Eric Chasalow

(1955, USA) is a composer, sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, teacher, and advisor to non-profits. He is especially well known for works that combine instruments with electronic sound, but has collaborated with other musicians and artists to create a wide range of projects. ARRAY, the journal of the International Computer Music Association, has written that his music...“clearly establishes him as one of the leaders of our times...offer(ing) a wondrous fusion between distinct styles and mediums, ...” Two CD compilations were released in 2015 and a library edition of the complete scores and tapes for instrument and tape was released that same year in celebration of his 60th birthday. An album of ten new genre-bending songs, Ghosts of Our Former Selves was released in the fall of 2020. He is currently at work on a violin concerto for Miranda Cuckson and a new song cycle about climate change.

Eric’s music is programmed throughout the world, with recent performances in Berlin, Boston, La Paz, Los Angeles, Milan, New York, Rome, and San Francisco. He has written for Guido Arbonelli, Tony Arnold, Lucia Bova, Tim Brady, Bruno Schneider, Vicki Ray, Talea Ensemble, Musicatreize, New York New Music Ensemble, The EAR Unit, DaCapo Chamber Players, Network for New Music, Portland Chamber Music Festival, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and many others.

Eric has a long association with The Composers Conference, the seventy-seven-year-old organization that aids composers in early stages of their careers, serving from 2012 to 2016 as president of the board of directors. He worked to conceive and establish the Contemporary Performance Institute to add a cohort of conservatory students to the Conference, building this community of established professional performers, student composers, and serious amateur chamber musicians. In 1996, along with his wife, Barbara Cassidy, he established The Video Archive of Electroacoustic Music, an oral history project chronicling the pioneer electronic music composers and engineers from 1950 to the present. Interviewees include Bebe Baron, Milton Babbitt, Mario Davidovsky, Pauline Oliveros, Max Matthews, Morton Subotnick and many others.

 Eric Chasalow is the Irving G. Fine Professor of Music, and Director of BEAMS, the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio at Brandeis University where he has taught since 1990. A product of the famed Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, he holds the D.M.A. from Columbia University where his principal teacher was Mario Davidovsky and where he studied flute with Harvey Sollberger. He also studied with Elliott Schwartz, William Thomas McKinley, George Edwards, and Jack Beeson. Among his honors are awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Koussevitzky Music Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Fromm Foundation at Harvard University (two commissions), New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (awards in 1986 and 2003). His music is available from Suspicious Motives Music, G. Schirmer, McGinnis & Marx (New York) and Edition Bim (Switzerland) and on CDs from New World Records, ICMC, Intersound Net Records, SEAMUS, Suspicious Motives Records, and RRRecords.

The Eric Chasalow collection in the Library of Congress was established in 2009. Additional information may be found at www.ericchasalow.com