Raven Chacon & David Lang / Williams College ensembles
Voiceless Mass and the little match girl passion
Music
Williams College ensembles perform music of transcendence in St. James Church.
The 12 (Kara-Lis Coverdale’s Music for Organ) and 1 pm concerts at St. James will be performed back to back. One ticket will give you admission to both events.
Raven Chacon’s Voiceless Mass is a large ensemble work to be performed in any gathering space of worship with high ceilings and pipe organ. Though ‘mass’ is referenced in the title, the piece contains no audible singing voices, instead using the openness of the large space to intone the constricted intervals of the wind and string instruments.
In exploiting the architecture of the cathedral, Voiceless Mass considers the futility of giving voice to the voiceless, when providing space is never an option.
David Lang’s the little match girl passion sets Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘The Little Match Girl’ in the format of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, interspersing Andersen’s narrative with Lang’s versions of the crowd and character responses from Bach’s Passion.
“With his winning of the Pulitzer Prize for the little match girl passion (one of the most original and moving scores of recent years), Lang, once a postminimalist enfant terrible, has solidified his standing as an American master.” –The New Yorker
The Dark: PS21’s fearless winter festival of live performance radiating across Columbia County
The Dark is a new annual festival from PS21 : Center for Contemporary Performance that celebrates and elevates the depths of winter. Taking place February 16–22, 2026, the festival will unfold at PS21 and across Columbia County—in theatres, restaurants, libraries, saunas, and outdoor public spaces. Featuring more than 60 international artists and over 80 performances, The Dark offers a packed week of world-class contemporary performance, installation, music, dance, and theatre—all exploring winter as a time of community and solitude, fire and ice, darkness and light. A major new attraction for the region, the festival positions Columbia County as a year-round cultural destination—not just a summer one.
It is a light in the dark—and The Dark is the light.
Secure your Festival Pass to The Dark now which includes tickets to every performance along with a complimentary sauna and ice skating session!
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and The Kennedy Center. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile long land art installation Repellent Fence.
A recording artist over the span of 22 years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from The LA Times, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America.
Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022), the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022), and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.
His solo artworks are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.
https://spiderwebsinthesky.com/
Passionate, prolific, and complicated, composer David Lang embodies the restless spirit of invention. Lang is at the same time deeply versed in the classical tradition and committed to music that resists categorization, constantly creating new forms.
Lang is one of America’s most performed composers. Many of his works resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and clarity of vision that inform their structures. His catalogue is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling and very emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music — even the deceptively simple pieces can be fiendishly difficult to play and require incredible concentration by musicians and audiences alike.
the little match girl passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered by Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices, was recently listed by The Guardian as “one of the top 25 works of classical music written in the 21st Century.” It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 and the recording received a Grammy Award in 2010. Lang’s simple song #3, written as part of his score for Paolo Sorrentino’s acclaimed film YOUTH, received many awards nominations in 2016, including the Academy Award and Golden Globe.
For Voiceless Mass:
I/O New Music is a collective of Williams College student instrumentalists, composers, and singers committed to creating immersive and adventurous musical experiences. The ensemble has appeared at the ‘62 Center for Theatre and Dance, the Clark Art Institute, the Williams College Museum of Art, EMPAC, and as the resident ensemble for the Williams Music Department’s annual I/O Festival of New Music. The members of I/O New Music are especially committed to programs featuring new voices, fresh perspectives, and creative modes of musical expression.
For the little match girl passion:
Ephemera
Soprano: Margot Story
Mezzo-Soprano: Sienna Kelley
Tenor: Cooper Johnson (or Stephen Biegner)
Bass: Nathaniel Rose
Ephemera is a select, invitation-only vocal ensemble composed entirely of Williams College students. A project-based ensemble, Ephemera’s roster and size varies with the needs of each performance. With an emphasis on challenging repertoire and one-per-part performance, Ephemera particularly focuses on presenting stimulating performances of early and contemporary music.
Music Director: Anna Lenti
While this performance does not have reserved seating, we are happy to accommodate any specific accessibility needs.
Please reach out to Adriana at boxoffice@ps21chatham.org, and she will coordinate with our front-of-house team to ensure your experience is comfortable and enjoyable.
