatorial you know running a record label doing these other things running venues before um I you know for me that maybe solves or tries to solve that but but yeah I don't I don't know if I have an answer to that yeah and I just wonder that perhaps it's not so much a question about sort of theorizing but it comes down to I think what you're getting at is that there's a different way of knowing or a different epistemology that there's this kind of western way of knowing and of composing and producing and writing and what you're offering and I don't want to use the word other but what you're offering is something different which is let's say outside of that outside of that canon of you know and that epistemology I think so but the I think where I have to be careful is where this where this might relate to indigenous world views or traditions or ceremony would be one situation where my links to that or if there was a potential to place this into that space then you know there's a whole different set of protocols that this might not align with this kind of work and so that's the thing that's kind of has me floating between these two places I think with and that's not with every piece but I could see some pieces where that that's going to be in conflict even the deer piece I mean there's I can tell when it's in that space when there's a lot of polarization between responses of indigenous people and some of those pieces there's another one where he butchered a sheep in a in a motel room which also had that same kind of response but music I mean it's it might I think I think one of my other tactics to dealing with that was building my own instruments because instruments can become a very sacred or powerful thing to deal with and while I have an interest in indigenous instruments they're not always going to be accessible to be used in a you know in a situation like I want to use them so thinking of that that's that's probably why I ended up working with electronics working with building my own things thank you so much Raven um thinking um with the connection between bill recordings and silent choir um I ran into a conversation on harsh and always to be specific about the allure of the a tonality a rhythm a lack of harmony in a way it's a chaos being a letting go of a system a noting system at the composition to welcome something that you might not have complete control over um and then that contrasted with your compositions I was just wondering a little bit of how these field recordings these pieces that to an to an extender just there situated a body with an ms how that informs the the compositions and vice versa how you see your role as a composer change affect curate the field recordings one thing about the field recordings is even from that first one I think there was uh an an intention to avoid being anthropological with the field recording so that was part of my reason for turning it up tossing fidelity out the window because I didn't want to I didn't want to try to explain or document the earth the land or its animals and maybe get something else out of it color I don't know speed maybe there was some kind of audible pace or tempo in there always thinking about the musical parameters of course pitch goes out the window with something like that but um but you hear things I mean you'll hear like birds and little things in one of them and um and same maybe that that was also coming full circle to the silent choir one thinking that this had a different kind of presence to it this had this kind of weight you you feel when you hear that many people being quiet and so that at the same time because nobody's actually making much sound can also avoid being anthropological like you're gonna capture their voices but how that influences the the compositions I'm not I'm not sure if they if they do you know I keep the electronic and the noise stuff kind of separate from the the chambers chamber things um I rarely use electronics in any of the chamber music and and vice versa you know maybe in I mean when I make recordings for like albums and things those those are totally different as well but you know I think something like again like silent choir it already had its own window of duration the second people started leaving the site that's when it ended and so that's where the recording just kind of cuts off and field the first one the field recordings that could go on forever and I I have very long versions of those recordings and they I have them play on a loop because I like to envision that they would be going forever you know with the no presence of people or vehicles or anything like that so in a way there's you know and I couldn't do that with a composition I couldn't have somebody play violin forever or something you know so I I do treat them very different and I I think they the the the the the works like the field recordings can exist in a place that's not improvisation either improvisation may be being a third one or that that is a very real time kind of a response to music itself and and maybe that's the body part too like myself as an improviser on my instrument on my electronics I play guitar also that becomes a very physical physically responsive thing or another kind of interaction that's not composed try my hand one more as soon as you have a recording device and are able and then as soon as one intervenes as soon as an artist has a recording device and as soon as an artist intervenes in a basically gorilla act um a responsibility will be assumed it will be assumed that you are responsibly you're responsible for reproducing the sound that you got or that it's somehow representing something or that you now have a representational responsibility to the persons on on whose behalf you're advocating so I guess maybe one way to rephrase that question you you're being asked before is do you feel a responsibility does responsibility name something that's useful to you as someone who is actually a composer a composer of course has responsibility because you have to decide you you're sort of orchestrating people does the word responsibility weigh on you or not with music yeah no no in my private life no no in making music um absolutely absolutely I'm I'm always again I'm always conscious of who the piece might be intended for first as musicians who I can include if it's something that is can only be played by somebody like chronos quartet then what does that mean you know what is what who I I think there's a link there between who would be playing it and who the audience will end up being for that and so I I most definitely feel responsibility there I feel responsibility every time I do a kind of noise thing you know I want to I don't want to be obnoxious really I mean my reasons for making noise is a is a sound I appreciate the sound of it I appreciate the physicality of what that can do you know very loud music very low tones it's kind of it's kind of immersive experience one can have in that concert setting and um and yeah I mean I've done some dangerous pieces I didn't show the piece for guns there's a piece for firearms where it's all notated and you play shotguns rifles and things obviously there's a responsibility there both performers and audience but um is it are you asking if something maybe further than of a responsibility of the out maybe the outcome of of the work or the influence of the work or yeah I was asking about the concept of fidelity like what are you you know in music basically there's there's always noise and there's always and it seems to me that the intentional fallacy is even stronger in music and in composition than in and then in just let's say without you know storytelling without musical notation and without translations there's so many layers of translation that um the the very notion let's say that an anthropological recording would somehow you know that anthropologist has to somehow bear the the responsibility of their act and be a transparent agent I just didn't seem I mean your answer about responsibility I hear but it sounds like that of a composer vis-a-vis the the art form or something rather than to like a reality or to a you know kind of cause of a broader cause there was one more question right there and and yes you'll be the last one thank you raven for your talk I have a question about pedagogy or when people come to you I don't know if you teach but if you teach or when you teach or when people want to learn from you how do you um what is your approach then to the like score techniques you use specifically like 20th century western notational practices it seems like references like cage or oliveros or even earlier of just general 20th century modernism there are references in your work but they're not the primary references they're kind of more um I see them as maybe auxiliary or part of your notational language how do you then approach speaking or teaching a young composer do you prescribe or suggest or recommend learning these notations yeah um right now I'm teaching a couple different places I'm teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts Mario Kato here is the director of that program and I also teach a program I've been teaching for 18 years called the Native American composer apprentice project where I teach kids on the reservation to write string quartets so maybe talking about that one is it's an opera what that project is is I have a week with young people to have them write a composition and what happens in this project is a quartet string quartet for a long time it was a quartet ethyl quartet also based here in New York City would go out to the reservation and work with the students to play their music and then they put on a concert at the Grand Canyon ethyl is very versed in experimental techniques a student could write a graphic score draw some line and say play this to me I wouldn't be doing my job if the kid turned in something like that you know I had a kid one time write improvise and turn it into ethyl so I abandoned that pretty quick because the kids are too smart they figured out they could just draw I mean some artists haven't figured this out yet they make a score play this I'm joking but it was how I learned it was my entry to to music making it is a rigid system and these kids half the schools out on the reservation don't have music programs they there's they don't have arts programs and that's not limited to the the Navajo and Hopi reservations that's all over this countries you know the arts are not a priority and the ones that do have a music program they they only have a music program because the sports team is really good so they needed a marching band and so they hired a music teacher because you know to go to the tournament or whatever so I have to teach the music notation in a week knowing that or letting them know that this they're gonna meet the string quartet halfway with this language you know and they can expand on that music notation like I do you know they could then draw the vibrato or something or the volume and come up with their own notations there's definite room for creativity there but I feel that they need some kind of starting point and for me that makes the most sense even though it's a western music tradition it's it's still a timeline we're still talking about time we can talk talk about any concepts they want to bring to the table whether that's something relating to their tribal worldviews or or anything else you know I think that's my work is to fit that into that that system and oftentimes you know a student will have no musical background and at minimum they learn what a whole note is for you musicians here though they'll at least know how to draw a whole note and what that means and maybe find middle C on the staff or which exists on all the staves and they'll at least write a composition for middle C whole notes but they could do all these other things I show them how to ricochet the bow and how to you know vibrate the string and do all the stuff and to me that's the more interesting music that's the music I like to listen to is that that kind of thing anybody else like other artists like we teach at II there are some students that who are interested in in using scores as a way to organize performance or organize other situations or to just maybe even organize their own methods of making something that's going to be non musical and so that's an opportunity to do to do something maybe more more complicated because maybe the discipline is there they're not going to like I said just turn in the squiggle and say play this so text is I mean text is something I I always like to see if a score is possible with text first if voiceless mass was possible with just text maybe I would have gone that way but it's something I always consider when working on something is maybe there's a way to just explain what one can do but at the same time not be overly instructional with the Zikalesha scores that was the last thing any of these women needed is me saying do this the project was not about that it was actually it was about the opposite of that me being a listener and maybe transcribing something that can become a prompt hi um well thank you so much for this beautiful lecture I have a simple question about your experience in performing some of these pieces in different locations and I'm thinking for example about performing the same piece in Boulder Colorado and Norway Oslo or the relationship between the site of recording in Standing Rock and performing in a museum or here like thinking about what travels and what doesn't what's communicated and what's not and the reason why I'm asking is because it seems like I mean the things that I have in mind is the way in which music has been made to travel either as anthems for national communities or for other kinds of communities or has participated in the construction of diasporic communities or and it seems to me that your standard does something that is completely different from those two but it's still related to locations so that's why I'm interested in the relationship between Boulder and Oslo or Standing Rock and the Whitney and what's communicated in your experience like just listening to them in those spaces thank you yeah that's hard to think about I mean surely something like like drum grid like I was saying is is reliant upon the people who will end up or who get asked to be representing the piece or who get asked to enact it so those will have its own site specific sound I'm interested that Boulder Colorado has its own sound Oslo has its own sound I don't know how to conjure that necessarily I mean that maybe there's an attempt in all of these to see if that comes out and I can learn something from that the middle C whole note sounds different on the Navajo reservation or over in Mongolia you know I'm interested in that for sure and and maybe all of these in some way can be that that experiment or that that study to see if if there is a difference or if I learn something from that maybe that ends up in another piece or another iteration of the piece I've made scores that are generative they've they've I didn't consider them done until I went through processes like that like I had them played by a group of people and something I learned something from that that maybe only happened because of them and then I went and revised the score did it again somewhere else and so forth um same with audiences maybe it was something about who was there to listen or a configuration of the audience for instance but um but yeah I think that's all we answered that question so with that final yes I think we maybe can give you a break and a well-earned evening uh with the rest of us so please join me in thanking Ray Ventricone