Wednesday, September 9, 2026 from 6-8 PM
Join us for a performance and screening in conjunction with the current Charlotte Street exhibition, Digital Prairie.
Music Research Strategies presents CHOREO, for bullroarers, a live performance of Raven Chacon’s graphic score For Zitkála-Šá (For Suzanne Kite), accompanied by a screening of LISTEN LIKE LOVERS, a digital community archive documenting a performance of Raven Chacon and Candice Hopkins’ graphic score Dispatch #2: The Gathering.
About For Zitkála-Šá (For Suzanne Kite)
When Diné artist and composer Chacon learned about the Yankton Dakota writer, activist, and musician, Zitkála Šá (1876–1938), he felt compelled to write a piece in homage to her. He began drafting an orchestral composition but ultimately decided to write 13 separate pieces, each in honor of an Indigenous woman artist who carries on the work begun by Zitkála Šá. Chacon includes instrumentation and guidelines for the performance of each score. Oberlin Conservatory students will be studying and performing them throughout the semester.
Retracing the challenges that Zitkála Šá faced in her own compositions, such as The Sun Dance Opera (1913), Chacon explains that the Western classical notation system “cannot relay the information of the complex keys and modes of the sung Native voice, nor the fluidity of time inherent in Indigenous musics. The diatonic staff reduces all tribal music to an Indianist sound, easier digestible to white ears. A graphic score can resist the history of Western notation, and with that can eliminate normalizations and assumptions of time that influence how we see the universe and whoever created us. Each score needed to fit into one letter-sized sheet of page, as this is the physical form that also contained most of Zitkála Šá’s work, be it poetry, music, prose, or letters of legal petition to the federal government. In these scores, one may see a map, guiding us to worldviews that never doubted that women could be leaders… If we see Zitkála Šá as a woman who oscillated between two worlds, the question becomes: What is the sound of this oscillation?”
Included in the Charlotte Street exhibition Digital Prairie, For Zitkála-Šá (For Suzanne Kite), the instructions for performance include:
Any electronic or non-electronic instrument Starting at the top, perform the given value, interpreted as a changeable parameter of music (pitch, tempo, volume, etc.), or as rhythms, preset buttons, code, etc. As you proceed to other values, you may be confronted with a new path, which may also climb back up the page. When you arrive at the end of a path, you may turn around, unless that path is at the bottom of the page. The Xs are any value you desire.
About LISTEN LIKE LOVERS, a digital community archive documenting a performance of Raven Chacon and Candice Hopkin’s graphic score Dispatch #2: The Gathering
Dispatch is a conceptual score conceived collaboratively by Navajo Nation composer Raven Chacon and Carcross/Tagish curator and writer Candice Hopkins. Published in three parts — or ‘Dispatches’ as the artists declare — the work draws from Chacon and Hopkins’ reflections on the fight for cultural preservation and defense of Indigenous sovereignty at the Standing Rock Reservation Water Protector encampment in 2016. There are three parts to Dispatch including Dispatch 1: The Call, Dispatch 2: The Gathering, and Dispatch 3: The Aim.
ABOUT DISPATCH 2: THE GATHERING
Rocks have harmonics, resonant frequencies. They are also deities, lives begun millions of years ago, witnesses to the formation of the earth. They can pick up the tremors of extractive colonialism exposing wide caverns that lead to trails deep inside the ground, generating sludge and slurry, releasing poisons meant to stay undisturbed. The time is now to protect these rocks as though it is a last stand. Our gathering can open up the way to other worlds, those of our own making. These other worlds are not de-colonial ones, but non-colonial ones. Not bound by their frameworks, but by ours. Heeding this call is the first action. In this action we come together, in-person or at a distance, to open up a portal of shared experiences.
Choose one or more prompts to follow
(Consider the prompts as protocols—of relation, of listening, of action, of witnessing, of performing)
Schematic 1 can be used as an aid in engaging with others in the camp.
- Heed the call
- Hosts determine points of reference
- If you are not already there, arrive
- Gatekeepers welcome and relay protocols of place
- Do nothing (activated at any time)
- Listen (ongoing)
- Listen beyond (to your immediate surroundings, to the land or water, to sounds outside your normal range)
- Sustain yourself (don’t be in the way, don’t encroach); at the same time, be useful (observe; introduce yourself, unobtrusively; deliver supplies; find your place; determine your role, humbly)
- Broadcast outward (for any player at any time). Also determine what is not to be shared
- Create a small gathering (5 people or less) for one activity. Do something—cook; pray; sing; teach a game
- If necessary, initiate a larger gathering
- Witness, relay what you learned
- Translate a broadcast for other listeners—consider different languages, different tones
This score can be realised as a performance or as a series of imagined events. It can also be enacted in the real world. The players, the prompts, and the schematics are derived from an analysis of the dynamics and organisation of the Water Protectors in defense of Standing Rock during the noDAPL movement, not glossing over the miscommunication, profiteering, and injustices. In an increasingly fractured society, new paths and new formations are needed to refocus our attention in an attempt to find truth. Participating in this score may produce sonic or visual artifacts, these are as important as the actions.
