Eric Chasalow is a composer, sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, teacher, and advisor to non-profits. He is well known for works that combine instruments with electronic sound, but has collaborated on a wide range of projects with other artists. In 1996, along with his wife, Barbara A. 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 (now in the Library of Congress).
Chasalow is Irving G. Fine Professor of Music at Brandeis University, and Director of BEAMS, the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio. A product of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, he holds the D.M.A. from Columbia University where his principal teacher was Mario Davidovsky.
At MacDowell in 2004, he composed Concerning Sunspots for large orchestra to be premiered by Boston Modern Orchestra Project in 2005. During his 2007 residency, he finished The Puzzle Master for five singers and computer-manipulated sound, for premiere on the Boston CyberArts Festival. In 2019, he composed and recorded two songs on his own texts for a cycle with the title Ghost Songs. The cycle will be performed by mezzo, Reut Ben-Zeev in NYC and alternate versions, sung by Chasalow, would appear on a CD project. He also worked on his Second String Quartet, for the Lydian String Quartet to be premiered at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.
During his 2025 residency, he worked on a setting of $6.82, a poem by MacDowell Fellow, Mónica de la Torre. The new piece is scored for soprano and fixed media and composed for soprano, Stephanie Lamprea.
