Student Spotlight: Ethan Chaves

Ethan Chaves ’26 is a Senior in Winthrop House, who completed his Music concentration this past May, studying composition with Professor Chaya Czernowin. Chaves plays violin and piano, and has interests in composing, improvising, and electroacoustic work. A musician from a young age, Chaves started playing violin at age 7 and says he started composing music at the same time. “I had been given a scale sheet by my teacher and there were two leftover lines on the page. I thought I was supposed to fill them in.”

For Chaves, it always felt inevitable that he would pursue music in some capacity. “My identity has always been so shored up in music that I didn’t really think about it as a realm of study [before college]. It’s just what I do and it’s part of who I am… The fact that I’m studying music at Harvard means that I’m interfacing with it in a much more academic way, it’s something I wouldn’t have gotten with a more traditional conservatory or a music department that wasn’t so integrated with the rest of the academic community.” Through his Harvard journey, Chaves started finding inspiration in unlikely places: other departments. “I’ve always seen fields of study that I take up as informing what I do with my music.” He says, “Every time I do something at Harvard, it ultimately ends up feeding back into music, even if I don’t intend it to”

While at Harvard, Chaves has been able to grow and explore different sides of music, from performing to composing. “I’ve always been interested in the intersection of the two.” He says, “Some months I might be doing one or the other more, but ideally it’s an equal mix of both.” This past year, for a University Hall Recital Series performance, Chaves performed a mix of works by post-1970 composers and his own original pieces. “It feels the most natural in some ways. When I play my own piece, I always have the final say so I can deviate from what I’ve written if it feels right.” Chaves has also honed his improvisation skills, “There are some things you can do with improvisation that you can’t necessarily do in written music all the time. When you’re on stage and in the moment you really want to do something that’s not written, if you’re playing a composed piece you’re kind of stuck.”

“Every time I do something at Harvard, it ultimately ends up feeding back into music, even if I don’t intend it to”

At the end of his Sophomore year, Chaves received a Davison Fellowship from the Department of Music, which allowed him to spend the summer studying in London, England with acclaimed composer and former Harvard Music professor Julian Anderson. “There was something about studying there at a very high intensity.” He says, “I was alone in London and I had nothing else to do except compose. During that time, I realized that the purpose of the [Davison Fellowship] is to allow you to find something you want to do and pursue it.”

During that summer, Chaves found himself in a period of musical evolution, “I was shifting the way that I wrote music.” He says, “My style was changing, I was becoming interested in microtonality and spectralism. I was thinking about integrating references to other music, whether that be from the past and creating a cultural continuance of those pieces, or using other genre references.” At the same time, Anderson was instilling in Chaves a new kind of work ethic. “I used to sketch things out and leave a lot of blanks on the page, telling myself I would fill them in later. He [Anderson] said to me ‘You’re a composer, you need to make decisions. You can fix it once it’s on the page, but if you don’t make a decision, you don’t know what you’re doing.’ In the moment, it was brutal to hear but it’s also been good advice for my life.” The next day, Chaves says he spent the entire day composing what would ultimately become an 8-voice madrigal, one of his first works written for voice.

“I realized that the purpose of the [Davison Fellowship] is to allow you to find something you want to do and pursue it.”

Chaves also found himself thinking about his upcoming thesis project, which would be the largest project he had ever undertaken. He found himself thinking back to studying abroad freshman year, during which he saw a production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist play, No Exit. “Something about it really struck me.” He says, “I sat on the idea of doing something with it for a long time. Then when I was thinking about my thesis and what I would do to fuse [Music and Philosophy] together, and I thought, well, making a philosophical play by a philosopher into an opera, that’s one way to do it.”

No Exit, perhaps best known for being the origin of the line “Hell is other people,” centers on a depiction of the afterlife where three people are punished by being locked in a room together for eternity. “I noticed in the play that there were a lot of silences and these tense, emotional moments. I thought that it could be served by somehow illustrating what was going on in a more tangible way for the audience.” Chaves says, “That’s when I decided to fill the silences, so to speak. I saw the play in German, it was originally written in French, and I’ll be setting it in English. To me, it’s about capturing the things between the words.”

“To me, [composing] is about capturing the things between the words.”

Writing an opera was no easy task for Chaves, who says he saw it as the grand culmination of his undergrad career. “It’s almost two hours long, I needed to pull out anything I’ve ever done and draw on everything I’ve learned.” The original play explores various existentialist themes, including privacy, self-deception, and the inability to escape your own actions. “It has a rich subtext, and I’m trying to aestheticize the subtext from a philosophical context to a musical one.” NO EXIT – An Opera in Two Acts was presented by Lowell House Opera March 27-29, 2026. The final score uses elements of live electronics, jazz, rock, cabaret, and more.