Alicia Castillo
l i s t o f w o r k s
glass house
solo guitar
Glass House is an exploration of the natural harmonics that can be produced on a guitar. I've always been drawn to their glassiness and transparency. They ring clearly, yet are delicate and require precision to execute them accurately. I wanted to explore writing a piece that puts a magnifying glass on both the harmonics and the performer, where nothing is hidden. Every movement is exposed and the performer inhabits a vulnerable space like a glass house.
[Score and recording
coming soon]
audio samples coming soon!
Billow
unspecified chamber (4+) / orchestra
Billow is inspired by the comings and goings of various elements; billowing grass and clouds, or swells of waves continuously retreating and returning in surging masses. I think of Billow as an exploration of movement across a space. While the chamber version includes elements of spatialization, the orchestral version augments the process further with sound that undulates and flows throughout different areas of the orchestral stage.
audio samples:
chamber version
orchestra version
a garden of roses
wind ensemble
A Garden of Roses is inspired by a narrative of discovery, grief, and acceptance abstracted from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s children's story, The Little Prince. In the story the little prince tells his adventures of exploring various planets and recalls seeing a rose for the first time. Later, he stumbles upon a garden full of roses and is devastated to realize that roses are actually commonplace. I drew on this narrative sonically through exploring the relationship between perception, anticipation, and expectation.
audio samples:
flow
unspecified chamber (4+)
In psychology flow is a state of mind in which you are fully immersed in an activity with energized focus and full involvement. In the flow state, your perception of time falls away as you're completely absorbed on the task at hand. It's synonymous with "being in the groove", "being in the zone", or that moment where pieces are "coming together". I tried to capture this state of mind sonically in Flow with a spatial ensemble to create an immersive experience.
audio sample:
tightrope
low clarinet choir
Balancing between extreme textures, Tightrope explores the delicate tension a performer faces when transitioning from being masked within the security of an ensemble, to emerging as a featured soloist. The piece draws inspiration from the metaphor of walking a tightrope, where every step is a calculated risk and every movement is amplified for all to see.
audio sample:
flicker, flash, flare
handbell choir
Flicker, Flash, Flare is inspired by the fleeting, unpredictable ways light appears and disappears, coloring the spaces around us in various ways:
sunlight filtering through swaying tree branches,
lightning briefly illuminating the sky,
headlights glowing through dense fog.
audio sample:
surface and sky
guitar quartet
Surface and Sky explores the space in between; the bottom of a mountain and it's summit, or perhaps the space between one end of a guitar's fretboard and the other. With the guitar being my own instrument, I wanted to explore writing a piece based on the glissando, a technique that is used more sparingly in the traditional guitar repertoire.
audio sample:
enneagram suite
solo guitar
Enneagram Suite is a set of nine pieces based on the Enneagram personality type system. There are nine individual types in the system and I aimed to capture their interconnectedness and vastly diverse features. Each movement thus has its own texture palette and explores its own soundworld, though they are connected by the thread of a 5 note motive that can be found in each one. The set is modular and the performer chooses the order of the nine movements.
audio sample:
