RISING: Voiceless Mass

Find a pew in St Paul’s Cathedral and feel instrumental reverberations move through you.

Voiceless Mass won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022, by composer, performer and installation artist Raven Chacon, a Diné man born in Fort Defiance, Arizona within the Navajo Nation. Raven is the first ever Native American composer to win the prestigious prize. His Voiceless Mass reflects on the history and access to gathering spaces, the lands on which they sit, and the role of sites of colonial power play in suppressing Indigenous voices.

Composed for organ, flute, clarinet, percussion, strings and sine waves – with the organ holding centre presence – the music reverberates, responding to the architecture, and symbolically resonating within the history of the site. Silences linger, and layered timbres build to a reverberant din. A space to consider the futility of giving voice to the voiceless, when ceding space isn’t an option for those in power.