Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Raven Chacon’s 2022 Pulitzer Prize winning composition Voiceless Mass is only one of many works he has created to engage with cultural and political conceptions of silence. Far from denoting a lack of sound, silence in Chacon’s work often is full of noise that requires different forms of listening. In what follows I argue that Chacon’s use of silence is a direct challenge to the visual and sonic legacy of European landscape art and to a terra nullian ontology that perceives land as empty. In doing so Chacon’s work aligns with a resurgence of Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism and its extractive logics that reached a climax with the resistance to pipeline construction at Standing Rock. By listening to Chacon’s works that engage in silence we can hear a theory of relationship to the land that insists on its sacred fullness of life.
Source: Sound Stage Screen
DOI: 10.54103/sss30336
Author: Gabriel Saloman Mindel
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7125388980
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