For the first time in four years, Prof. Eric Chasalow (MUS) held a music colloquium to discuss the highlights of his musical compositions Thursday. He did so in preparation for a Saturday concert by Auros New Music, in celebration of his 50th birthday and his impressive career."Orchestra is such a rich thing ... you can do anything with it ... but it's a big, slow elephant," Chasalow said early in his talk.

There was nothing big or slow, however, about the first work he showcased, a piece for orchestra and electronic recording dubbed "Dreamsongs." Based on the text of the 385 poems with the same title by poet John Berryman, Chasalow created the piece by recording singers, actors and even his father-in-law reciting lines from the poetry. He then composed classically-styled music to complement the words and sounds taken from the angular and bizarre texts.

It emerged as a combination of baby talk, jazz scat and even controversial minstrel dialogue, backed up by orchestra transitions. In concert, it would be performed by a live group of musicians, played against electronic broadcast of the recordings. When describing this novel combination of noise, Chasalow remarked, "This chimera would become the orchestra."

Chasalow also innovated the use of recorded interviews with composers in tandem with their music. In his "Volpe Variations," Chasalow mixed and chopped parts from Volpe's music for any instrument and combined it with quotes from ancient conversations with the composer himself. This unique brew of sound was hypnotizing, and left the colloquium in silence as it played out. The piece concluded with an appropriate quote from Volpe: "You can turn anything into form, even under the most absurd circumstances"

Electronic modification allowed Chasalow to toy with the very essence of how people perceive music. In his "Due (Cinta)mani," for piano and tape, he modulated the music by enacting electronic transformation of the piano timbres, creating what he described as "sonic dialogue." Inspired by themes of Buddhist music, as well as artistic patterns from textiles and the Ottoman Empire, the piece was an incredible, captivating exploration into the subtleties of pitch and intonation.

In his many years of composition and teaching, Chasalow has left a legacy of breaking new ground in music. His original attempts to incorporate computers and technology into the world of classical audible art is reminiscent of the revolution brought about by the RCA synthesizer. Although he repeatedly claimed that most of his inspiration was drawn from the text itself for "Dreamsongs," the interviews for "Volpe's Variations," or traditional music for "Due (Cinta)mani," when asked if his work was at all autobiographical, he said, "We are the accumulated experiences of our lives ... and as an artist, we should reflect that.