A cough.
A voice behind me: “It’s kind of quiet.”
Violinist Laura Ortman walks by wearing a maroon skirt, black blouse, and black high heel shoes.
A woman with her father is finding seats. “Papa, where to you want to sit,” she asks? Her cowboy boots are high on her calf. She leaves to get a drink, coming back and says, “And we roasted a very large pig.”
A man sits across from me. He sports a handlebar mustache and has a spider-web tattoo on his forehead, with an accompanying flower tattoo on his neck that reads “13” next to it. No one sits by him.
Someone is wearing an avant-garde pop musician David Sylvian t-shirt: “Picasso is painting the flames from the houses,” it states.
Hipster and the honorary have gathered at the Albuquerque Museum of Art to hear Pulitzer-winning composer Raven Chacon and violinist Laura Ortman perform a free-improv, art-noise composition.
Chacon won the Pulitzer in 2022 for his contemporary work Voiceless Mass, a commissioned piece by the United Church of Christ, with a primer at the Cathedral of St. Paul the Evangelist in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Pulitzer committee called it “a mesmerizing, original work for organ and ensemble that evokes the weight of history in a church setting, a concentrated and powerful musical expression with a haunting visceral impact.”
But here in a secular arena there is only the consecrated ground of art surrounding us.
I make my way to the stage before the performance. There’s a blue-white Fender Stratocaster, a Fender amp, six pedals, and a volume pedal. Next to the guitar is a violin in a case, a Fender Deluxe amp, six more pedals, and two controllers.
Not what you’d expect for classical music. But this is not your ordinary performers.
I look down at the flyer an usher handed me at the entrance. It read, “A Happening Tonight.”
I know the “happening” is about to begin when co-curator of the accompanying exhibit and host of the Broken Boxes podcast, Ginger Dunnill, puts a microphone in front of the stage, with the aim to covertly broadcast the concert on a pirated radio signal.
After some niceties by museum director, Andrew Connors, Dunnill introduces the performers, and explains to the audience that Chacon and Ortman are “Shifting the way indigenous art is framed.”
People sit in anticipation.
Then the dissonant distortion begins on the guitar, followed by rapid pizzicato on the violin. Some of the elderly in the room cover their ears, others move back.
Chacon riffs, Ortman bows, toying with their sound pedals.
After five minutes of performance, some of the elderly leave. Was it too loud? Too dissonant? Too contemporary for their tastes? I’m not sure. Maybe they were expecting a soothing Native flute. If they were, they don’t know Chacon’s music, an assault on traditional forms and structures in classical music, a multi-layered soundscape of exhiliration.
With free improvisation mixed with electronic manipulation, the performance goes on for roughly 45 minutes, a conversation back and forth (musically speaking) between Chacon and Ortman; a dialogue between two musicians, allowing the audience to eavesdrop. Furthermore, it’s an exchange between and two Native voices, an Apache (Ortman) and Dine (Chacon).
I don’t know what the conversation entailed, but I wonder if had anything to do with Chacon’s quote found in the Broken Boxes exhibit: “What our role as artists is: to assemble or fabricate or uncover the beauty that exists.”
Some had trouble finding the beauty. In all, I counted roughly a dozen people leave, mostly elderly. I thought to myself this must’ve been like when a riot broke out at a Stravinsky concert for “Rite of Spring.” No physical riot here, but a riot of wills.
Others, however, found deep beauty in the performance and musical discourse between the two musicians. I, for one, found Ortman and Chacon’s performance an assembling, a fabrication, and uncovering of magnificence, an ontological signpost that says beauty exists.
