Peter Castine

Peter Castine (United States/Germany) is a composer of instrumental, vocal, and electro-acoustic music as well as installation art. He is active as a performer (piano, harpsichord, organ, speaker/narrator, laptop) and has developed numerous software tools to assist with his own musical work, including the Litter Power Package and iCE Tools, both for Max/MSP, as well as many of the original Finale Plug-Ins. Castine’s principal musical training was at the Berlin Institute of the Arts (Hochschule der Künste), where his teachers included Frank Michael Beyer (composition, counterpoint, harmony), Witold Szalonek (instrumentation, 20th century harmony), and Rolf Kuhnert (piano), complemented by further compositional studies with Brian Ferneyhough, Cristóbal Halffter, Joji Yuasa, and Isang Yun; computer music studies with John Chowning and Ed Cobrin. Castine’s work on “Set Theory Objects: Abstractions for Computer-Aided Analysis and Composition of Serial and Atonal Music” led to a Ph.D. awarded summa cum lauda by the Technical University of Berlin. Castine’s music has been performed at festivals in Darmstadt (International Summer Courses; Institute for New Music and Music Education); Bergen, Norway (Music Factory); Santa Cruz, California (April in Santa Cruz); Berlin (Transmediale, DESIGNMAI, and in the Unerhörte Musik series); Chicago (Goethe-Institut); Montreal (CEC); and the International Computer Music Conference. His compositions have been performed by musicians such as Ulrich Maiss, Marcus Creed, Philip Moll, and Alan Marks. His music research has been presented in papers at the International Computer Music Conference, the “Journées Informatique musicales”, and the European Conference for Music Analysis. He has been an invited lecturer at Columbia University, Stony Brook University, the Netherlands Royal Conservatory, the Humboldt University (Berlin), and the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg. Castine has taught music studies at the Technical University of Berlin and the Berlin University of the Arts. Peter Castine currently lives in Berlin.