Classical- and contemporary-music lovers are not starved for choice this fall, but there’s little doubt that Vancouver New Music has staged a remarkable programming coup: its annual festival, this year titled Quartetti, has engaged the services of seven different string quartets, all of them strong proponents of the new and the unusual. Montreal’s Quatuor Bozzini, for instance, will offer composer Cassandra Miller’s About Bach. New York City’s JACK Quartet will present John Zorn’s The Alchemist. Italy’s Quartetto Maurice will present works for string quartet and electronics. But the newest of all this new music will be played by Vancouver’s own Black Dog String Quartet; it’ll be handed to them just two weeks before showtime.

And it’ll be written by teenagers.

The new works, which Black Dog will premiere over Quartetti’s three-night run, will be the product of the Indigenous Youth String Quartet Project, led by Navajo composer Raven Chacon, whose pieces Double Weaving and The Journey of the Horizontal People will also be performed.

“I’ve been doing this project for about 14 years, and what’s usually the case is that I only have a limited amount of time with these students,” Chacon tells the Straight in a Skype interview from his Albuquerque, New Mexico, home. “And a lot of times this is happening through the school year, which puts even more of a limit on how much we can meet, because we don’t want to disrupt their schoolwork. So it’s a very intensive course.…I’ll teach some bits of music theory or western musical history, but even more important will be a discussion about their own tribal music, how familiar they are with that.”

Chacon adds that, in Vancouver, the Black Dog quartet will be on hand to demonstrate the various tones that can be drawn from violin, viola, and cello. Since many of his students won’t have had formal musical training, he’ll also teach the use of graphic notation to indicate sounds that aren’t part of the classical-music canon—which he illustrates by singing, with a wide vibrato, an excerpt from a Navajo chant. And he’ll ask the youths to think about what their music is intended to convey.

“For a lot of young people,” he says, “that might be a narrative or a story from their home, and a lot of times it is specifically a piece about a place. They might say it’s about the city, or it’s about the forest, or out here it’s the desert, which is so quiet. So you think of things. You say, ‘Okay, what happens in this place? Is there a lot of noise? Are there animals? Is there wind?’ All of these elements, natural or unnatural, that the student might encounter—that’s a strategy to get them thinking about what their piece might mean, or the world that it takes place in.”

This intuitive combination of the familiar and the abstract is a strategy Chacon himself sometimes employs, notably in The Journey of the Horizontal People, commissioned by the Kronos Quartet in 2016. It’s rich in dry, rattling, desertlike noises produced by a variety of unconventional bowing techniques, but it’s also a futurist take on the Navajo creation stories Chacon grew up with. And, as can happen in creation stories, it also incorporates an element of disorientation; the score leads the players into a wilderness of sonic options, and then offers them a path back out again—with a woman finding the way.

“Within a lot of these [Navajo] stories, what you see is women emerging as the leaders and guiding the people, the different clans, to where they ended up in contemporary times,” Chacon explains. “And the reason I call this a future creation story is because these things are ongoing. We’re still in migration, as humans. We’re still in an evolving state, and so this is a piece I wanted to write to talk about all of us people in the 21st century.”

Vancouver New Music presents Quartetti at the Orpheum Annex from Thursday to Saturday (October 18 to 20).