Name: Andrea Casarrubios
Nationality: Spanish-American
Occupation: Cellist, composer
Current release: Andrea Casarrubios's 2024 album SEVEN is available via Odradek.
Current event: Andrea recently performed the world premiere of her own MIRAGE, Concerto for Cello and Orchestra at the Charlotte Symphony, under the baton of Christopher James Lees.
Global Recommendations: I’ve called home a few places over the years. In New York, I would recommend The Hungarian Pastry Shop and walking through Riverside Park. If you like beer, go to Burp Castle in the East Village, it’s a quiet bar (meaning they will “shhh” you if you speak loudly) and it’s both amazing and hilarious.
At the moment I'm based in Chicago. Going to the Symphony Center is always inspiring. I also recommend getting out of the downtown area and seeing other neighborhoods like Pilsen, Logan Square, or Edgewater / Andersonville.
I am trying to spend some time in Madrid lately in order to write … rather than visiting one thing, I'll give some general guidance: try to go to places that locals actually go to. Americans and northern European tourists tend to flock to the same kinds of places: cafes that could easily be in LA or Berlin. Walk around and look for places where people are only speaking Spanish. Go to those places!

If you enjoyed this Andrea Casarrubios interview and would like to stay up to date with her music and live dates, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram.



Many people perceive classical music and contemporary composition as having high barriers of entrance, both for listeners and musicians. What have your own experiences been in this regard?

I definitely understand the perception, especially regarding “contemporary music.” However, I think that's changing as both musicians and audiences are discovering living composers. They feel more connected to them personally, emotionally, and aesthetically—I think this is key.

I feel lucky to have had many positive experiences regarding this topic. One of them was at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's MusicNow concert where my piece Afilador was premiered.



It took place at the Symphony Center, but there was general seating, so people who could never afford an expensive seat to see Yo-Yo Ma playing Elgar could enjoy a thrilling eye-level perspective that only a privileged few normally get to experience. They also incorporated very subtle, but distinctly non-typically-classical lighting—that is, colors!

Jesse Montgomery, the CSO composer-in-residence at the time, was also a wonderful MC, introducing the concert with elegance and charm, and conducting a brief interview with me before Afilador was performed. This allowed me to share some insights and demonstrate on a real afilador's whistle (a small pan-flute used by knife sharpeners in some Latin American countries and Spain), an important musical gesture in the work infused with childhood nostalgia, giving the audience a clear bearing.

I saw honest and immediate results at the concert reception, where everyone in the audience was invited afterwards. This kind of event seemed to walk the line brilliantly between accessibility and mystery.

Where do most of your inspirations to create come from – rather from internal impulses or external ones? Which current social / political / ecological or other developments make you feel like you need to respond as an artist?

For me, "inspiration" is a very delicate thing to talk about—it's mostly a non-verbal experience and I never feel that I do a good job describing it.

I would say I listen closely to internal impulses and my own voice, but in some cases I do let the external impulses be hugely influential, too. An example of all of this would be SEVEN for solo cello, written in New York in 2020 as a tribute to the essential workers.



I'm also deeply inspired by the natural world, as I grew up in a small Spanish town in a valley called Valle del Tiétar. The spaces carved by the mountains—the sounds, scents, colors, and lives that fill those spaces—are foundational to my aesthetic, I would say. I feel that in vast natural spaces there’s no place for ego, and I find this centering. Wherever I go, it's often the impression of nature that stays with me.

For example, various moments in my Piano Quintet, most obviously the first movement, Abundance, and third movement, Golden Hour, are inspired by the dramatic beauty of California’s Central Coast, where it was commissioned and premiered.



Composing has always had an interesting relationship between honouring its roots and exploring the unknown. What does the balance between these two poles look like in your music?

Being overly self-conscious, asking myself, "Should I be more innovative? feels antithetical to how I create. Perhaps for specific musical ideas I'm sometimes more aware of the stylistic roots, but it happens in discrete moments.

I'm not interested in exploring the unknown for its own sake—only if there’s a clear purpose. Purpose and intention are essential to me, whether I am writing or performing.

The 'roots' that matter most to me, that I'm most often moved to explore, are my own personal roots—which, paradoxically, feels like slowly discovering something unknown.



Caminante for cello and choir might be an interesting example of this.

What role do electronic tools and instruments play for your creative process? What does your creative space / studio look like and what tools does it contain?

I am a deeply technologically challenged individual, so I'm afraid electronic tools don't factor too much into my writing process!

I still write by hand during the first stage of any composition. I use the piano, the cello, sometimes I sing while I play to imagine all the other instruments. I listen internally, trying to feel the essence of the music and get to the most important and honest part of the new piece. Manifesting it in writing is more direct when I am using a physical instrument, if that makes sense.

Eventually, I do use an app called StaffPad that allows me to write by hand onto a tablet, which I adore since I don't use any fancy compositional software. After exporting the files for my editor, we then move on to the engraving process. I have been working with the wonderful Michele Galvagno for the past 15 years, and he has done the engraving of many of my chamber and orchestral works.

What does my studio look like? The couch is my studio. The key to any creative space for me is order and organization. Before I start working, I make sure the room is clean and everything is in its place. Disorder is a major distraction for me —there's enough chaos just being alive.

There is one piece I composed that incorporates electronics: a simple speaker or a mic. The piece is called La Libertad se levantó llorando for violin, cello, and pre-recorded voice (or recitation).



The text is a poem by Pablo Neruda, and the words are heard in its original Spanish in the middle of the piece as part of the sonic world of the music. Sometimes it is recited live, other times through a pre-recorded track, which I like because nobody expects it.

It is my impression that adding a conceptual, non-musical dimension to one's work is almost a prerequisite for commissions and grants. How do you view this tendency and how “conceptual” is your own approach to writing?

Sometimes some sort of concept is requested when someone approaches me with a commission, but sometimes it isn’t.

In any case, I generally like to envision the premiere, the program, the people, the context. When I am given a concept, the process does begin from a meditation on the "theme" proposed by the commissioners. I've rarely found it restrictive, though. If anything, being given some kind of emotional or conceptual direction helps jumpstart things; it can even yield some meaningful ideas.

For example, in my work Herencia for string orchestra, the only information shared with me was that it would be performed during the Sphinx Virtuosi U.S. tour, and the theme was “generations.” The rest was totally up to me. Afa Dworkin, Sphinx’ President and Artistic Director, mentioned that she found the word Herencia beautiful. Herencia means both inheritance and heritage. I thought about this complex word a lot, in particular about how much weight we carry that isn’t ours, and how difficult it is to break free.

Eventually, I decided I wanted to build an experience that included the individual story that each person on stage brings with them, since we express ourselves through sound and that’s the most direct connection to one’s true self.



There's a moment where the orchestra hums the chorale that opens the piece, creating a halo around a few soloists, and the ghostly-yet-loving timbre, the effect of distant memory that it creates, is meant to evoke the feeling of the accompanying ancestral presence in oneself.

It's one of my favorite things I've written and I'm not sure I would have thought of it without that conceptual framework of “generations.”

Working with long forms, complex concepts or new vocabulary is potentially more challenging today because they require us to remember things that happened perhaps minutes ago – while most of us are finding it hard to focus even on what's happening right now. Both as a composer and as a listener yourself, how do you deal with this?

I love this question! The word that immediately comes to mind is clarity and a prime example is the second and fourth movements of Schubert's Piano Trio in E-Flat Major: the cello theme from the second movement reappears many minutes later in the heart of the nearly 20-minute long fourth movement.

The reason it works so well—apart from the melody being legendarily beautiful—is that it's extremely, painfully, clear in terms of character, emotion, and shape. There are many examples of composers going for this same effect, but with more ambiguous musical ideas. The result isn't nearly as impactful.

But part of what makes that moment of reappearance so brilliant is that, a movement and a half of music later, the listener is no longer thinking about what was going on in the second movement; it's a complete surprise when we hear that melody again. And that's exactly what I want both as a listener and as a composer: a well-written, well-performed piece should force the listener to be fully present.

I thought about this a lot when I was writing the MIRAGE Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, a work in four movements that I just performed with Charlotte Symphony Orchestra and their Resident Conductor Christopher James Lees.



A memory of the intimate second movement, titled Mensajes del agua, comes back towards the end of the fourth movement, and even though at that point the journey has taken you somewhere else, you are absolutely able to recognize it—it stays with you not just aurally, but (more importantly) emotionally.

When something feels important, your body remembers.

How, would you say are live performances of your music and your recording projects connected at the moment? How do they mutually influence and feed off each other?

One element in the compositional process that I don't think gets talked about nearly enough is how much the "musical persona" one is writing for could influence the character of the piece; that is, the personality of the musician as filtered through their music-making.

Most pieces I write are deeply connected to how I perceive that persona, whether a soloist, a chamber group, or an orchestra. I will often visualize them playing, to generate some initial ideas or moods; what would I want to hear them play? And how would they play it?

SEVEN, written for cellist Thomas Mesa, and Amid a Place of Stone, written for violinist Emily Daggett Smith, are two excellent examples. Their musicianship was central to how I conceived of the pieces.



I get the opportunity to compose for some extraordinary musicians and I'm very fortunate they, as commissioners, have the right to make the first recording of the piece.

When I get the opportunity to record an album myself, I do everything possible so that the musicians involved are exactly the people I was imagining playing the pieces when I was first dreaming them up. For me, those are the reference recordings.

To some, the advent of AI and 'intelligent' composing tools offers potential for machines to contribute to the creative process. What are your hopes, fears, expectations and possible concrete plans in this regard?

This dovetails perfectly with my answer to the previous question. The process of commissioning a piece of music, working with the artists during rehearsals, being present at the premiere and involved in the recording—all of this is built on human connection.

I think a lot about technique being connected to emotion, and I believe you can absolutely tell when music is not composed in that way. There will certainly be a market for AI-generated filler music. Perhaps for other composers it can become a useful tool.

I believe that people who are drawn to my music are, in part, moved or connected to it in some way when they experience it. For now, I will continue to write with human timing.