Photo of Marshall Trammell by Agatha Urbaniak

PLEASE NOTE: Due to the continued cleanup of an oil leak in the Redstone Building's basement, The Lab is still not safe for visitors. Our friends at CounterPulse, 80 Turk St, San Francisco, CA 94102, have agreed to host. Please meet us there for the show!

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Saturday, February 25, 2023
7:30pm doors / 8pm sound
Tickets $15 (discounted or free for members)
Students can email us for a discounted ticket
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Let’s undo the hit.

The music program for the Drum Listens to Heart exhibition at The Wattis Institute concludes with a performance of Raven Chacon’s American Ledger No.1 (2018) and an audio visual performance by Music Research Strategies titled Ebonics Native Land Acknowledgment.

American Ledger No.1 is a score that can be displayed as a flag, a wall, a blanket, a billboard, or a door. It’s meant to be played by many players with sustaining and percussive instruments, coins, axe and wood, a police whistle, and a match. This score is the first part of the American Ledger series and tells, in chronological order, the creation story of the United States of America. From moments of contact and enactment of laws, to the erasure of lands and worldview.

This performance of American Ledger No.1 is conducted by Andy Meyerson.

Music Research Strategies’ Ebonics Native Land Acknowledgment is a live performance and a community gathering. For this performance, Music Research Strategies stages a collective reading of the United Nations’ Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP). This participatory performance exists as a communal offering, where the drum becomes a vernacular tool for acoustic study and social change.

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. He has exhibited and performed all over the world and was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for music. He was the 2020-21 Capp Street Artist-in-Residence at the Wattis Institute.

Music Research Strategies is a project by Marshall Trammell, who is a composer, percussionist, and experimental archivist. His practice is oriented in activist work and social interventions that embrace improvisation as a collective movement-building tool in the creation of post-capitalist imaginaries.

Drum Listens to Heart is curated by Anthony Huberman and organized by Diego Villalobos, with assistance by Katherine Jemima Hamilton and Meghan Smith. 

Raven Chacon: American Ledger No.1 (2018)