• Liturgy for dancers and orchestra
  Music: Robert Casteels/ Choreography: Antonio Vargas/ Text: Frederico Garcia Lorca
  Instrumentation:
  - 4 trumpets in B flat with 4 different types of mutes;
  - percussion: (player 1 on bass drum, timpani, snare drum, pair of cymbals, 1 suspended cymbal, cajón and geophone/ player 2 on vibraphone, glockenspiel and xylophone);

  - Niibori guitar orchestra (soprano, alto 1 and 2, prime 1 and 2, bass, contrabass and guitarrón/ at least 2-4-4-4-4-4-3-2)
  - 1 electric and 1 synthesizer guitars
  - harpsichord;
  - 1 player on one or two 21-string gu-zhengs;
  - vocal ensemble of 12 singers with lithophone (or 12 pairs of stones of varied size, texture and sound);
  - solo mezzo-soprano voice
  
  
  

• Duration: 20'
• In 12 movements
• Composed in 2010
• Commissioned by the National University of Singapore, Centre For the Arts
• First performance: 03.04.11 NUS Guitar Orchestra, Flamenco Sin Fronteras, Satsuki Nagatome Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, Conservatory Concert Hall, National University of Singapore
• ISMN: 979-09016501-9-8
• Parts: ISMN: 979-09016511-2-8/ To rent the parts, please email <rc@robertcasteels.com>
• Downloadable scores for inspection:
  full_score.pdf

Commissioned by National University of Singapore's Centre For the Arts for a special concert celebrating 30 years of the NUS Niibori Guitar Orchestra, El Jardín de la Vita y la Muerte (or The Garden of Life or Death) calls for a full Niibori orchestra augmented by electric and synthesizer guitars, gu-zheng, harpsichord, 4 trumpets, mezzo-soprano voice and vocal ensemble, solo percussion and lithophones. Each instrument fulfills a role with respect to the narrative of the bull-fight. For example, the bass drum represents the bull and the lithophones or stones reflect its heart beat. Trumpets herald the beginning of each of the 12 parts that constitute the bull-fight. Despite the multi-million business it generates, bull-fighting is not a hobby. Despite its strict rules and share of scandals, bull-fighting is not a sport. Despite its dazzling display of virtuosity greeted by shouted ¡Olé!, bull-fighting is not an art. Opponents to tauromachy have an anthropomorphic vision of bulls experiencing human emotions in front of bestialized humans while aficionados argue that the torero facing pain and death deeply respects the bull during a tauroboly enshrined in a code of honour. This composition is by no means a eulogy of tauromachy. Casteels's subtitle Liturgy for dancers and orchestra refers to the fact that tauromachy is in essence a sacrificial and cathartic liturgy in a Judeo-Christian context, with pagan roots tracing back to dravidian India, Sumerian and Assyro-Babylonian civilisations, Minoan Creta, pharaonic Egypt and Mithridatic Rome. Even the names of Europe and Italy have an etymology related to bulls. Casteels did not choose the corrida as the subject matter of a folkloric sonic postcard out of some atavistic inheritance of his Castilian ancestors. The title El Jardín de la Vita y la Muerte refers to the essence of the following existentialist tenet. Society traps each of us into inescapable mental if not physical closed spaces not unlike the torero and the bull in the arena. Even if our minds were able to escape from physical confinement, they remain stifled by social strictures. Considered in his or her own individuality, each human being is unique and refined. Herded together as an anonymous collectivity, humans become feral,  just like in the corrida where the cruelest participants are its audience. In existentialist terms, Jean-Paul Sartre’s huis clos, or confinement with no way out because Hell are the Others makes sense in a post-Auschwitz or post-Srebrenica world. Are animals humans? The bull is colour-blind and charges forward, deeper into the inescapable reality of his palpable hell. Are humans animals? We create our own hell by running meaningless rat races that bleed our blue planet to death. (Corrida literally means the act of running, not a bull-fight as it is improperly translated into English. Our survival instinct urges us to conform to expectations. This survival strategy leads to self destruction, a sort of ontological liposuction. The chasm between the reality of dreams and the appearances of reality deepens our emotional wounds. Like the torero and the bull facing fear and suffering, we wander and wonder in the garden of life. At the end of El Jardín de la Vida y la Muerte, the deep mezzo-soprano voice, the spirit of the mother of the bull, sings Frederico Garcia Lorca’s poem entitled El Silencio: "Listen, my son: the silence. It is a rolling silence. A silence where valleys and echoes slip. And it bends foreheads, down towards the ground". Life and Death? La Vida y la Muerte. Eros and Thanatos.

Review

"Robert Casteels’s Garden of Life and Death was a full scale drama in which guitars served as evocative accompanists. Antiphonal trumpets opened the ritual of blood and death, pitting man against beast which played out to its inevitable conclusion. Seldom has gracefulness and brutality in scoring and choreography been juxtaposed this eloquently on the same stage. The disturbing message was this: who was the greater victim?"
Chang Tou Liang, Singapore