Composer Eve de Castro-Robinson: “I’ve always had a thespian tendency." Photo / supplied
Composer Eve de Castro-Robinson: “I’ve always had a thespian tendency." Photo / supplied
Eve de Castro-Robinson is one of our leading composers. She is a retired associate professor of music, two-time winner of the SOUNZ Contemporary Award, and composer-in-residence of Orchestra Wellington and the forthcoming At the World’s Edge Festival (AWE).
So, why on Earth was she recently doing stand-up comedy at anAuckland club? “You’re a long time dead,” she reasons. “I’ve always had a thespian tendency, and what I did the other night in about 11 minutes has been building up through my teaching career.
“One of my past students came and she said it was like me giving a lecture, but a bit funnier.”
If you squint, you can just about see the connection between de Castro-Robinson composer and de Castro-Robinson comedian.
“People have commented over the decades that my music has a humorous spirit, though it’s hard to know how you creatively manifest that, apart from having a tendency to think in a lively and spirited way about how sounds behave.”
Fans of her music have the rare chance to hear a selection of works from across her career, with eight pieces – two of them festival commissions – scheduled for AWE (October 5-18).
For the new works, she has drawn on a trusted method of finding inspiration in a name.
“I have to get a title that speaks to me, and that’s one of the first things I do,” she says. “I go back to [poets] Emily Dickinson a lot, and Denys Trussell; I just have to open one of his books and a phrase leaps out.”
Bird-Sung Sky, a short piece for violin duo, has its title borrowed from Trussell. A larger work, Earth’s Eye – the name taken from Henry David Thoreau – is for clarinet and string trio, and its debut performance will feature UK star Julian Bliss (“What a beautiful name for a clarinettist!”).
For both works, de Castro-Robinson applied a freewheeling, stand-up approach to composition.
“There’s a lack of planning I’ve taken up that reminds me of how I used to compose at the beginning, where I’d just start writing,” she says. “I suppose it’s freeing the material up and seeing what comes out, which sounds simple and obvious …” but isn’t, is the unsaid implication.
There are times, then, when the music is as much an enigma to de Castro-Robinson as it is to the rest of us.
“There’s a little movement in [Earth’s Eye] where it’s tapping col legno with the back of the bow,” she says. “I don’t know why that’s happened. I can talk about contrasts and things, but music’s always been a mystery and there’s no point trying to pretend it into logic.”
