2025 Robb Award9/30/2026Raven Chacon  Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile long land art installation Repellent Fence. A recording artist over the span of 24 years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from The LA Times, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America. Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022), the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022), and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. His solo artworks are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections. World Premiere Tiguex, for the entire city of Albuquerque (2025), composed by Pulitzer Prize-winning, Albuquerque-based composer Raven Chacon, is a large-scale musical composition consisting of twenty overlapping movements performed over the span of a day. The performance took place September 27th, 2025, from dawn to dusk, across the city of Albuquerque. learn more about Tiguex Artistic Example Video: Present Music premieres Raven Chacon's 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning composition "Voiceless Mass" on November 21st, 2021 at The Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee. Present Music, along with the Wisconsin Conference of the United Church of Christ and Plymouth Church UCC, commissioned "Voiceless Mass" by Raven Chacon for the 40th season of their concert series. “Voiceless Mass” is scored for organ, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, two percussionists, strings and sine tones. Raven Chacon writes: "This work considers the spaces in which we gather, the history of access of these spaces, and the land upon which these buildings sit. Though ‘mass’ is referenced in the title, the piece contains no audible singing voices, instead using the openness of the large space to intone the constricted intervals of the wind and string instruments. In exploiting the architecture of the cathedral, Voiceless Mass considers the futility of giving voice to the voiceless, when ceding space is never an option for those in power." See more about Present Music at www.PresentMusic.org. Learn more about Raven Comments are closed.
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