Listen to Raven Chacon discuss the creative impulse behind 'Tiguex'

A small crowd gathered Saturday morning at Sandia Peak to experience the first movement of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon’s new citywide musical composition, “Tiguex.”

After making their way up the twisting mountain road in the drizzly, predawn hours, the musical pilgrims were greeted by a rainbow stretching across the entire valley. Then, as dawn broke, a solo trumpeter, Duane Hoskie, played “Prayer,” a simple, repeated musical phrase to herald the new day.

Hoskie said he was “a bit nervous,” because he hadn’t expected so many people to be there so early on a rainy day.

“But it’s something else, getting to play up here while the sun’s coming up,” he said. “That whole rainbow in the background was pretty cool, too.”

Moments later, a hot air balloon lifted off from the Bosque School campus in the North Valley. A trombonist in the balloon played “The Teaching of the Wind” — the second movement of Chacon’s 20-movement score — as the balloon floated away.

Other poetic visual moments during the multi-site, dawn-to-dusk performance included a cello floating down the Rio Grande, Indigenous heavy metal drummers performing “blast beats” among the historic bombers and missiles at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History and singers from four nearby Pueblos singing traditional songs from the rooftop of City Hall.

“These are things we have probably never seen in Albuquerque,” Chacon said.

As the day went on, crowds at the various sites grew larger. And some performances attracted the curiosity of onlookers who had been unaware of the larger project. When a mariachi group on the back of a flatbed trailer drove through the Los Altos neighborhood, some curious residents came outside and watched from their yards.

The word “Tiguex,” a synonym for the Albuquerque metropolitan area, comes from the Tiwa language. Chacon, a longtime Albuquerque resident, wanted to create a portrait of the city based on his own associations. He worked with the Tamarind Institute, which printed a map of the performance’s 20 sites as a fine art lithograph.

“Really, I think I’ve been working on this since I was 17 years old,” he said. “I’ve been doing performances all over the city — in the West Mesa, under bridges and in abandoned buildings — since then. So, to me, this is a kind of culmination of not only bringing together some of those sites, but also the people I’ve been collaborating with in the city for 30 years.”

Some of the sites Chacon chose for “Tiguex” are well-loved and nostalgic, like the Cafe 66 New Mexican Restaurant, which was the starting point for Chacon’s lowrider procession. Others, like the Nuclear Museum and 4-H Park — which was built on a historic mass grave — are linked to darker histories.

“If a music composition can help bring awareness to the events of those sites, or what those sites represent, to me that’s an achievement. And that’s one of the things that music can do, even without words, just by being gathering sites for people,” Chacon said.

Chacon said one of his goals in creating “Tiguex” was to highlight Albuquerque’s intersecting cultures.

“Music can be an opportunity to talk about history and place and politics,” Chacon said. “But at the same time, music is connected to community, so this score tries to represent the overlap of communities we have in this city.”

At certain points during the day, these communities literally overlapped, as when the lowrider procession and the mariachi group both arrived at the Nuclear Museum during the heavy metal drummers’ grand finale. The lowriders blared sirens as they circled the parking lot, and some of the audience who had just watched the drummers joined the mariachi band beneath a decommissioned PGM-11 Redstone nuclear missile.

Chacon said he wanted to create opportunities “for audiences to engage with music they might not normally engage with.”

Before the final movement at Pat Hurley Park, “Tiguex” echoed its beginnings with a trumpeter on Sandia Peak playing a “Reverse Prayer” at sunset. Audiences who had caught parts of the multilayered, intersecting performances at ground level throughout the day could reflect on the music, and the city that inspired it, now from a bird’s-eye perspective.

Journal staff writer Gillian Barkhurst contributed to this report.

Acclaimed composer Raven Chacon's 'Tiguex' unites communities across the city