CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois music professor Carlos Carrillo is one of 10 composers chosen for a Copland House Residency Award.
Carrillo will spend about six weeks next summer at the New York home where composer Aaron Copland lived and worked, now a National Historic Landmark. The residency award program provides an opportunity for composers to focus on their creative work. Carrillo will be finishing an opera based on a well-known Puerto Rican play.
Carrillo said the home is in a beautiful setting in the Hudson River Valley, and the residency will give him a connection with a great composer.
“(Copland) did so much to connect with composers in America and in defining American music, and I feel the residency is a continuation of that effort in promoting American music,” he said.
It also will provide an opportunity to work without any distractions.
“I’m doing some work (now), but it’s hard during the year when we are teaching,” Carrillo said. “Opera is such a huge endeavor.”
It’s a new experience for him as well. Carrillo composes classical contemporary music for instrumental and vocal performance; for symphony orchestras, chamber groups and other smaller groups; and for individuals. Opera represents a huge change in medium, in that he must produce two hours of music and also consider interpreting the text, the staging, the movement of the performers while they are singing and other logistical elements that are not present with other types of musical performances.
“It’s a very complex and fascinating process,” Carrillo said.
The residency will be Carrillo’s second at the Copland House. He also received a residency award in 1998, the program’s first year, that he used to complete his thesis, which was a portion of the opera he now plans to finish.
The opera is based on the play “La Pasión según Antigona Pérez” by Luis Rafael Sánchez, a famous Puerto Rican author. Carrillo is also Puerto Rican, and said it is significant to him that he is creating music that is based on Puerto Rican culture.
In addition to the Copland House Residency, Carrillo also won a two-year fellowship with the American Opera Project’s Composers & The Voice Workshop Series. The workshops provide composers experience working collaboratively with singers. Carrillo hopes to get the bulk of the opera written during the fellowship workshops, and then use the Copland House Residency to finish it.
Editor’s notes: To reach Carlos Carrillo, email carcarri@illinois.edu.
