For centuries the Lenape people had hunting grounds and fishing camps in an area they called Penadnic, in the rocky hills of upper Manhattan. Wrested away from its original inhabitants by Dutch and British settlers following the infamous “sale” of the island to the Dutch colonial governor Peter Minuit in 1626, the land passed through the ownership of multiple well-to-do New Yorkers until, in 1842, John James Audubon’s family bought it using proceeds from his field guide The Birds of America. In the early twentieth century Archer Huntington, heir to a California railroad fortune, funded the construction of several Beaux-Arts style buildings on the land. With the hunting grounds of the Lenape long buried, two of those structures, sitting just off of a large bricked terrace and perched on the hills around 158th Street, now house the galleries of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

In 2024 the academy made eloquent use of the site’s history by inviting the Diné composer, musician, and artist Raven Chacon to premiere a work in one of their high-ceilinged, tile-floored galleries. Aviary was a dense palimpsest of bird calls that rained down upon listeners from multiple speakers equally spaced around the rafters of the academy’s northern pavilion. The audience could come and go as they pleased, invited to rest on triangular cushions that mimicked the shapes of musical crescendos and diminuendos in the gallery’s enveloping natural light.

Aviary plays with two sources of birdsong. The first is field recordings of birds that can still be heard in the area, culled from the Audubon Society archives, a nod to the land’s most famous previous owner. The other is a kind of ghost music: recordings of Chacon mimicking the songs of now-extinct birds using instruments he built from materials salvaged from near his home in upstate New York, including bits of rubber tubing, a bellows, and what looks like a small clay pigeon. Played on a loop, the resulting forty-minute piece sounds like a transmission from an alternate universe in which global avian extinction and Indigenous displacement in the Penadnicdidn’t occur, an imaginary space where passenger pigeons still sing and the Lenape still hunt.

But this is only one way to hear Aviary. During a visit on the installation’s closing weekend, my wife experienced the piece for the first time with no information in hand about it or Chacon’s other work. After lying back for thirty minutes on one of the installation’s triangles, she told me she’d felt that the barriers of space had fallen away. Inside and outside had blended, and the manufactured, surround-sound playback of Chacon’s score had intermingled with the wild spontaneity of the natural world outside the academy’s open doors. She left, she said, in a state of heightened hearing and relaxation. While I was jotting notes about Audubon’s history and Chacon’s beautifully minimalist graphic score—a non-Western way of notating music using symbols beyond the typical notes and staves—she was finding a less programmatic and less mediated encounter with the sound itself.

Our different experiences of Aviary help explain the broad appeal of Chacon’s work, which has long stood out for its synthesis of high-modernist aesthetics, DIY noise music, and narratives of displacement. In 2022, when Chacon became the first Native American composer to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the news was cause for celebration not only among Indigenous artists but throughout America’s underground avant-garde music scene. Much of Chacon’s early work was done in New Mexico, outside typical hotbeds of experimental art such as LA or New York, but his reputation for mixing sculpture, visual iconography, pure noise, homemade instruments, and social action projects spread throughout the clubs and backroom performance spaces of the US and Europe, especially after he began his ongoing series of ecstatic collaborations with John Dieterich of Deerhoof and the electric violinist Laura Ortman. Part of his appeal has long come from his music’s ability to combine narrative and political clarity with avant-garde, nonlinear form without sacrificing the wildness of his sounds. Aviary tells a story of American colonialism and of the slow decimation of global wildlife precisely by asking us to question whether the sounds we are hearing are of birds captured and catalogued, recreated from memory, or immediate and alive.

Born in 1977 within the Navajo nation in Fort Defiance, Arizona, Chacon studied at the California Institute for the Arts under radical American experimental composers such as James Tenney, Morton Subotnick, and Wadada Leo Smith. After graduating he joined Postcommodity, an Indigenous arts collective focused on resisting what, on its website, it calls “the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial and multi-ethnic colonizing force that is defining the 21st Century.” After his Pulitzer—and a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2023—Chacon experienced a meteoric rise in institutional praise and underground cred. A faculty member at Bard College, he has shown work in museums around the world and maintains a full touring schedule at small- and midsized experimental music spaces.

Chacon’s work could be separated into three broad categories: experiments with nonmusical sound (“noise”), installations or site-specific pieces that combine musical and visual elements, and “traditional” chamber music. The division helps suggest the formal breadth of his output, but in practice things aren’t so clear-cut. Chacon might use Western chamber-music notation to prod violins and flutes into making pure noise, just as he might treat an extinct bird’s call played on an invented instrument as a woodwind solo.

He might, for that matter, enlist large sea vessels to take the place of a choir. In his 2018 piece Chorale, four ships docked in a Scandinavian valley inlet follow Chacon’s musical score to time blasts of their foghorns. Composers such as Charlie Morrow and Heleen Van Haegenborgh have previously relied on foghorns for their sound of joyous chaos, but Chacon orders the ships’ ear-rattling honks with a restrained elegance, situating them within the centuries-old church tradition of vocal polyphony. The foghorns evoke something musically historical and nautically practical, but as their tones resonate between the hills surrounding the fjord they come to sound like four godlike voices singing a mountain-shaking chorus.

Report, from 2001, also works with unusual instruments, but it trades the ethereal textures of Chorale for sounds that are, whether we like it or not, more modern. The piece is a sort of deadly salon music scored for “firearm ensemble.” Like his foghorn choir, Report uses a traditionally notated score to organize different frequencies of firearm, from pistol to shotgun, into a sort of drumline of explosive rim shots—“a tuned cacophony of percussive blasts interspersed with voids of timed silence,” as Chacon put it on his website. The point, he went on, was to convert these “instruments of violence, justice, defense, and power…into mechanisms for musical resistance.”

For all of these timbral experiments, Chacon is also an adept composer of Western chamber music. It was one of his works in this tradition, Voiceless Mass, that won him the Pulitzer Prize. Commissioned by two Wisconsin church organizations and the Present Music ensemble, the twenty-minute composition—released on CD in 2025 by the New York-based label New World Records—finds Chacon confronting the history of the Catholic church’s barbarous treatment of Indigenous peoples, from residential schools to forced assimilation and other abuses. At its core lies the Nichols & Simpson organ at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee, a massive bit of musical machinery that seems to stand in for the Church itself. Authoritative and immutable, it sits in the center of the space while the rest of the ensemble performs interspersed throughout the audience. Some of the musicians’ sounds are nearly silenced, lost in their separation from the audience and each other, while the organ remains solid, subtly reinforced by electronic tones, projecting its indestructibility.

New World’s CD release of Voiceless Mass is a gift to Chacon’s fans, perfectly capturing the work’s fragility while making sure each sound is present and clear. (You can also get the release in Dolby Atmos surround-sound, which comes very close to recreating Chacon’s original placement.) The music doesn’t move linearly, but oozes and floats in and out of the rhythmic beating patterns of two pitches closely tuned. A little past the halfway point the organ takes over, and the music gathers momentum, in the form of a curiously beautiful trudge that places its unshakable harmonies against the defiant, dismembered long tones of the rest of the ensemble. There are moments of great beauty as harmonies collide, giving a hint of French impressionism before the flute and viola begin a simultaneous series of microtonal glissandi that stretch the momentary serenity toward a shriek and cry. Percussion takes over the organ’s plodding; the music ends in a mist of uncertainty.

Much of the recent writing about Chacon has rightfully foregrounded his critique of America’s colonial history and its abuses against Indigenous people. This project is central to Chacon’s thinking, but the methods, techniques, and materials he chooses to pursue it connect him with a wider range of American musical mavericks than critics often acknowledge. His oeuvre has echoes of the microtonal hobo ballads of the instrument-builder and theorist Harry Partch, the “Deep Listening” epiphanies that Pauline Oliveros found with her accordion in the bottom of a Houston cistern, and the vibrant painted scores that Wadada Leo Smith uses to entwine the improvisational spirit of jazz with non-Western musical traditions. (Smith’s Ankhrasmation scores were also featured at the academy during Chacon’s run of Aviary.)

All these works, in disparate ways, seem preoccupied with the angst and loneliness that accompany America’s cultural preoccupation with self-determination and individualism: Partch’s intoning is an avant-garde alternative to Roscoe Holcomb’s “high, lonesome sound” (in John Cohen’s famous phrase), just as Oliveros, droning on her accordion, comes to seem like a small, Thoreauvian figure within the cistern’s echoing expanse. Chacon’s music at once shares this isolated version of America and more directly confronts the trauma of its colonial past and its ecological future.

His 2017 sound installation, Silent Choir, for instance, is both a document of our cultural, political, and natural history and a conceptual riff on a famous composition by yet another twentieth-century musical maverick. It consists of a field recording made at the Oceti Sakowin camp during the 2016–2017 North Dakota Access Pipeline Resistance, known popularly as Standing Rock. In it, a group of protesters led by Indigenous women encounter a line of armed police. They stare each other down in complete quiet.

Chacon’s recording is in this sense a moment of “silence,” but it takes us beyond the concert hall that served as the setting for John Cage’s famous “silent piece,” 4’33”. It imbues the quiet with a palpable feeling of potential action, blood and grit, dirt and land. Where Cage’s chamber work is conceptual and potentially light, Chacon’s is thick with emotion and defiance. It makes the listener rethink the sound of “nothing” not just as a theoretical exercise but as an active confrontation. In an avant-garde musical scene that often seems stuck cycling between minimalism, pop music aesthetics, and academic virtuosity, Chacon brings us back to the ground: the slow crunch of a boot shifting in gravel, the interruption of an occasional breath or cough, and the constant menacing drone of a helicopter overhead.