Join us for a special concert of the New York premiere of Muriel’s Songs (2023) by Eric Chasalow and a performance of Alex Weiser's Coney Island Days (2022), two song cycles that commemorate the composers’ grandmothers and detail how they navigated 20th century American Jewish life in New York City. The program will open with Joan Tower’s Petroushskates (1980).

Muriel’s Songs traverses the tumult of 20th century America from the very personal, intimate, and primarily domestic perspective of Chasalow’s grandmother, Muriel, with each song inhabiting its own musical world with stylistic points of departure from Baroque to Tin Pan Alley, The Beatles, Latin Jazz and Disco to Milton Babbitt. The songs describe Muriel’s experiences coming of age and through adulthood, including piano lessons, marriage, and family vacations.

Coney Island Days sets to music words from an oral history interview with Weiser’s grandmother, Irene, about childhood in the bilingual immigrant world of Coney Island in the 1930s and ‘40s. Irene would buy penny candies, spend days at the movies, explore Coney Island’s rides and beaches, eat at Nathan’s, and spend summers living behind her family’s knish store.

Both song cycles serve as love letters to the composers’ grandmothers and invoke the nostalgia of 20th century New York Jewish life.

This concert will be performed by the Talea Ensemble, followed by a discussion with Chasalow and Weiser.

About the Participants
Drawing from every corner of the soundworld, Eric Chasalow creates genre-defying music. As a mentor and long time arts advocate, he works tirelessly to nurture developing composers and encourage a community with the greatest respect for the arts and artists. Part of the last generation of composers to work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, Eric has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Fromm Foundation at Harvard, and the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Eric’s music has been commissioned and performed by numerous soloists and ensembles in the US and abroad including Talea Ensemble (New York), Ensemble Phoenix (Basel), and California EAR Unit (Los Angeles). Eric is the Irving Fine Professor of Music at Brandeis University where he directs the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio (BEAMS). He is a proud alumnus of Bates College, studied at New England Conservatory of Music, and earned the DMA from Columbia University, studying primarily with Mario Davidovsky.

Alex Weiser is the Director of Public Programs at the YIVO Institute where he curates programs that explore history with an eye to contemporary Jewish culture. As a composer, Weiser’s debut album and all the days were purple, was named a 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist. The album features songs in Yiddish and English sung by Eliza Bagg. A second album, in a dark blue night, features two song cycles which explore Jewish New York history sung by Annie Rosen. Other projects include operas Tevye’s Daughters with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann (American Lyric Theater), andState of the Jews and The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language with librettist Ben Kaplan (American Opera Projects).

Recipient of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, the Talea Ensemble has brought to life at least 80 commissions of major new works since it was founded in 2008, including bold and inventive productions combining music and other genres. In addition to a robust NYC performance season, festival engagements have included the Lincoln Center Festival, Donaueschingen Musiktage, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Warsaw Autumn, Wien Modern, Vancouver New Music, Time of Music Finland, TIME:SPANS, NY Philharmonic Artist Spotlight Series, and many more. Talea’s recordings have been distributed worldwide on the KAIROS, Wergo, Gravina Musica, Tzadik, Innova, and New World Records labels. Talea supports early-career composers through US school residencies, a commissioning program, and a composer recording workshop.