Most musical compositions can be classified by the instrumentation and the musical structure. Cartography is not usually part of the notational features. But in the case of Pulitzer Prize–winning composer and Albuquerque denizen Raven Chacon’s Tiguex, the city known today as Albuquerque is both the subject and the stage, and the composition itself is notated as a hand-drawn map that captures the city cartographically, historically, and culturally. On September 27, the composition’s 20 overlapping movements will be performed by more than 200 musicians from dawn to dusk in places across the city. Conducted by Chacon’s childhood piano teacher, the full composition will be broadcast on KUNM (89.9 FM in Albuquerque and online) and live streamed on the One Albuquerque Media (GOV-TV) YouTube channel. A week before the event, Musically Speaking had the opportunity to speak with Chacon about this extraordinary project. Our conversation is reproduced below, edited for length and clarity. For full details about the project—including the score, movements, locations, and timing—please visit tiguex.com.

MS: Lara Manzanares [singer/songwriter] told me about this project, and as soon as I looked at the website, I knew I had to do something about this and get the word out. It’s really a very intriguing and ambitious project.

RC: It’s crazy.

MS: Yeah, that’s a word for it. Can you tell me about the germination of this idea? When, where, and how did the seed get planted for this?

RC: Well, you know, I think unconsciously, the seed was planted way back when I was 17 years old. That was around the time I was really starting to play music live around the city, started playing with other musicians, and some of these projects were quite, you know, maybe abrasive and loud and noisy, forcing us to go out to the West Mesa and get a generator and make sound out there. Nobody wanted to hear this in any enclosed space. And so the earliest concerts I did in Albuquerque, they were all around the West Mesa, way out there up the end of Rio Rancho. And since then, I think it gave me the ideas that really, you could make music all over the city. So through my 20s, after university, working with other musicians, we’d go and put on concerts in alleyways around the university area or abandoned buildings. We put on a concert. We did a recording session in a space one time that resulted in an album called Brujas that I put out about 20 years ago. We did a couple concerts on rooftops about 15 years ago, 20 years ago, and under bridges, as well. I remember we did one under one of those bridges. I think it’s Carlisle where there’s a bike path.

MS: Oh, yeah, yeah, I know that bike path.

RC: Yeah, and so a couple of years ago, the Tamarind Institute at UNM asked me to be a visiting artist residence. I’ve moved up to upstate New York the past few years, but always back and forth from Albuquerque to New York. And they wanted me to make a lithograph, and I don’t know anything about print making, but I said yes because I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I wanted to make a situation where I could create a score all over the city, and to do that, it would take on the form of a map.

MS: Yeah.

RC: So the first part of the project was researching different maps. There’s a place on campus called MAGIC. I think it stands for Maps and Geographic Information Center, I believe.

MS: Okay.

RC: They have all these amazing maps of New Mexico and of our city. And so they have, you know, geological maps, water maps. The conquistadors, of course, were making maps about this mysterious place. There is tourist maps, all kinds of these kinds of exaggerated drawings of Route 66 and the balloons and all of that. And so I combined all of these into a drawing. And that became one layer of, or several layers of, the lithograph, both the kind of cartographic documenting of the city, but also the things that are imagined—the conquistadors imagine the city of gold out here along the West Mesa, you know, other things. There’s the drawings of the pueblos that don’t always end up on maps. So I try to put all these things into the map itself as layers. And the top layer of this was to be the score. So I started drawing a melody that I wanted to be played on the mountain peak. I started drawing a path that a choir would take to reach the top of one of the volcanoes on the West Mesa. I started drawing a path at the melody of two people on horseback singing. That’s Lara Manzanares and Antonio Márquez on horseback going up the ditch trail near the bosque, singing these old corridos to anybody who they encountered. And so started drawing this as graphic notation like you see in the works of Cage or Cornelius Cardew of the 20th century. And that’s what happened, and before I knew it, I had 20 of them that I’d drawn all over the city.

MS: Yeah, yeah. Well, a couple years ago, I went to the Museum of Musical Instruments for the first time. Have you been there, Raven?

RC: I have, yeah.

MS: One of the things I learned—it’s not that I didn’t know this, but it was really driven home to me how important music is as a cohesive and sustaining force in community. And to me, when I looked at this map and the various tunes and approaches, it seems to me that this project is about community. Would that be a fair thing to say?

RC: Absolutely. You know, I was thinking of all the music communities I’ve been in in the city. As a young person, I played in rock bands, and you know there’s no shortage of rock bands in Albuquerque. And I wanted to learn as much as I could as a young person. I took piano lessons, and that was where I learned to read classical notation. From that, I enrolled in the University of New Mexico as a music composition student and was exposed to that musical community of people who read that kind of notation. I played in a Mariachi group here in town. I was in a group Pueblo and Navajo singers where we sang traditional music with each other. I tried to play with as many people as possible. That’s how you learn. But, you know, these musical communities are also sometimes representative of other communities. I think I wrote this piece to consider that, you know, it really is a gradient of Venn diagrams all over the city of people and communities. And sometimes there’s no separation. These things overlap.

MS: Right.

RC: And so the score does the same. The score , I think, reflects different, not just musical communities, but other communities that exist in our city. That’s what cities do. Cities are places where people gather and where people come and visit others, and maybe they leave, and they come and go, and they come for work, or they come for school. And they should be places that welcome people from all over the world.

MS: Yeah, yeah.

RC: And so in a way, the score was made at a time, I think, where we are hearing a different kind of rhetoric of, you know, we should kick out people who do not belong here. And so Tiguex is very much, I think, considering the complex history of Albuquerque, but also the mixture of ideas and people that have resulted in who we are today.

MS: Yeah. Looking at the map, I see that the notation, the musical notation, is very sparse. So can’t remember now. Maybe it was the cellos. There’s maybe four to six notes that are on the paper. And what do you want the cellos to do with those four to six notes?

RC: Yeah, so I think the cello one is actually really written a little bit longer, but I could go through some of these movements to describe more of what they are. I could also talk a little bit about some of the ideas of overall of how the music functions within this piece.

MS: Okay. Sure.

RC: Well, yeah, maybe I could go through some of these. Would that be helpful?

MS: Yeah, you know, the one I’m thinking of, turns out it’s the balloon part of the map. Yeah, and there’s like four notes on a bass clef, and then to the right of the balloon, there are notes that seem to be for timing. So you have tones on the left and timing on the right of the balloon.

RC: Yeah, yeah, so that is a movement called “The Teaching of the Wind,” and that is for a trombonist to go up in a hot air balloon and witness the movement of people and cars in the city. And so if the balloonist is traveling north to south, they’re playing from any four notes of a mode that might be used in the songs of Sandia Pueblo. If they’re traveling east to west, they are using the sounds that might be used in the songs of Western Keres tribes—Acoma, Laguna. So this is myself trying to listen to that music and give a nod to some of the intervals and tales used in local Pueblos’ songs.

MS: Yeah, very cool.

RC: Now, the other grouping of notes is a whole note, half note, quarter note, different pulses, different rates, and that is determining how fast the trombonist plays some of these held tones. So if there’s heavy traffic, they’re going to be playing eighth notes. If traffic is barely moving, it’s going to be a whole note drone. So within the piece, you have different things happening. You have some prompts, which, for the choir who is climbing the volcano, they are simply starting at their lowest at the lowest point of the volcano, and as they ascend, walking up the volcano, they will increase their pitch chromatically until they get to the top of the volcano. And so there’s no notes written. It’s just a simple prompt of saying start low and go high. And the notation in a lot of cases tries to be in the language of the people who might be interpreting it. So, for instance, the movement called “Flying Lead Changes,” which is for 10 electric guitarists on a rooftop, that notation was in guitar tablature. And so a lot of text is used, a lot of graphic symbology—a lot of it is actually influenced by the petroglyphs at Rinconada Canyon—and also just standard Western notation and my own extended classical notation.

MS: Right, right. So the musicians, all of the individual musicians, including vocalists, have some work to do on their own with this notation and bring their own interpretation of these notes. So sometimes, like with the choir, as you said, there’s no indication of what notes to sing. Just go low to high. So that opens up a rather large area of exploration for the choir. And I think that’s very cool that they have that freedom. I didn’t realize that different parts of these notations were linked to different traditions, and so that’s something I’m going to look closer at on this map. So some of this is written out. Somewhat improvised stuff for the musicians. And there’s some traditional music, as well. So there’s a variety of musical approaches, if you will. Is that an accurate way to say it?

RC: It is. You know, almost all my scores, whether they are strictly notated, and you’re asked to do exactly what is written, or they are more maybe prompts for a mixture of intentional action and also accidental improvisation, I think Tiguex is a mixture of all of those compositional tactics. It’s important to say that nothing is really open to interpretation as far as how the music goes. Things are still very specific. So a large part of the task of putting Tiguex together has been rehearsals. All of these pieces get rehearsed, and all of them get contemplated and discussed amongst everybody involved about, you know, how to execute the piece or the movement of Tiguex, and so to me, I like working on the kind of back end of the score. The score becomes the initiator for what we’re going to do. It provides a guide. But then after that becomes the work of actually getting it to the place of where it needs to be.

RC: Yeah, yeah. Are you playing?

RC: I will be playing as one of the guitarists on the rooftop at 5:00 p.m.

MS: That would have been my guess. So how do you pull something like this together. So Tamarind comes to you and says, you know, we want you to do this map project, and out of that grows this really ambitious citywide musical event. And you’ve got 200 people, and God only knows what kind of bureaucratic obstacles or challenges there were to get this set up and happening.

RC: When I was thinking that this actually had to be done, and then the work began to find partners. And one of the immediate partners was the city of Albuquerque Department of Arts and Culture, who, while not providing financial support, was able to provide, you know, really become a collaborator of logistics, helping us with permits, helping us letting the police know, lowriders blasting noise and, you know, guitarists on rooftops, all of this, and promotion, and they’re also going to be livestreaming the event in real time on that day. The University of New Mexico came on as a partner in having students participate. And just a lot of in-kind donations. Jonathan Wolfe of the Fractal Foundation has the fractal balloon. He’s going to take the trombonist up in the air. And we did have some private donors. Larry Schulte and Alan Zimmerman are not only performing—I mean, I wrote a movement for them anyway—but they’ve offered a lot of support. I mean, shoot, I don’t live here anymore, so I’ve been sending things to their house, equipment, you know, things I’ve had to order, some film equipment. Some other people to shout out. There’s a filmmaking collective called Cousin Collective provided me some filmmaking equipment. The Native Arts and Culture Foundation provided some funds to pay musicians, and the National Performance Network also provided funds, as well. Not to mention that the Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts through the Albuquerque Community Foundation. So the ABQ Community Foundation has been great in offering fiscal sponsorship so people can donate. So we’ve been able to support and make this happen through all of those different avenues.

MS: Yeah, yeah. That’s great. As you’re speaking, I’m looking at the list on the website, and it’s an interesting combination of people and organizations. You know, I think that’s all I need from you, Raven. Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I’m looking forward to catching as much of this as I can next week. Good luck with this.

RC: Thank you. Thank you. I’m running to another interview and then some rehearsals this evening.

MS: Yeah, you’re riding a wild horse right now.

RC: It’s crazy. It’s crazy.

MS: All right, Raven, be well. Thanks again.

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