Introducing Muriel’s Songs

My grandmother, Muriel Gellert Chasalow (9/13/1903 - 02/28/2000) was born in Brooklyn and lived the rest of her life there and in New Jersey — primarily Newark and West Orange. In 2016, my Aunt Renee Chasalow Dunn, her daughter, collected the stories that Muriel had written in a senior center creative writing course at the Y when she was in her eighties and assembled them into a book. I had heard or read some of these stories over the years, even recording my grandmother reading one of them and using that recording shortly after her death in my electroacoustic piece, Crossing Boundaries. Others were completely new and surprising to me.

Muriel and Sam Chasalow in 1928

As I searched for a direction for my new song cycle, my wife, Barbara suggested that my grandmother’s story was a shared first-generation American story, and in particular, an American Jewish story. As I re-read the book with a musical monodrama in mind, a series of scenes began to emerge. I extracted a number of dramatic situations from the book, composing a poem on each, often incorporating Muriel’s sentences to give a sense of her voice. These I ordered chronologically, starting with her memories at ten years old in 1913 and finishing with the death of my grandfather, Sam, her husband of fifty-six years, in 1985. In addition, I composed a few poems on especially colorful family stories that I had heard repeatedly over the years, and one more on my own memory of a moment I spent with my grandmother in the 60’s.

The music that is coming together as I write this piece draws on a broad range of styles and is in direct conversation with iconic pieces of historical importance. I find that this has often been the case with my music and have meditated on the deep history of Neoclassicism at Brandeis. Harold Shapero liked to tell me that I was a neoclassical composer (partly to goad me I think), which I found amusing, but it never felt true. More recently, I have decided that, while I share the idea of a conversation with the past with the neoclassicists, my music is “Metaclassical”, in that it layers refracted memories of older music rather than processing some of its attributes and affects into a unified style. I think I’ll need to write more about this with examples someday. For now, it feels necessary to write this just to start to prepare to launch this song cycle with its many musical references.

See the next posts for the song texts

Copyright 2023 Eric Chasalow DBA Suspicious Motives Music (ASCAP)