The Brooklyn Rail

While lying supine on a triangular foam mat in Raven Chacon’s Aviary, I open the Merlin Bird ID app and press record. Across my phone’s screen a grayscale spectrogram reflects the birdsong reverberating off of the glass ceiling far above, the room’s brass-plated doors and its imported Spanish tiles. As the app recognizes the bird calls in Chacon’s nine-channel sound installation at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, images of those birds appear on my screen, one beneath the other: Black-capped Chickadee, White-breasted Nuthatch, American Robin. Merlin, a product of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, helps amateur birders instantly identify calls using machine-learning and a database of citizen science—a much more immediate means of identification than, say, flipping through a field guide like John James Audubon’s The Birds of America.

The Birds of America, published in four volumes between 1827 and 1838, was the first field guide of its kind. Audubon, whose legacy is of both a field-defining ornithologist and an enslaver and vocal anti-abolitionist, purchased the land that the Academy of Arts and Letters sits on today with the proceeds from the field guide’s sale. Chacon prioritizes site-specificity across his sound-installations, sculptures, and compositions, and in Aviary (2024), he combines regional field recordings from the National Audubon Society’s database with recreated calls of extinct and endangered birds of the New York region. These approximated calls are performed with instruments of Chacon’s own making, constructed from materials found near his home in the Hudson Valley, with additional components from the vicinity of Arts and Letters (a bright orange plastic cigarillo mouthpiece left on Broadway, four feathers culled from Trinity Cemetery).

In an alcove in the hallway outside of Aviary, a graphic score provides a transcription of the work. Two large V-shapes intersect, with the outside triangles containing symbols that match the calls of the birds that still exist, while the inside triangle where the two shapes meet is populated by symbols of the extinct birds. The instruments used to recreate their sounds are displayed on two shelves below. Inside of the gallery, there are moments when it’s hard to tell which you’re hearing. A slippage between the “real” call of a living bird and the mimicked call of the nonliving bird occurs as the recordings braid together. In Richard Cullen Rath’s 2003 book How Early America Sounded, he begins by asking: What do you hear as you’re reading this now? Likely not an abundance of birdsong, but probably the hum of traffic, a radiator, sirens. In Chacon’s 2023 manifesto “Being in a position,” he writes that “the musical parameter that is most important to me is counterpoint.” He clarifies that he doesn’t mean counterpoint in the classical or Baroque conception, but in an expansive and corporeal sense, as the zigzagging “contrary motion of navigating a world that assumes where you are coming from.” In Aviary, Chacon offers a sonic recalibration to the effects of colonization, a super-corrective counterpoint to our contemporary soundscape. 

Across Audubon Terrace, in the lower level of the Arts and Letters gallery space, hangs an early score of Chacon’s. The piece, Bilagáana ádin [Dead White Men] (2003), incorporates written instruction and elements of graphic notation into the five-line staff of Western notation. Chacon developed this score while he was a student of trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith at CalArts in the early 2000s. The influence of Smith—who is known for his geometric, polychromatic art-scores—is evident in the piece’s use of original symbols to extend beyond the limitations of traditional notation. Bilagáana ádin [Dead White Men] stands outside the entrance to Kosmic Music, Smith’s first solo exhibition in New York, where more than fifty years of his Ankhrasmation scores are on display. Kosmic Music functions as a mini-retrospective of Smith’s visual works: alongside his art-scores are schematic drawings and studies, original sketchbooks and facsimiles of them to page through, and QR codes and wall-mounted headphones linked to performance recordings of the scores on display.

Ankhrasmation is Smith’s language of musical notation, and it wasn’t invented, but discovered; it appeared to him fully formed. The name “Ankhrasmation,” as described in the exhibition's wall text, “derives from Ankh, an ancient Egyptian symbol of life; Ras, an Ethiopian word for leader or father; and Ma, for mother.” Ankhrasmation uses line and shape and color to denote rhythm, intensity, and tone. In Jupiter in Black Space (2020), Smith combines the atmospheric striations of Jupiter with Ankhramasation symbols clustered in the corners of the work, which resemble Egyptian hieroglyphics and the wedge-shaped imprints of cuneiform tablets. In Smith’s notation, triangles are used as markers of velocity, signifying a change not in pitch or dynamic, but in intensity.  Smith overtly states that these works are not graphic scores in the tradition of the 1950s and ’60s avant-garde, but language scores that follow their own system. Any initial illegibility of the scores is due to their distance from Western notation, but to those who have researched the symbols, colors, and pathways of Ankhrasmation, it’s clear where to start, how to proceed, and where to stop. Looking at Smith’s scores feels like encountering an ancient codex written in a dead language; there is a latent coherence, even without understanding its internal logic. 

Color is essential to the language of Ankhramasation, and Smith speaks frequently in interviews about his experiences of synesthesia. In Kosmic Music, a dozen of Smith’s rhythm studies are on display, simple compositions of geometric blocks of color in a saturated palette of cobalt blues and cadmium reds. In Geeta Dayal’s essay that accompanies the exhibition, she describes Smith as a cataloguer of color and quotes him explaining how he has “collected all kinds of colors … from ancient Egypt, which are different from colors anywhere else on the planet,” to modern, “industrial colors, such as buildings and highways and traffic markings.” Each of Smith’s colors hold specific symbolism, and each can be “read” and translated into a sound or a gesture or a dance. 

At Arts and Letters, Smith and Chacon both present an expanded understanding of what a score can be and do. Smith emphasizes that the essence of a score lies in its potential for regeneration, and the title of his exhibition, Kosmic Music, mirrors his infinitely expansive project. “I’m trying to show something,” Smith stated in a 2016 interview with the writer John Corbett, “that a score is a living entity and that it changes just like the cosmos does.”