Robert Casteels: more than meets the eye/ear – by Lionel Lye

To provide a backdrop for Sound Journey, Lye first explores Casteels, the man himself - from his interest in non-tempered tuning systems and cross-disciplinary experimentations, to his writing of symphonies, to why Casteels’ works seem to force together very disparate types of instruments. From this understanding, Lye then observes that Sound Journey presented yet another opportunity for Casteels to “forge new ground by writing for an instrument that… (is) as yet non-existent”, and describes the work as a “journey of exploration into how the sound produced by the instrument would develop as work on it progresses”. In conclusion, the reader is left anticipating for more of Casteels’ works in the future, even if they may be “deliberately obscure and difficult to understand”.

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