"Compass" Raven Chacon, 2025

Music scores can be coded as instructions, but Raven Chacon prefers to craft them as invitations. His notational style often directs the performer to take cues from their immediate surroundings to inform the composition’s shape and sound. “Compass,” was created as a solo for electric guitar. These works fall somewhere at the intersection of score (to facilitate performance) and visual artwork (presented as the work itself). For a long time, Chacon considered the score to be an instruction manual, the purpose of which was to simply get sound out into the world. But over time, his thinking has changed: “Scores themselves can be the document to mediate every part of the work itself, to be a kind of feedback loop within itself, as supplemental information, as something that allows the music to continue to grow through its existence as being separate from the music, as well…Meaning that it’s not just the instruction manual anymore. It’s more information about the concept, the narrative, the biography, the concern, and it can have that other existence separate from the music.”

Silkscreen on 320 gram Coventry Rag paper (deckled edge).
Dimensions: 18" x 28"
An edition of 50 + 5 APs and 5 PPs
Signed by the Artist in pencil