Unlike the liturgy of a traditional mass, Voiceless Mass (2021) is not centered on the human voice. The work, which consecrated Raven Chacon, an artist born in the Navajo Diné Nation, as the first Native North American composer to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music, is centered on the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee and its pipe organ. The building, with its imposing acoustic architecture and its symbolism, itself becomes a subtle resonant body of the conflicts it has perpetuated for centuries. As Chacon says, “this piece has been a kind of metaphor for the inaccessibility of voices throughout the history of the Church – and also the history of colonization to which the Church contributed. And, in the case of Indigenous peoples, that led to the loss of language itself.”¹

Almost thirty years ago, the presence of the Indigenous voice as an expression of insurgent forces in Brazilian history took shape on Sepultura’s album Roots (1996). On the tracks “Ratamahatta” and “Itsari,” the chants of the Xavante people cross the soundscape of heavy metal, breaking with the dominant aesthetics of the genre and bringing a generation of fans closer to Indigenous peoples’ struggles for their territories and ways of life. It was from the encounter between the trajectories of Raven Chacon, Iggor Cavalera, former drummer and founder of Sepultura, and Laima Leyton, a music producer based in London and member of the duo Mixhell who is active in the intersections between performance, pedagogy, and sound activism, that the project to be presented at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo was born. Together with the Xavante musicians who took part in the recording of Roots, and with the local support of cacique Cipassé Xavante, from the village of Wederã (Canarana, Mato Grosso, Brazil), the artists are developing a multichannel composition that poetically undoes the rhythms of the city’s engines (“…undo the urban motor-rhythms of São Paulo”) to bring out the pulse of the earth and of the voices connected to it.

The critique of language as a power structure – which began in Voiceless Mass and expanded in the dialogue with Roots – goes even deeper in Chacon’s approach to writing music itself. The right to one’s own voice and language is an exercise in humanity. Just as Indigenous languages were suppressed by the imposition of European languages, the history of music has enshrined the traditional score as the legitimate form of sound writing. In For Zitkála-Šá (2017-2020), Chacon pays homage to thirteen Indigenous and Mestizo artists through graphic scores that function as sound portraits, composed with symbols, shapes, and instructions open to interpretation. By working with other forms of notation, performance, and musical recording, Chacon shows that the Western systematization and teaching methodology is only one of countless possibilities – and that it is not even adopted by the majority of people who practice music in the world.