Music for 13 Paths

As a composer, musician, and artist, Raven Chacon (Diné) brings attention to spaces in which music and art are performed to question the colonized ground upon which these assemblies take place. During the opening weekend of Counterpublic 2023, Chacon challenged the spatial organization of the State Streets neighborhood with an intervention into the organizing systems of music. For Music for 13 Paths, Chacon subdivided the twelve-note Western musical scale into thirteen divisions, hand-tuning thirteen chimes accordingly. Thirteen performers moved through the State Streets neighborhood, each holding a chime that sounds in response to the momentum of the performer’s cadence and called out to other performers stationed throughout the neighborhood. Culminating in Benton Park, the chimes were then suspended between two trees in an arc that mirrored the shape of the hill below and formed an anti-monument of St. Louis’s famed Gateway Arch, which celebrates expansion and the settlers who moved through the city to populate the West. Set against the historical context of Benton Park—specifically, its relationship to Manifest Destiny through the Missouri senator for whom it is named—Chacon’s performances offered an embodied and sonic way of finding solidarity and forming a nonvisual counter-coalition.