Three Tastes of Home (2025) (program notes)
For most of my thirty-five years teaching composition, I counseled students not to write their own texts. After all, librettists and poets are professionals like composers, and in my own experience it is better to be inspired by a wonderful piece of writing and then bring your entire creative energy to bear in setting that text so that the sum is greater than the parts. Think of the process as a collaboration with a writer whose work excites you. Many students ignored this advice, but my point was not to create a prohibition, rather to make them take their choice of text as seriously as creating the song(s). I, on the other hand, took my own advice and, after some failed teenage attempts at writing lyrics, stopped trying. Instead, I set inspiring poems by Robert Creeley, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens, Charles Simic, my friend Rachel Hadas, and my wife Barbara Cassidy, among others.
My thinking on the whole matter of writing my own texts has evolved over the past decade, primarily through the side project working with Barbara as The Barbara Cassidy Band. But frankly too, securing permissions from publishers has become a nightmare and I now avoid it whenever possible. My 2020 release, Ghosts of Our Former Selves is based entirely on ten of my own texts. In 2024 I composed Fever Dream for Talea Ensemble with Sharon Harms and Adrian Morejon as soloists, also on my own text.
As I began to work on this new piece for Tony Arnold and Collage in the summer of 2025, I planned again to write my own texts but was totally stuck for a topic. Eric Nathan had given me two themes as jumping off points: the season would be about concepts of “home” and my particular concert would also be about “time”. One morning, after bemoaning my paralysis to Barbara, we found ourselves reminiscing about some travel and memorable meals we had shared. Barb stopped me mid-sentence and said, “I don’t know how you remember every meal in such detail, but you do, and do you realize that all your memories and experiences relate somehow to food? That is what you need to write about.” As usual, Barbara was right.
Three Tastes of Home consists of three songs that reimagine food-related scenes from my past. In addition to images of actual locations, the powerful sense memories of smell and taste drive these narratives. At The August Moon, takes place in the Chinese restaurant that my father’s parents took us out to (a family of eight) as a treat. Tantalus Walks Up Broadway is based partially on a walk I took on summer nights with friends more than once in the 80’s. Unlike Tantalus, we were able to eat and drink our way uptown. At Townsend Gut recounts my experience in the summer of 1976, living and working in Maine as a poor student, fishing and foraging to supplement my diet.
I am very grateful to my friends Tony Arnold, Eric Nathan, and Frank Epstein, and to everyone whose contribution to the commissioning funds made this piece possible.
Eric Chasalow
