Bruno Schneider, horn with Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose, Music Director

I. Lively, Always Pushing Forward
II. Meditative, A Long Expanding Breath
III. Distant
IV. Moving By Angle And Accent

09 Horn Concerto  I. Lively, Always Pushing Forward

First Quartet  Movement 2

for violin and chamber orchestra - in three movements

1. Infamous Rhythms
2. Ancient Signs
3. The Green Linnet

to Miranda Cuckson

Miranda Cuckson, violin and Yoko Hagino, piano

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION - This is a demonstration recording made without rehearsal and only lightly edited

CHASALOW: Violin Concerto (Ancient Signs & Infamous Rhythms) - piano reduction

(PLEASE LISTEN WITH HEADPHONES) 

Inspired by my residency at Bogliasco Foundation in April/May 2022 and my stay in the Chalet della Musica.

Thanks to the Lydian String quartet for their beautiful recording of an earlier piece of mine that found its way into this.

Vista Dal Giardino Di Bogliasco (Chasalow 2022)

copyright 2022 Suspicious Motives Music (ASCAP)

What Shade of Green is Our Horizon? 

(a sound piece to accompany Lisa D. Watson’s Avant Gardener)

created with the support of a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship.

Lisa and I met while we were both artists-in-residence at The Studios of Key West in February 2022. My work has been increasingly engaged with our climate crisis and I quickly appreciated the way in which Lisa’s work seeks a positive approach to this monumental problem. So when she asked if I would create a sound piece for her upcoming show, I was very pleased.

Formative parts of my life, including my early childhood, were spent on the coast, experiencing and learning about the marine environment. My father’s work in submarine defense took my family to Key West and Bermuda, making my recent residency a moving return.  In college, I spent time doing benthic field research and I came very close to becoming a marine biologist. Over the course of my professional life in music, I have found it hard to see how pursuits in music and biology might connect – until recently. I now realize that the library of field recordings I have accumulated over many years of work in electroacoustic music have been waiting for me to see how they might become sound pieces. And having bookended the past seven years with transformative residencies on the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Mexico has inspired a new kind of work.  These pieces can be conceived of in narrative form, for the concert hall, but alternative forms – sound art - are now emerging from my process and these more properly occupy gallery spaces. 

In contrast to a piece of music, played in a concert hall to a seated audience, sound art acknowledges that the listener comes and goes at will. This shifts how artists can think about the possibility of narrative form – of “beginning, middle, end” through the journey of listening. What Shade of Green is Our Horizon? consists of a forty-two minute long piece that is continuously played as a loop in the gallery space. My intention is to color and heighten the experience of Lisa’s installation. However, if one did wish to sit, meditatively, from the beginning to the end of my piece, they would find that there is a large-scale narrative too and that alternative experience is also valid. 

What Shade of Green is Our Horizon? is a kind of aural land and seascape. The background throughout is a prayerful stretched chorale in G major for string quartet that progresses ever so slowly. Interacting with the harmony of this background one hears some recognizable environmental sounds, but also sounds at the threshold of recognition, abstract, yet somehow organic and capable of igniting a personal response.

What Shade of Green is Our Horizon? was created with the support of a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship.

What Shade Of Green Is Our Horizon? - sound piece for museum space

DREAM SONGS for orchestra and tape

5 poems by John Berryman

Dream Songs for orchestra and tape

Performed by Mari Kimura - April 1, 2023 mix

The Wings That Bear The Night Away (2022) Violin And Fixed Media

Ben Fingland, clarinet - University of Georgia performance, April 2023
Composed with the support of the Bogliasco Foundation

Extinction 

If randomly 
allowing for a breath
Perhaps a bit of tension
But then, back to business
We don’t sing,
We slog.

Our narrative should
rely on riveting 
rivulets of sound
shriek and moan words. 
Rhyme or not, 
who cares?

Eye contact
filling our space with energy,
demanding to be listened to,
demand to be heard!
Not passive!
Speak. 

Speak?!
But about what?
And why?
This onslaught will persist.
We will cease to notice
violent swings that
now seem shocking.

And, with each
Diminishing
our twilight.
Then, completely dark
By the thousands,
the millions
until nothing sings
or even
Breathes.

Barbara Cassidy and Eric Chasalow

Copyright 2022 Suspicious Motives Music

EXTINCTION For Clarinet And Fixed Media (2022)

To The Edge And Back - for flute and piano (violin version)

This is a performance of a piece I wrote in 1979 while studying flute with Harvey Sollberger.  The performance is one I gave in 1980.  I had not thought about it given that I was just finishing my masters at Columbia when I wrote it. Listening now in 2024, after so many years, I am proud of the piece and plan to make it available to flutists soon.

Antichambers - flute solo

For Soprano and String Quartet. 

Poems of Charles Simic from The World Doesn't End (winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize). Used by Permission.

Premiere performance - November 14, 1998 - Brandeis University
Nancy Armstrong, soprano
The Lydian String Quartet

The hundred-year-old...

Everything's forseeable...

We were so poor...

My mother was...

Performance by Andrea Chenoweth Wells, soprano and the Ulysses Quartet on October 18, 2024. Marsh Chapel at Boston University. The Shakespeare Concerts, Joseph Summer, director.

Recorded by Antonio Oliart.

Poems from The World Doesn't End, by Charles Simic, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Used by permission.

Five Simic Songs (1998) -  October 18th,  2024 performance

Muriel’s Songs – text adapted by Eric Chasalow from Years of Understanding, by Muriel Chasalow.

Text may be found at this link: www.ericchasalow.com/blog/muriels-songs-1

For the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress
and dedicated to the memory of Andrew Imbrie

March 16, 2024 Premiere, for the Women’s Studies Research Center’s annual DiLuzio Concert

Sound Icon, Jeffrey Means, music director

Jeff Means, conductor;
Sharon Harms, soprano;
Ashley Addington, flute;
Amy Advocat, clarinet;
Sean Mix, alto saxophone;
Natalie Zemba, bassoon
Mike Williams, percussion;
Elaine Rombola, piano;
Pierre Bibault, guitar
Lilit Hartunian, violin;
Mark Berger, viola;
Steve Marotto, cello;
Eddie Kaas, bass

Muriel's Song's for mezzo-soprano and eleven instruments (better mix)

Philipp Stauedlin, alto saxophone

CD release May 19, 2015

copyright 2015 Suspicious Motives Records (ASCAP) all rights reserved

Are You Radioactive, Pal? (alto saxophone and tape)

October 1, 2023 premiere on a concert honoring Davy Rakowski on his 65th birthday.  Heather Braun, violin with Collage New Music Ensemble.  Brandeis University

Quasi Troppo Veloce (2023) violin solo

April 04, 2025 Performance at Brandeis University by Talea Ensemble

James Baker, conductor
Sharon Harms, soprano
Adrian Morejon, bassoon
Miho Saegusa,   violin
Noriko Futagami, viola
Chris Gross,  cello
David Friend, piano

NOTES 

Fever Dream (2024) – Eric Chasalow

Lately, I have been writing most of my own texts and using them as the starting point for each piece. In writing Fever Dream, I wanted to create the sense of an internal dialog, with words pouring out into breathless, winding lines; one thought leading organically to the next with increasing urgency. The poem starts with the description of a repeatedly dreamed vision and moves out into a stream of interpretations and self-inspections, becoming more and more desperate to understand experience and feelings. Any ability to resolve things, ultimately, is complicated by our post-pandemic context.  

Fever Dream was commissioned by Talea Ensemble for soloists Sharon Harms and Adrian Morejon.

Fever Dream (2024) Chasalow - Talea Ensemble w Sharon Harms

SOPM - What Is Essential

SOPM - What Remains

Commissioned by Bates College in 2000 for the new millennium.

Crossing Boundaries

The November 2, 2025 premiere performance by Collage New Music with Tony Arnold, artistic partner. Jeffrey Means conducting. Commissioned by Collage. 

Three Tastes of Home

(Chasalow) Three Tastes of Home - Tony Arnold and Collage New Music - premiere 2025

As A Kind Of Knowing III

US Premiere by MusicaTreize, November 12, 2016. Brandeis University.

Commissioned by MusicaTreize (Marseille)

Copyright 2016 Suspicious Motives Music (ASCAP)

Elegy and Observation is an environmental requiem. Drawing on ancient and modern texts, the piece leaps and lurches among perspectives from intimate to global, tender to catastrophic. So too, our perceived relationship to the natural world is constantly shifting, from the poet’s tension between fear and delight, to scientific observation, biblical prediction of catastrophe, the unassailable truth of species extinction, and the poetry of those who have experienced natural disaster.

Songs 1, 4 and 8 are settings of poems by Meng Hai-jan, Sono-Jo, and Basho. 
In between, I have intertwined highly contrasting sources. Songs 2 and 6 started with bits of reportage from the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, which are assembled into poems. Song 7 sets a list of extinct birds.  The remainder of the texts combine scientific abstracts related to climate, a nineteen-century translation of an ancient Celtic text, The fifteen tokens of Doomsday, the book of Genesis, and an anonymous oral history from a survivor of hurricane Katrina.

Elegy And Observation  - 12 voices and tape

August 2009 premiere by the Portland Chamber Music Festival.  

Anna Lim, vln; Jennifer Elowitch, vln; 
Dov Scheindlin, vla; Marka Gustavson, vla; 
Mark Johnson, vc; Claire Bryant, vc.

String Sextet, mvtI

String Sextet, mvt II

String Sextet, mvt III

composer, Eric Chasalow;  Guido Arbonelli, bass clarinet.

In a Manner of Speaking, for bass clarinet and fixed media (2000)

Eric Chasalow
Marco Pavin, electric guitar

commissioned by Tim Brady

Scuse Me (1997)

composed by Eric Chasalow
commissioned and premiered by Vicki Ray, piano

2 movements - Three Symbolic Gestures
                         Cloudbands

copyright 2002 Suspicious Motives Music (all rights reserved)

Due (Cinta)mani (for piano and tape)

for fl,cl,vln,vc,perc,pn, and fixed media

in four movements

Eric Chasalow, Composer
New York New Music Ensemble. at Merkin Hall, NYC March 2012.

A Chamber Music America commission


commissioned by Chamber Music America

On That Swirl of Ending Dust

Ghosts of Key West

Call the roller of big cigars
Call the fisherman too.
Bid them come stumbling out of the bars
There’s so much more that we have to do.

Call the family, brothers, sisters,
Mother, Father, bored as hell.
Head on down that endless causeway
toward the Southernmost Hotel.

Concrete sweats and chlorine bleaches
Children splashing, unaware.
Cocktail hour blurs the sunset
Laser-focused, floating hair.

Call the fire-ants, skinks, and ‘possum
Feed them figs and green papaya.
Brittle, reaching, rotting branches
claws and jaws attack each blossom.

Conch shell splinters and sand-grit fritters,
dying shark and baitfish stew.
Turtles struggle for their freedom
in black and whites of me and you.

Call the Soviet submariners
heading straight for Havana harbor.
Those radioactive magazines are
plying naïve, delusional waters.

Drift through Miami neon night
Find the apartment, make the bed.
All that’s neon soon grows dark;
it has no meaning once we are dead.

Ghosts Of Key West

WWW.ERICCHASALOW.COM

Please try to listen to music with reasonable speakers or headphones. Be aware that this music has lots of subtleties and your experience of it is highly compromised when reproduced through phone speakers, computer speakers or cheap earbuds


Eric Chasalow is a composer known for both electro-acoustic music and music for traditional instruments.  Among the last generation to work at the original Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, since 1990 he has directed BEAMS, the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio. Eric’s music is programmed throughout the world and he holds awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  The Library of Congress established an Eric Chasalow Collection in 2009, and his music may be found on a number of record labels, including New World Records, and his own, Suspicious Motives Records.  A library edition of his complete works for solo instrument and electronics was released in 2015 for his 60th birthday (available through Tfront.com).

Eric is the Irving G. Fine Professor of Music and the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis University.

Eric Chasalow

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