Tracing Time Through “...arching, reaching, breathless”
Time is the quiet architecture beneath …arching, reaching, breathless, the new release from composer and seven-time MacDowell Fellow Eric Chasalow. It is not simply that the album spans thirty years of creation, from 1997 to 2022, but that it reveals how a life in music builds, ebbs, flows, and transforms. Each piece on the new record carries the imprint of when and where it was written, and all together they form a continuous whole, like a long measured breath across decades.
(Aleks Karjaka photo)
When Chasalow listens to this new series of works, he describes it as an experience less like revisiting a fixed past and more like moving through a series of lived environments. A quartet composed at MacDowell in 2019 sits alongside a later work at Bogliasco Center in 2022. In response to being asked what journey he hears unfolding in …arching, reaching, breathless, he shares “...the record creates a dramatic shape starting very focused, still, vibrating and climaxing with intensity with the three movement String Sextet.”
We see this rise and fall, ebb and flow, also mirrored in Chasalow’s evolving creative process. Earlier in his career, time was something to push against. Composition meant long, uninterrupted stretches—entire days spent in the studio, driven by an urgency to complete and move forward. “My time at MacDowell, until my last two residencies, tended to be spent holed up in the studio writing every minute other than breakfast and dinner…I might work a couple of hours in the morning and call it a day, spending the rest of time taking long walks to think or reading and cooking,” Chasalow shares. Time has now softened.
Eric Chasalow during his MacDowell residency in 1998. (Joanna Eldredge Morrissey photo)
Literature has been one of the constants across this span. The poetry of Wallace Stevens, with its precise musicality and philosophical depth, has long hovered at the edge of Chasalow’s work. “For years they seemed so perfectly calibrated that the idea of setting them seemed impossible. When I finally did decide to create musical treatments, a short song and the two cello pieces on this record, I knew that I had to keep things simple and make every detail count to respect the texts and use music to heighten rather than diminish them.”
When he finally began setting* Stevens’ texts, he approached them with restraint—paring the music down so that every gesture mattered. Similarly, the compressed emotional intensity of John Berryman’s Dream Songs offered a model for holding contrast within tight spaces. These influences persist across decades, not as static references, but as evolving conversations.
If time shapes the music, it is also embodied in collaboration. The Lydian Quartet has been a constant presence, performing all four of Chasalow’s string quartets and developing a deep, intuitive understanding of his voice. Their long partnership lends the album a sense of continuity—of ideas carried forward and reinterpreted over years of shared work.
In the end, …arching, reaching, breathless is not just a retrospective. It is an experience of duration and of how music can hold time, stretch it, and give it form. In a culture of fragments and interruptions, Eric Chasalow hopes listeners will find a piece that resonates with them and stay to listen through the rest. And if they listen closely enough, they may hear not just the passage of time, but the way it breathes.
*“To set (a text)” is to compose music to accompany, interpret, or enhance a literary text (The Oxford Dictionary of Music).