Writing, & al.

"In 2014, President Barack Obama announced that his administration would begin the process of normalizing relations between the United States and Cuba, restoring full diplomatic relations with the island nation after 50 years of tense, frozen relations. In 2015, Third Sound presented the first concert entirely comprising contemporary American music, and with all composers in attendance, to take place in Cuba since before the Cuban Revolution. This concert would be presented as part of Festival de Música Contemporánea de La Habana, a festival that Composer and leader of Third Sound, Patrick Castillo attended just one year prior. The Festival was founded in 1984 and since its inception has included the music of composers contemporary music from all over the world.  We sat down with Patrick and fellow composers who joined him and his group for the historic 2015 concert, Jeremy Gill and Kati Agócs to reflect their travels."

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Many of us fundamentally assume that homogenous programming results from cowardice and/or lack of imagination on the part of our orchestras. The first step in constructively addressing the problem is to challenge this assumption.

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Jeremy Tusz, video producer

In the last of a series of composer conversations I had the opportunity to moderate for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, John Luther Adams discusses the road from rock-n-roll garage band to Pulitzer Prize-winning classical composer and shares insights into Become Ocean.

View the full Conversations with Composers series, including interviews with Emily Cooley, Jake Heggie, Pierre Jalbert, Christopher Rouse, Augusta Read Thomas, and Joan Tower, here.

Presented with support from The Aaron Copland Fund for Music.

A stylish soundtrack by the English film composer Clint Mansell (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan) amplifies the homage to van Gogh. Explaining her practice of leaving flowers daily at van Gogh’s grave, Marguerite Gachet (an intimate of van Gogh’s and the subject of more than one painting) tells Roulin, “He would appreciate the delicate beauty of their bloom.” The same might be said for Mansell’s ethereal vignettes, rife with melancholy piano motifs, hazy string textures, and pulsating rhythms.

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Composer, performer, writer Patrick Castillo talks about his work and his innova album, The Quality of Mercy, with Philip Blackburn.

Video by McGann + Zhang; Hyeyeon Park, piano

A sweet little spot for NYC Pride that I got to write some music for.

To kick off Pride month, NYC Pride (The Official NYC LGBT Pride Organizer) produced a video to remind everyone that, while we live in a world where LGBT has become part of the mainstream, there are millions who lived and continue to live in fear of being their true selves. Come out to Pride this year and shout for those who can't.

By Arlene & Larry Dunn

Brooklyn-based composer Patrick Castillo is the vice-chair of the board of directors for the American Composers Forum, which has an open call for scores from composers to participate in an artist delegation to the 28th Havana Contemporary Music Festival in November 2015. Castillo attended the Havana festival last year, making him the ideal person to tell us more.

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My conversations with Mr. Frank about Beethoven and Schubert were, without exaggeration, among the greatest privileges of my life. Here's a brief word on the Schubert B-flat Sonata from the brilliant artist and beautiful human being we lost today.

RIP Claude Frank (1925–2014)

In November 2014, I was given the opportunity of a lifetime to travel to Cuba: ostensibly to attend the Festival de La Habana de Música Contemporánea (Havana Contemporary Music Festival), where two of my chamber works were to be performed—but moreover, por supuesto, to explore a place that remains, for most of us norteamericanos, so shrouded in mystery, in certain ways even vilified, that an entire people, and their breathtakingly rich culture, can feel to us a taboo.

Knowing in what great detail I would want to report back to friends and family, and moreover to freeze-frame each confounding moment for myself, I kept this travelogue throughout my eight days in Havana. It aspires neither to comprehensive cultural nor political commentary, nor to anything beyond one visitor’s experience. It will surely feel both overly verbose and hopelessly inadequate.

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As a postscript to my editorial for Classical MPR lambasting the classical-music-for-relaxation trope, I was invited to debate the topic further on WQXR's "Conducting Business" with Michael Morreale, host of CBC Music's "Serenity Stream."

As seventeenth-century social and cultural traditions gave way to modern Enlightenment values, so too in music did new principles take hold. Following the music of the Baroque period—characterized by an ornate melodic sensibility, intricate counterpoint, and pyrotechnic virtuosity—a new musical aesthetic emerged in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In the Age of Reason, symmetrical, four-bar phrases replaced the biblical polyphony of Bach’s fugal writing; in the part-writing and melodic clarity in Haydn’s chamber music, one could hear the rights of the individual asserted as clearly as in the writings of John Locke.

What has since become known as the Classical style had its patriarch in the aptly nicknamed “Papa” Haydn, but was fully crystallized by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The startling melodic beauty, harmonic and textural clarity, and perfect synthesis of form and expression to be found in Mozart’s music render it the apotheosis of Viennese Classicism.

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Dear Beethoven. You are going to Vienna in fulfillment of your long-frustrated wishes. The Genius of Mozart is mourning and weeping over the death of her pupil. She has found a refuge but no occupation with the inexhaustible Haydn; through him she wishes to form a union with another. With the help of assiduous labor you shall receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.

These were the prophetic words of Count Ferdinand von Waldstein to Ludwig van Beethoven in 1792, the year after Mozart’s death, as Beethoven departed his native Bonn for the musical capital of the Western world. But even with such lofty expectations, Waldstein, one of Beethoven’s most important patrons, could not have foreseen how prescient his words of farewell would be. Beethoven would indeed inherit the mantle of Haydn and Mozart, then extend the tradition of Viennese Classicism into the nineteenth century, creating music of such imposing power that generations of composers since have not ceased to feel its weight. After Beethoven’s Opus 131 Quartet, Schubert wondered, “what is left for us to write?” Indeed, the entire Romantic era felt paralyzed by the echo of Beethoven’s voice. Brahms famously delayed attempting his First Symphony, explaining when pressed, “You have no idea how it feels to hear behind you the footsteps of a giant like Beethoven.” For Igor Stravinsky, Beethoven’s Große Fuge remained, in the twentieth century, “an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever.”

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Film by Zac Nicholson