Very often these days, when I start to think about a new piece, I am confronted with a flood of questions: Will this piece be like the last, or will I push myself to discover some new way to express things this time? Do I just start to write and see where things lead, or should I force myself to do some pre-planning (which I hate to do)? Am I writing abstract music, or will the piece be “about” something? It is finding an answer to this last question that preoccupies me the most lately. For example, if I decide to write for a singer, the structure and character of the piece are going to be shaped in dialog with the meaning and expression of the text. But songs with texts are obviously about the subject of the text. There are other, less obvious ways in which a piece of music might be “about something”.

One of my mentors often said, “you are either aware of your influences, or you are controlled by them”. He meant that every composer is influenced by other music, whether willing to admit it or not, and to pretend otherwise is ignorant. I have thought a lot about that statement over the years and, ultimately, have found it helpful and freeing. If I just accept that influences are always there, then I had better get to know as much music as I can. It follows that this gives the unconscious the broadest range of sources to pull from. Furthermore, one can choose when to push the line between unconscious and conscious influence and create pieces that have an intentional “conversation with the past”, drawing on archival sources, deliberate musical references, or even quotations. The job then becomes to compose new contexts and points of view around and on old materials, transforming them and creating something new. This is, in fact a rich way of working that tracks the entire history of music, at least as far back as chant and as recent as “sampling”.

I find it deeply inspiring to consider all kinds of pre-existing materials – words, music, and recordings – depending on the piece I wish to write. My 1998 piece for live electric guitar and fixed media, ‘Scuse Me transforms Jimi Hendrix samples and musical motives into a new musical world with its own energy, totally apart from its famous source. My setting of five of John Berryman’s Dream Songs, for orchestra and fixed media has chunks of Bach woven into the orchestra at key dramatic moments to heighten the text without even really being heard. Other pieces, such as my recent, Muriel’s Songs, incorporate both historical musical models and memoir-based storytelling.

My grandmother, Muriel Gellert Chasalow (1903-2000) was born in Brooklyn and lived the rest of her life there and in New Jersey. In 2016, my Aunt Renee, her daughter, collected some stories that Muriel had written, assembling them into a book. I had heard or read some of these stories over the years, others were completely new and surprising to me. For my libretto, I extracted several dramatic situations from the book, composing a poem on each, often incorporating sentences from her stories wherever possible to capture her voice. The narrative thread starts with her memories at ten years old in 1913 and finishes with the death of my grandfather, Sam, her husband of fifty-six years, in 1985. My text adds a few especially colorful family stories that she had not written about, but that I had heard told by other relatives repeatedly over the years. The result is an intimate, intelligent and humorous personal reflection on living through key events of the Twentieth Century.

Excerpts from Muriel’s Songs – Copyright 2023 Eric Chasalow DBA Suspicious Motives Music (ASCAP)

1913 

My mother’s mother was orthodox
So very religious, she only spoke Yiddish…

But my parents were completely different.
My father was a Tammany Hall Democrat
And above all, worshiped
The Brooklyn Dodgers.

1942

This song grounds the cycle in perhaps the defining experience of the century for my grandparents’ generation…World War II… I have written a direct parody (in the oldest sense of that word) on Purcell’s, When I am Laid in Earth, from Dido and Aeneas.

We suffered the shortages

We learned first aid
We suffered the fear of air raids.
We lowered the shades
We sat and listened
Every moment was a new threat

We suffered the fear
We worried the night through
We suffered the loss of loved ones
We were resolved

Then, somehow,
it was all over
I swept the sand
off of the summer carpet
and out the door,
But we would never
Ever be the same again.

 1959

Following a monumental effort, due to the post-war housing boom, my grandparents moved to West Orange. Grandpa returned to truck sales, founding Greater GMC truck sales, in Newark…bankrolled by the mob.

After the war
We moved to a nice
Part of West Orange
Not the best, but very nice

One day Longie,
who lived
Just two-minutes away,
But in a more exclusive neighborhood
Was found by his wife
In his own basement, hanged.

You had known him
In younger years –
A business acquaintance
Back when he dated Jean Harlow
And bought her that
Diamond bracelet and
A red Cadillac

We did not attend
The funeral
Though almost two-thousand
people did, with an
open casket
and an abundance of flowers
which really was surprising
for a Jewish service
though we heard later
that no one, not even
the rabbi, had been at all surprised…

1985

Toward the end of her book of stories, Muriel takes stock of what matters to her and realizes that the small interactions and daily accomplishments really count.

After being busy
In the role of wife and partner
For fifty-six years,
Suddenly I am alone

I never tell anyone
How pleased I am
When they ask
me to mend a sweater
Or show me a picture
And ask, “don’t you think
This would look well on me?”

Just the other day
I was extremely
Satisfied that
I was able to reset
all of the clocks
myself.

Musically speaking, each song in the cycle is a meditation on a different historical source and style. The challenge here was to embrace each source so completely that the new piece would move well beyond mere imitation to become transformative. With that as my goal and not wanting listeners to start playing “name that tune”, I have often been reluctant to mention specific sources. But the piece is written and I have either succeeded or failed, so here goes: Henry Purcell, Irving Berlin, JS Bach, Milton Babbitt, Disco, Latin Jazz and a less intentional bit of Mahler each make their appearance. As luck would have it, as I write, Talea Ensemble plans to present the New York premiere of Muriel’s Songs on April 23 at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research so you can come and judge for yourself.

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research 15 W16th Street, NYC. (Information and tickets at yivo.com/Musical-Memoir)