Patrick Castillo leads a multifaceted career as a composer, performer, writer, and educator. His music has been featured at festivals and venues throughout the United States and internationally including Spoleto Festival USA, June in Buffalo, the Santa Fe New Music Festival, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Berklee College of Music, Tenri Cultural Institute, Bavarian Academy of Music (Munich), and Nuremberg Museum of Contemporary Art.
Recent season highlights include the world premieres of Incident for cello and piano, The Quality of Mercy for soprano and chamber ensemble, Two Pieces after Grass for tenor saxophone and electronics, and Evocation for chorus and cello; the German premiere of Cirque for solo violin; and the second New York performance of This is the hour of lead, a chamber cantata for baritone/countertenor and ensemble, presented by North/South Consonance; as well as premiere performances of Patrick Castillo’s chamber works by Anti-Social Music, Forecast Music, the Interlochen Chamber Players, the Society for New Music, and the Pharos Music Project. The 2012-13 season featured the premieres of Music for the Third Place for violin and electronics, The Conversation of Prayers for soprano and ensemble, and others.
Patrick Castillo is variously active as an explicator of music to a wide range of listeners. He has provided program notes for numerous concert series: most prolifically for Music@Menlo, a chamber music festival and institute in Silicon Valley for which he also serves as Artistic Administrator. In this latter capacity, he has led a variety of pre-concert discussion events; designed outreach presentations for middle and high school students; and authored, narrated, and produced the widely acclaimed AudioNotes series of listener’s guides to the chamber music literature. Patrick Castillo has been a guest lecturer at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Fordham University, Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass (Kentucky), String Theory at the Hunter (Chattanooga, TN), and ChamberFest Cleveland. From 2010 to 2013, he served as Senior Director of Artistic Planning of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.
Patrick Castillo holds degrees in music composition and sociology from Vassar College, where his teachers included Lois V. Vierk, Annea Lockwood, and Richard Wilson. He has also participated in master classes with John Harbison, Alvin Lucier, Roger Reynolds, and Charles Wuorinen. While at Vassar, Patrick Castillo served as composer-in-residence for the Mahagonny Ensemble, a collective of performers specializing in twentieth-century music. His Requiem aeternam for mixed chorus and chamber ensemble, composed for the Mahagonny, was awarded the 2001 Jean Slater Edson Prize. He has also been the recipient of the Brian M. Israel Prize, awarded by the Society for New Music for his chamber work Lola.
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