Detail of score for performance, Background Music (2024) by Raven Chacon. Commissioned by Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

Walter Phillips Gallery is thrilled to present the newly commissioned score, Background Music by composer, performer, and artist Raven Chacon (Navajo Nation), which will premiere during Gather Listen Hear at Banff Centre.

Musicians in residence and other collaborators are invited to take part in an improvised interpretation of the graphic score, a form of musical notation using imagery, made available to audiences digitally. The performance will be sited outdoors on the trails on campus in and around the Leighton Artist Studios.

In part an homage and response to Rebecca Belmore’s iconic work, Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother (1991), and in dialogue with the artist’s later piece, Wave Sound (2017), Background Music by Raven Chacon is intended to prompt the amplification of sounds taking place on Sacred Buffalo Guardian Mountain that Banff Centre is situated on, projecting these back into the sonic landscape. As the title suggests, Background Music invites awareness of the sounds made by the land and its non-human inhabitants that are already present and often not the focus of one’s attention, while also highlighting the increasing scope and encroachment of human-made sounds in many global contexts. Foregrounding the sonic background, the score also has a relationship with Chacon’s prior work, Field Recordings (1999), in which outdoor locations in the Desert SouthWest of the United States that would typically be considered quiet spaces were amplified.

Opening questions of who and what is listening and sounding, Background Music considers the relationality of each individual’s presence on the land and within a group. The work can be undertaken by a variable number of individuals in pairs or more. Each group will make use of a portable amplifier connected to a microphone. The actions of the individuals are informed by a score that is composed of a series of descriptive prompts in both image and text. These prompts are to be internalized by the performers but are not required to be memorized. Over the course of the piece, those undertaking the score may be reminded of different prompts, at which point they are invited enact them. In this sense the score guides the actions of the person intended to position the portable amplifier towards listeners, and of the second person amplifying sounds both heard and inaudible via the mic. The image and text-based prompts also inform the ways in which both people, as well as any additional members of the group, may make sounds in response to non-human and creaturely beings they encounter or to human noises that are heard during the performance.

Please be aware that the audience will be invited to experience the performance on unpaved paths and may also be on their feet at certain points throughout the duration of the piece. Should you require seating or other arrangements to attend the event, please contact box_office@banffcentre.ca.

Walter Phillips Gallery would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Government of Canada, and Government of Alberta.