An avid collaborator, Camila Agosto is an electroacoustic composer and interdisciplinary artist currently based in New York City. Camila seeks to discover intersections of her work with additional artistic fields through partnerships with other musicians, visual artists, choreographers, instrument builders, and creators. Her projects range from acoustic and electroacoustic concert works and orchestral scores to interdisciplinary projects incorporating visual media and dance, and from solo instruments and larger ensembles to fixed media works. Her music is both fully notated and improvisational and often employs extended instrumental techniques, exhibiting a particular emphasis on the exploration of different timbral and textural elements. Within her works, Camila is interested in uncovering the sonic potentialities of acoustic instruments through highlighting and exposing the human element of live performance.
Her music has been featured at venues and festivals in the United States and abroad, and has been performed by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Quartet 121, the Semiosis Quartet, Berrow Duo, Ensemble Échappé. It has been featured at the Miller Theatre Pop-Up Series at Columbia University, National Sawdust, Symphony Space Bar Thalia Series, 2018 New Latin Wave Festival, the FETA FM Festival, Sala Neumann, and the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity. Camila often works with visual artists, choreographers, and film directors on a variety of multimedia projects. Past collaborations include imprint, an electroacoustic installation piece commissioned by Berrow Duo, featuring projected visual media and artwork created by artists from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
In the summer of 2020, Camila became a certified yoga instructor and created the Meristem Artist Retreat, a virtual space for artists of marginalized genders including women, trans individuals, femme-identifying, and nonbinary folks, to meet a variety of artists across different disciplines while learning holistic and balanced practices to help them sustain a healthy artistic life. Since then, Camila has founded Meristem Artists, an arts community continuing the work of the retreat to support artists of marginalized genders and create a welcoming, supportive, and trustworthy atmosphere in which to connect, learn, share and work. Through her work with Meristem Artists, she has directed a series of artist retreats and community events including open discussions surrounding topics central to creating arts today, artist talks with invited guests across the contemporary music community, yoga and meditation sessions, and additional holistic activities to stimulate healthy and positive creative practices. Camila has led various wellness workshop series through the Columbia University Computer Music Center and was an invited guest presenter at the Ensemble Evolution 2022 summer sessions led by the International Contemporary Ensemble.
In recent projects, Camila has designed and constructed various instruments and performative installation pieces to use in her compositional work. Upcoming projects include Paracusia IV; a continuation of a multi-movement, concert-length program scored for solo saxophone and live electronics co-commissioned with Justin Massey, with a grant awarded from the Canada Council for the Arts, The Memory of Water Vol. 1; a multi-piece project created in collaboration with violist and poet, Martine Thomas, exploring the integration of text, live composition, improvisation, electronics and custom instruments, as well as I gather them all; a new work for small ensemble commissioned by the Bar Harbor Music Festival.
Camila is currently a doctoral candidate at Columbia University. She holds a Master’s degree from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelors in Music from Montclair State University. Her teachers include Zosha Di Castri, Seth Cluett, Brad Garton, George Lewis, Oscar Bettison, Marcos Balter and Du Yun. She has also worked with Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Sabrina Schroeder, Amy Williams, and Juraj Kojs. Camila was a composition fellow at the New Music on the Point Festival, the Cortona Sessions for New Music, and the Summer Music programs at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity. A recipient of the Randolph S. Rothschild Scholarship, Camila has also received awards and scholarships from the Marshall M. Williams Endowment and Sorel Organization.
The Thinness Of
With special thanks to Martine Thomas for her beautiful text which influenced this work, your words have always been a source of inspiration and I am honored to have been able to include them in this piece:
light through distance. now focus in, up close. nothing but light, overcome, overpowering, overwhelming, thermonuclear fusion happening right now in the
plasmic spheroid, coming through clear from how far.
the dark whittles down to clarity. what holds together. what is inner. what is real, what distorts the message, what do you concede, & what will not translate? shed it.
forget the loss, keep clear & ask to be understood. against the star-thin edge between you & darkness & how can meaning come through. through the body of darkness
above. through the body at hand, the body at a glance, the body submerged within cloud or water or space, membranes, equilibrium, & what can be exchanged
between or across tell me what can come through?
fusion, luminous, coming clear from thousands of miles. through distance the thinness. the plasmic spheroid. from unknown miles, unknown distance. dark whittling
down to clarity. whittling down to the interior. it will not translate.
Provided with permission from the author, Martine Thomas (www.martinethomas.com)