FRANCISCO CASTILLO TRIGUEROS was born in Mexico City, on December 7 th, 1983. He started piano lessons with teacher Haruko Shimizu at the age of four and at the same age entered the children’s program at the Yamaha School of Music in Mexico City. At the age of eleven he started taking classical and Spanish guitar lessons. In 2000, Francisco migrated to the United States to attend St. Mark’s High School in Southborough, Massachusetts, where he studied theory and composition with Tom Berryman and piano with Ellina Blinder.

In 2002, he entered the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University where he has studied composition with Pierre Jalbert, Shih-Hui Chen and Arthur Gottschalk. In the Shepherd School of music, Francisco has had the chance to work with groups such as Speculum Musicae, California Ear Unit, and the Woodlands Symphony Orchestra, and has been in master classes with composers like George Crumb, Bernard Rands, Stefano Scodanibbio, Samuel Jones and Ellsworth Millburn.

The composer has also collaborated with Rice Dance Theatre and with several performers of the Shepherd School of Music. Francisco studied with Catalan theorist and composer Marcos Bosch in the summer of 2003, and took master classes and private lessons with Kaija Saariaho, Frederic Rwezki and Chen Yi in the Music X Summer Festival of 2004 in Cincinnatti, where his piece Solsticio for Violoncello and Piano was performed. His music has been played in several cities in the United States and Mexico, and it has been described as “evocative”and full of “mystical harmonies, and sensuous strings.”