For Zitkála Šá Series (For Heidi Senungetuk)

When Diné artist and composer Chacon learned about the Yankton Dakota writer, activist, and musician, Zitkála Šá (1876–1938), he felt compelled to write a piece in homage to her. He began drafting an orchestral composition but ultimately decided to write 13 separate pieces, each in honor of an Indigenous woman artist who carries on the work begun by Zitkála Šá. Chacon includes instrumentation and guidelines for the performance of each score. Oberlin Conservatory students will be studying and performing them throughout the semester.

Retracing the challenges that Zitkála Šá faced in her own compositions, such as The Sun Dance Opera (1913), Chacon explains that the Western classical notation system “cannot relay the information of the complex keys and modes of the sung Native voice, nor the fluidity of time inherent in Indigenous musics. The diatonic staff reduces all tribal music to an Indianist sound, easier digestible to white ears. A graphic score can resist the history of Western notation, and with that can eliminate normalizations and assumptions of time that influence how we see the universe and whoever created us. Each score needed to fit into one letter-sized sheet of page, as this is the physical form that also contained most of Zitkála Šá’s work, be it poetry, music, prose, or letters of legal petition to the federal government. In these scores, one may see a map, guiding us to worldviews that never doubted that women could be leaders… If we see Zitkála Šá as a woman who oscillated between two worlds, the question becomes: What is the sound of this oscillation?”