Patrick Castillo


Patrick Castillo
March 2006

      A Piece of Coffee

Composer Patrick Castillo serves as founding Co-Artistic Director of the Pharos Music Project. In June 2005, his work Lola for Pierrot ensemble was awarded the Brian M. Israel Prize by the Society for New Music (Syracuse, NY). Highlights of the 2005-06 season include premieres of Patrick Castillo’s chamber and choral works by Anti-Social Music, the Canticum Novum Singers, Cerddorion, the Pharos Music Project, and the Society for New Music. Patrick Castillo moonlights with various vocal ensembles and daylights as Artistic Administrator for Music@Menlo, a chamber music festival in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Patrick Castillo writes: “A Piece of Coffee” expands. The excerpt in question of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons progresses from pithiness-“More of double. A place in no new table.”-to Coltranesque virtuosity-“The perfect way is to accustom the thing to have a lining and the shape of a ribbon and to be solid, quite solid in standing and to use heaviness in morning.” This setting takes Stein’s principle of expansion as its point of departure: stretching single notes and narrow intervals into dense harmonies and amplifying monophonic clarity into violently cluttered textures. (www.patrickcastillo.com)