About Me
Ethan Antonio Chaves (b.2003) is an award-winning violinist and composer based in Boston, MA, where he studies at Harvard University and the New England Conservatory of Music through their dual-degree program.
Chaves’ music is rooted in melodic lines, resulting in carefully crafted counterpoint and linear harmony with subtle rhythmic interplay in his work. He has written for a variety of ensembles, from voice and piano to large orchestra, and has explored non-classical composition in his work for the New York Youth Symphony Jazz Septet: Low Fidelity Replicator. His works for orchestra have been performed and recorded by the Juilliard Pre-College Orchestra, New York Youth Symphony, Harvard Pops Orchestra, and the Decoda Ensemble, and have won numerous awards, including Winner of the Harvard Pops Orchestra Composition Competition, Finalist in the National Young Composers Challenge and Honorable Mention in the Metropolitan Youth Orchestra of New York’s Emerging Composers Competition. His chamber and solo works have been performed by many acclaimed musicians and ensembles including Triple Helix, Jessica Meyer, Tom Kraines, Kenichiro Aiso and Philip Sheegog.
He has won and placed finalist in numerous competitions for his chamber works, including the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Awards, Tribeca New Music Festival, and the NextNotes High School Composition Award. He enjoys working with the text of great poets such as Antonio Machado and T.S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land provided the libretto for Chaves’ chamber cantata, Unreal City (2021), which was nominated for an award to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recent commissions include an orchestral overture for the Harvard Pops Orchestra, a piece for violin and orchestra for the Mozart Society Orchestra of Harvard University, and a vocal work for Harvard College Opera.
Closest to Chaves’ heart are his works for solo violin, which he performs on curated solo recitals throughout the nation along with the works of other composers, old and new. His solo violin work, Despair Says, won the New Music on the Bluff ‘22 Festival Award and was performed at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA by Kenichiro Aiso (also airing live on radio).
As a violinist, Chaves has performed around the United States and Europe. His awards in the field include being named a Finalist in National YoungArts, winning prizes in the Boston Symphony Orchestra Concerto Competition and UMass Young Artist Awards, placing first in the Stasia B. Hovenesian Prize of the Music Guild of Music Worcester, and the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra's Concerto Competition, which resulted in a solo performance of Barber’s Violin Concerto with the Boston Youth Symphony under the direction of Federico Cortese at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre. As a chamber musician, he was selected to perform in Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio at Alice Tully Hall at the Juilliard School as part of their “Wednesday’s at One” series. In 2019, Chaves was featured on NPR’s From The Top, where he was awarded the Jack Kent Cooke Young Artists Award.
During the summer, Chaves has attended a number of festivals and tours, including the Heifetz Institute, Curtis Summerfest, Holy Cross Chamber Music Festival, Bachfest in Leipzig, Germany, the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America, Boston University Tanglewood Institute where he received the ASCAP Scholarship for composition, and ICEBERG Institute in Vienna, Austria. He has also participated in many masterclasses with artists including Anne Akiko-Meyers, Julia Fischer, and Kirill Troussov for violin, and Nico Muhly, Nina Young, and David Ludwig for composition.
Chaves is a proud graduate of the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras, where he served as concertmaster for six years, and Juilliard Pre-College. His teachers have included Malcolm Lowe, Li Lin, Naoko Tanaka, and Joel Smirnoff on violin, and Eric Ewazen and John Harbison for composition. He currently studies with composer Michael Gandolfi at the New England Conservatory of Music.