What Shade Of Green Is Our Horizon? - sound piece for museum space by Eric Chasalow

copyright 2022 Suspicious Motives Music (ASCAP)

What Shade of Green is Our Horizon?

(a sound piece to accompany Lisa D. Watson’s Avant Gardener)

created with the support of a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship.

Lisa and I met while we were both artists-in-residence at The Studios of Key West in February 2022. My work has been increasingly engaged with our climate crisis and I quickly appreciated the way in which Lisa’s work seeks a positive approach to this monumental problem. So when she asked if I would create a sound piece for her upcoming show, I was very pleased.

Formative parts of my life, including my early childhood, were spent on the coast, experiencing and learning about the marine environment. My father’s work in submarine defense took my family to Key West and Bermuda, making my recent residency a moving return. In college, I spent time doing benthic field research and I came very close to becoming a marine biologist. Over the course of my professional life in music, I have found it hard to see how pursuits in music and biology might connect – until recently. I now realize that the library of field recordings I have accumulated over many years of work in electroacoustic music have been waiting for me to see how they might become sound pieces. And having bookended the past seven years with transformative residencies on the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Mexico has inspired a new kind of work. These pieces can be conceived of in narrative form, for the concert hall, but alternative forms – sound art - are now emerging from my process and these more properly occupy gallery spaces.

In contrast to a piece of music, played in a concert hall to a seated audience, sound art acknowledges that the listener comes and goes at will. This shifts how artists can think about the possibility of narrative form – of “beginning, middle, end” through the journey of listening. What Shade of Green is Our Horizon? consists of a forty-two minute long piece that is continuously played as a loop in the gallery space. My intention is to color and heighten the experience of Lisa’s installation. However, if one did wish to sit, meditatively, from the beginning to the end of my piece, they would find that there is a large-scale narrative too and that alternative experience is also valid.

What Shade of Green is Our Horizon? is a kind of aural land and seascape. The background throughout is a prayerful stretched chorale in G major for string quartet that progresses ever so slowly. Interacting with the harmony of this background one hears some recognizable environmental sounds, but also sounds at the threshold of recognition, abstract, yet somehow organic and capable of igniting a personal response.

What Shade of Green is Our Horizon? was created with the support of a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship.