Eric Salzman, 84, Composer and Reviewer

Eric Salzman of Brooklyn Heights and East Quogue, an internationally known composer, music critic, and well-known birder, died at his Brooklyn Heights home of cardiac arrest on Nov. 12. He was 84 and had been undergoing dialysis since February 2016.

Mr. Salzman was a reviewer for The New York Times and New York Herald Tribune and a contributing editor and writer for a number of periodicals in this country. His articulate and lively reviews also appeared in publications in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, among other countries.

One of the founders of what is known as new music theater, Mr. Salzman wrote or co-wrote more than two dozen theatrical productions. His work “Big Jim and the Small-Time Investors” will open Victoria Bond’s 2018 Cutting Edge Concerts at the Thalia at Symphony Space, a theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, on April 9, 2018.

He began writing reviews of Choral Society of the Hamptons concerts for The Star in 2012; the last appeared in June 2016. On the East End, he led bird walks for the South Fork Natural History Society, whose board he was on, and kept daily records of the many bird species in the wetlands that form part of the family’s property in East Quogue, which is now the Samuel and Frances Salzman Nature Preserve, managed by Southampton Town.

He was born on Sept. 8, 1933, in New York City and was educated at Forest Hills High School and Columbia and Princeton Universities, as well as at schools in Germany and Italy. He began coming to the East End in the late 1940s when his father built a small house in Hampton Bays.

His wife, the former Lorna Jackson, and daughters, Eva Salzman of Monroe, N.J., and London and Stephanie Salzman of New York City, survive, as does a granddaughter. 

In July 2018 SoFo will host a commemoration of Mr. Salzman’s contributions to New York State and Long Island as a naturalist and birder.