Raven Chacon: Voiceless Mass, Edinburgh Art Festival review - 'a cry of rage'

Raven Chacon: Voiceless Mass ★★★★☆

St Giles Cathedral

Sometimes “art” is music, as at Edinburgh Art Festival’s performance of Raven Chacon’s extraordinary Pulitzer Prize-winning composition Voiceless Mass in St Giles Cathedral. The British premiere, introduced by Chacon and conducted by Peggy Wu, was staged in partnership with the Fruitmarket Gallery which hosts its own festival of new music, Deep Time, in November.

Chacon is a Diné/Navajo artist and composer, and this work is also a kind of site-specific installation. Written for church organ and 11 other musicians (strings, flute, clarinet, percussion and sine tones), it is a response to the complicity of the church in the persecution of indigenous people, particularly in placing indigenous children in residential schools where many were abused. First performed in the Cathedral of St John the Evangelist in Milwaukee, it can only be staged in ecclesiatical spaces.

While the organ’s long deep notes are an undertow, less heard than felt in the bones, the musicians – from Scottish Ensemble – are dispersed around the space. From these points of isolation and displacement a sound arises which swells and resonates around the whole building. Structured like a formal mass, it has no voices, reflecting the “voiceless mass” of people whose stories have never been told.

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Yet, “voices” is the word I come back to when I’m trying to describe it. The resonant voice of the double bass holds a single note like a drone and is joined by the voices of other instruments. The drum pulses four beats, which is taken up by the bass, then others. Long round notes contrast with broken phrases. A violin howls like the wind, moans, screeches. This is a music of pain.

St Giles is beautiful at night, all warm light and bright stained glass windows. It is transcendent architecture but, this music reminds us, also an architecture of power. These musical voices break apart the unity of this space. A lament, a requiem, a cry of rage, this is one voice made of many. It uses no words, but it leaves us in no doubt what it wants to say.

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