Bio:
Few composers, if any, pull music out of thin air. As Berio said, there’s no tabula rasa. Most music is a reaction to something else. It could be another piece of music, but it could equally be an extra-musical stimulus: a landscape, a poem, a film, a performer, a painting.
What kinds of things stimulate Philip Cashian’s imagination? Literature is important to him, and his tastes are wide ranging and often quirky. He has taken texts from playwrights, such as Lorca and Edward Bond, or poets, from Keats to Kevin Crossley-Holland by way of Baudelaire, Rossetti and Thomas Moore.
Words are important, but the visual arts have been an even richer source of inspiration. A recent string quartet, Samain, takes its title from a painting by Leonora Carrington and there is a set of piano pieces based on work by the reclusive English artist Ben Hartley. And there’s more: Blue Circus, a little clarinet concerto, takes its title from Marc Chagall, Firewheel comes from Bryan Wynter and Strix was inspired by Graham Sutherland’s painting, La Petite Afrique III. There’s a bit of darkness and a bit of the surreal in these choices. Perhaps inevitably then Philip Cashian has turned to Goya, the master of the dark and the bizarre, for the inspiration behind his chamber work, Caprichos.
A glance at Cashian’s titles give still more clues to his inner world. His favourite colours are dark: there’s a Dark Flight (for six cellos) and a Dark Inventions. Black Venus, for guitar, takes its title from Angela Carter. Then there’s night. No less than three of his orchestral pieces are nocturnes: Night Journeys (written for the LSO), The House of Night and Nightmaze.
These night pieces are sometimes disturbed by the noise of ticking mechanisms. His catalogue includes Settala’s Machine (Settala was a 17th century Italian maker of automata), Pietro’s Machine, Bone Machine and The Star Machine. There’s a Forest of Clocks, a Musica Meccanica and a Mechanik (after a sculpture by Edoardo Paolozzi).
This mechanical imagery gives a clue to the kind of techniques Philip Cashian uses. His music is often built from musical mechanisms, number patterns, repetitions and ostinatos. Notes are often generated using Stravinsky’s technique for rotating pitches, paragraphs are sharply contrasted and joins are avoided. Philip Cashian’s music is not only replete with vivid images, it’s also a world of ingenious devices.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).