Title: Modern Love Songs; Recovering
Commission: 1999
Completed: 2002
Instrumentation: voice and piano
Premiere Location:
Premiere Ensemble: Judith Bettina and James Goldworthy
Notes: Lyrics by William Zinsser.

Chester Biscardi’s music has been performed throughout Asia, Europe, and North and South America. His catalog includes At the Still Point, for orchestra, Piano Concerto, Sailors & Dreamers, for voice and chamber ensemble, the opera Tight-Rope, Trasumanar, for twelve percussionists and piano, and works for piano, voice, chorus, and chamber ensembles, as well as incidental music for theatre, dance, and television. His work is published by C. F. Peters, Theodore Presser Company, and Biscardi Music Press. Recordings appear on the Albany, Bridge, CRI (New World Records), New Albion, and Steinway & Sons labels, among others, including a Naxos American Classics release entitled Chester Biscardi: In Time’s Unfolding. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award in Music from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a commission from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, among numerous other awards and fellowships.

Born in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 1948, Biscardi studied English literature, Italian literature, and music composition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before receiving a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Yale School of Music. His principal composition teachers included Kryzsztof Penderecki, Toru Takemitsu, Les Thimmig, and Yehudi Wyner. He is Faculty Emeritus at Sarah Lawrence College where he taught from 1977–2020. He was Director of the Music Program from 1987–2017 and the first recipient of the William Schuman Chair in Music.

Since the 1970s, Biscardi has been interested in the ways language and literature influence musical idea and form. Often a single word or poetic phrase generates the central idea of a composition, although his works are seldom overtly programmatic. The Italian tenzone [dialogue] inspired Tenzone, for two flutes and piano (1975), while T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” with its interplay of form and time, evoked At the Still Point (1977). Timbral and spatial concerns also play an important role in his early works. Transparent textures, delicate nuances, sounds frozen in time and space, and the cyclical nature of existence resonate from his study of Japanese music. In the 1985 opera, Tight-Rope, and the song cycle, The Gift of Life (1990–93), Biscardi’s lyrical impulses, pervasive in his later works, are more pronounced. Resisting Stillness (1996), an intimate, strikingly spare work for two guitars, has autobiographical aspects, which are also a characteristic element of his mature music. His Piano Quintet (2004), written in memory of his father, uses elements from The Odyssey and several of his own earlier works, all of which, in the composer’s words, “explore the passage of time, loss, recovery, and transcendence.”