In memory of Harry Castle

Harry Castle was a composer, computer musician, researcher, and pianist, and a treasured friend and collaborator. He died on June 23, 2009 at the age of 47. His inventive approach to interaction and improvisation was a delight and an inspiration. He was one of the finest musicians I ever shared data with.

Harry's creativity took many forms. In addition to his performances on piano and electronics, he was creator or co-creator of many hardware/software performance systems. Examples I particularly remember are the Arc, a wooden sculpture fitted with an array of photoelectric cells and a processor that calculated the position of a figure moving in front of it; a home-brew MIDI-controlled lighting board (I don't remember the name - it had something to do with "Luz" - the setup module was called "LuzInit," which tells the story pretty well); and an array of computer-controlled percussion instruments fitted underneath the seating of the Mandeville Recital Hall.

Harry also developed a sophisticated performance system he called the Pengstrument, which he used in many of his performances. This evolved from a simple program to generate and manipulate twelve-tone rows into a sophisticated tool for capturing, manipulating, and performing music data. The Pengstrument could capture and hold several different sets of data (originally MIDI; later I think it may have worked with audio as well), whose characteristics (pitch, time, loudness) could be transposed, stretched, and skewed in a variety of ways, and played back singly or in looped time structures. This meta-instrument allowed performance of elements from other people's performances - a complex form of collaborative real-time composition and performance at which Harry was a virtuoso.

As a small tribute to Harry's memory, this web site includes a piece called Cloning Dolly created and performed by Harry Castle (electronics), Elizabeth McNutt (flute), and me (violin) in 1999.

If you want to hear more, check out the album Apparatus, which Harry created in collaboration with flutist-composer Janet Parish-Whittaker (who died, also much too young, in 2011). It may still be available for purchase from CDEmusic.

There also appears to be a recording of one of Harry's performances with Joseph Pinzarrone and the Potato Engineers in the Links Hall Performance Series. If anyone reading this knows how to get a copy, please contact me.

A few fascinating essays Harry wrote about interactive computer music are available on the web: Musical Expression and the Human-Computer Interface, On Convincing Human/Machine Improvisation and Fleece: Graphical 3-D Trajectory Specification Software for Spatialization in Live Performance.

The silence is long but the sound was lovely.