About

As a composer, he worked in Europe, Asia and America. His music has been conducted by D. Russell-Davies, J. Kalitzke, T. Ceccherini, A. Soriano, H. Lintu and H. Schellenberger, among others. He has written for solo and chamber music, orchestra, theater plays, choreographies and opera. His music has been played at international centers such as Brucknerhaus Linz, Glinka Hall Saint Petersburg, Harpa Hall Reykjavik, Musiekgebouw Amsterdam. He has published for Doblinger Verlag, Bergmann Edition, Verlag Neue Musik, Da Vinci Edition, Mackingerverlag and Joachin Trekel. His music has been recorded on sixteen CDs and two DVDs.

He is president of the International Society for Ekmelic Music and director of the symposium «Mikrotöne: Small is Beautiful» in Salzburg since 2015. He created a 36- EDO scordatura system for guitar. His microtonal ideas were presented in “The Contemporary Guitar” by John Schneider or in Franck Jedrzejewski’s “Dictionnaire des musiques microtonales”. He is the director of the symposium “The microtonal Village” in New York.

He has written the artistic research “Instrumental Techniques Interchange, On Processes of Importing and Exporting Techniques in the Composition and Performance of Contemporary Music” collaborating internationally with different musicians.

An area of research by Castilla-Ávila is silence. In 2013 he composed “The Rest is Silence”, the first existing silent opera, for which he was awarded the Salzburg Region’s annual grant. In 2007 he created the graphic series “Still Life with Silence”, having solo and group exhibitions in Japan, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Denmark, Austria, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, USA and Mexico.

He is a founder member of the art collective NEVERENDINGARTIST. The goal of the NEVERENDINGARTIST is to explore the transdisciplinary possibilities between painting and music. These explorations are done in the practice of their improvisations performances, in which both artists are active in the disciplines of music and painting. With this project they try to facilitate the understanding of transdisciplinarity by proposing their own classification based on their artistic practice and according to who practices which discipline and with which objects.

As a lecturer, he gave around 150 lectures on his ideas in Europe, Asia and America (including Juilliard School in New York, Boston University, Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Mozarteum in Salzburg or Yong Siew To Conservatory in Singapore). As an author, he has published about his artistic ideas in Austria, Poland, Slovenia, USA, Mexico and Brazil.

He has been Visiting Professor for Artistic Research at Instituto Katarina Gurska de Investigaciones Artísticas in Spain. He had previously taught at other international institutions (including the Orff Institute at Mozarteum, Arizona State University, Conservatorio Profesional de Lucena, Conservatorio Profesional de Ceuta), as well as given master classes.