Hearing Complexity: Eric Chasalow on Memory, Modernism, and Electronic Sound
The composer discusses Elliott Carter, fixed media, jazz, and the challenge of transforming memory into music
For many listeners, contemporary classical music can feel intimidating because the language surrounding it often seems as complex as the music itself. Composer Eric Chasalow approaches the subject differently. In a recent AMC Classroom conversation, Chasalow described modern composition not as an abstract academic exercise, but as a process of listening, memory, experimentation, and transformation.
Over the course of the interview, Chasalow moved easily between discussions of The Beatles, jazz arranging, Elliott Carter, fixed media, and electroacoustic composition. What emerged was not simply a portrait of a composer, but a window into how contemporary musicians think about sound itself.
Discovering harmony through The Beatles
Like many musicians of his generation, Chasalow traces his earliest musical awakening to The Beatles. What struck him most was not celebrity or cultural phenomenon, but harmony.
“The light bulb went off for me when I heard the Beatles. I was so young and that music just got me to my core. It was so exciting. And I realized later what it was was the harmony more than anything.”
He singled out “If I Fell” as particularly formative, noting the harmonic movement between the introduction and verse. Chasalow emphasized that the Beatles developed these ideas largely through listening rather than formal theory.
“None of them read music. They played, they listened, and they absorbed things like sponges.”
That instinctive process later influenced his own development as a composer. As a teenager, he began writing big band charts despite having little formal training.
“Things would sound horrible, and I’d go back and try to make it sound less horrible.”
He laughed while recalling that his earliest scores consisted of individual parts written separately because he did not yet know what a full score was.
“My high school band director said, ‘Well, you might want to make a score.’”
From biology to composition
Although music increasingly occupied his attention, Chasalow initially resisted the idea of pursuing it professionally. At Bates College, he studied both biology and music while trying to balance artistic ambition with practical concerns.
A turning point came when music historian George Waterman examined Chasalow’s scores and told him directly, “You’re a composer.” That external validation led him to composer Elliot Schwartz, who became his first composition teacher.
Schwartz’s approach dramatically broadened Chasalow’s understanding of what composition could be. One assignment required him to write a free piece, a twelve-tone piece, and a third work described entirely in words rather than notation.
“I had never thought about that level of flexibility before. It’s like music’s something you write notes down.”
The assignment opened the door to experimental traditions associated with figures such as John Cage and Mario Davidovsky.
Elliott Carter and the sound of complexity
Among the composers who most shaped Chasalow’s thinking was Elliott Carter. Chasalow described first hearing Carter’s string quartets as both confusing and exhilarating.
“There was this incredibly dense counterpoint, which I found very confusing, but it sounded like some of the best improvised jazz I had ever heard.”
What fascinated him was Carter’s ability to create simultaneous musical layers moving independently in rhythm and harmony. Chasalow explained that Carter’s music freed instruments from operating inside a single collective pulse.
“You could have a piece where instruments are not locked together in a groove. There’s a great deal of freedom.”
Chasalow also emphasized that listeners can learn to hear complex modernist harmonies in much the same way musicians learn to recognize major or minor chords.
“When you can name a chord, you can start to hear it.”
For Chasalow, Carter’s music combined intellectual rigor with unmistakable personality.
“Even when it gets incredibly complex and incredibly dense, there’s a kind of energy to it.”
“I am working from memory”
When asked how these influences enter his own music, Chasalow rejected the idea of composition as a purely abstract system. Instead, he described music as a process of filtering accumulated memories.
“I am working from memory.”
Those memories include Carter, Ludwig van Beethoven, Claude Debussy, John Coltrane, The Beatles, jazz, and traditional Irish music.
“I think of making a new piece as a way of refracting and processing those memories.”
Rather than worrying about influence, Chasalow embraces it. He describes his approach as “metaclassicism,” a musical language built from multiple historical layers interacting simultaneously.
Fixed media and transforming sound
Much of Chasalow’s career has centered on electroacoustic composition and the interaction between live performers and fixed media. He described beginning one work with a direct quotation from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” then gradually transforming the material into something entirely different.
For Chasalow, composition involves continual revision and dialogue between instrumental writing and electronic sound.
“So much of composing is about editing, having an idea, just writing it down, not being afraid to write down something that might not be a good idea.”
He often manipulates recognizable sounds until they become almost unrecognizable. In his work Crossing Boundaries, source material included answering machine recordings, oral histories, improvisations, and family voices.
“That whole continuum going from something you recognize... to something else that’s fantastic and we couldn’t imagine.”
The remark serves as an apt summary not only of Chasalow’s music, but of the broader modernist tradition he inhabits: familiar materials transformed into new forms of listening.
Highlights from the Interview
Eric Chasalow explains how The Beatles first awakened his interest in harmony
A discussion of Elliott Carter’s complex rhythmic and harmonic language
How jazz improvisation influenced Chasalow’s understanding of counterpoint
Why composition often begins through experimentation and failure
Chasalow’s concept of “metaclassicism” and musical memory
An inside look at fixed media and electroacoustic composition
How recognizable sounds can be transformed into entirely new sonic worlds
Watch the full AMC Classroom interview on YouTube.
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