Music Review: Eric Chasalow – ‘…arching, reaching, breathless’ – Music for Strings

This album of music for strings by Eric Chasalow opens with a kind of composition that has always appealed to me: live performance with fixed media, i.e. pre-recorded sound. It’s a method that interested me enough, even early on, that I used it for my own final project in my electronic-media composition class in college, back in the 1980s.

I think the reason may be conceptual more than specifically artistic: the friction of a duet between what are in some ways antithetical forms of music. Live performance has freshness and unpredictability. Fixed media has the rigor of immutability.

Wings and Valleys

That doesn’t make “The Wings That Bear the Night Away” for violin and fixed media necessarily my favorite piece on …arching, reaching, breathless but it gives the album a compelling start. The piece has a further twist in that the recorded sound comes from another piece by Chasalow, a song performed by the Lydian String Quartet. The composer “granulated” that recording, manipulating it in various ways to create a jittery track of music obviously generated by string instruments but re-shaped into unnatural forms that a human string player couldn’t physically produce.

Just knowing the choppy track derives from the composer’s own music gives the combination an intimacy it might not otherwise have. At the same time, the man-machine duality of a soloist performing alongside a recording has what in the pre-robotic, pre-AI age we might have called a futuristic quality. Today one could say that it touches on the “uncanny valley” effect.

The live solo violin part is made up of many looping arpeggios and partial scales, with melodic gestures and motifs often of just two notes. Those motifs sometimes repeat in a way that suggests minimalism, but then veer off into other dimensions. The recorded music has a nervous quality and seems to drive along the soloist (a fired-up Mari Kimura, who is also a scholar and technological innovator).

Threes, Fours, and Sixes

“Third Piano Trio: Rock Hill Variations” offers a calming contrast. There are again jittery passages, but Chasalow intersperses them with flowing, pastoral interludes that indulge in relaxed and even traditional Western harmonies. A crackling performance by violinist Clara Lyon, cellist Hannah Collins, and versatile pianist Steven Beck makes the music sing.

Increasing the instrument count by one, Chasalow’s “Second Quartet” was composed for and is performed by the aforementioned Lydian Quartet. The music here derives from a sound-installation version, in which the musicians first play their parts unsynchronized in different locations around the performance space, then coalesce to play them together and create the 15-minute piece we hear on the album.

Perhaps because of this genesis, the music, though rooted in consistent material, has to me a wandering, unfinished feel – long on contemplation, short on momentum. It grips the ear after the midpoint, when the material grows denser and more active. Decisive thematic statements and even a faux-fugue section lead to an ultimately well-earned harmonious coda.

Upping the number of players to six, Chasalow gives us his String Sextet, an earlier piece (from 2009) whose first movement derives from the fourth movement of Brahms’ Sextet Op. 36. The interpolation and reworking of Brahms’ themes are quite clever and I really enjoyed listening to one and then the other.

Melancholy pervades the slow second movement’s dissonances and discomfiting tensions, which hover unresolved for a full five minutes until a peaceful hum finally settles things. Eastern European or Arabic influences mark the melodic fragments and modal suggestions. The hyperactive third movement feels like standard-issue contemporary avant-garde, a little of everything thrown into the pot, arch and tricky but with a somewhat hollow core.

Elsewhere on the album, cellist David Russell plays and recites settings of two Wallace Stevens poems. His un-studied vocalizing creates warmth and intimacy. In one, he placidly intones the lyrics, mostly speaking, here and there singing, accompanied by sighing music from the cello and manipulated vocal recordings. In the second, he sings most of the text, with a few subtle electronic effects supporting the non-resolving melody and a cello part consisting entirely of slow and very sparse pizzicato arpeggios that parallel the bleak lyrics. (“misery in the sound of the wind, / In the sound of a few leaves, / Which is the sound of the land / Full of the same wind / That is blowing in the same bare place…”

The album closes by looking back to the 1990s, when Chasalow wrote “To the Edge and Back” for flute (his own onetime instrument of study) and piano. Here transposed, without edits, for violin and piano, this compact exercise in virtuosity shines in the able hands of violinist Julia Glenn and pianist Beck, while serving as a reminder of the length and breadth of this composer’s distinguished career.

…arching, reaching, breathless from Eric Chasalow is out now on New Focus Recordings and available at Bandcamp.