Daniel Santiago Castellanos

1/25/24: Happy New Year! Welcome to my homepage. While I have you here, I’d love if you could listen to this string quartet I wrote back in 2023.

I called it Fixate and it serves as a commentary on Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). I’m either unable to focus on anything, or hyper-fixated on one arbitrary thing – there’s rarely any in-between. In writing this piece, I wanted the sounds to reflect that polarity.

Composing this piece in itself was both a personal exercise in concentration, as well as a meditation on unmindfulness, finding comfort and relief in an inevitable dissociation from a world that is constantly bombarding us with distractions and stimuli.

This piece is about my own struggles focusing, but it can also reflect the listener’s own inability to do so, given that we are constantly bombarded by infographics, dopamine traps, information, misinformation, memes and so many more things designed to distract us. Let this piece be a counter to that. I hope you enjoy it! Also trying to find string players to premiere this one so if you or someone you know is curious to program this piece, feel free to contact me!