- Adacemia.edu: Diego Castro Magas
- Research identifier: ORCID ID: 0000-0002-8697-5110
Research Fellow
Diego Castro-Magas is a Chilean guitarist, researcher, and educator specialising in contemporary performance and artistic research. Born in Chile (1978), he has developed a distinguished career combining academic rigor with artistic innovation. His contributions to contemporary guitar performance and research have earned him international recognition.
Diego studied guitar with Oscar Ohlsen at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (1997-2000) and Ricardo Gallén and Fernando Rodríguez at Universitat Ramon Llull in Spain (2003-2005). Also, he took private lessons of contemporary electric-guitar under Daryl Buckley. In 2016, Diego completed his PhD in Contemporary Performance under the guidance of Philip Thomas at the University of Huddersfield, where he was awarded the Vice Chancellor's Award for his thesis "Body, mimesis and image: a gesture-based approach to interpretation in contemporary guitar performing practice".
As an advocate of the music of our time, Diego has collaborated with composers such as Brian Ferneyhough, James Dillon, Michael Finnissy, Aaron Cassidy, Wieland Hoban, James Erber, Michael E. Edgerton, Bryn Harrison, Eric Egan, Christopher Fox, Hilda Paredes, Cristian Morales-Ossio, Nicolás Kliwadenko and Clemens Gadenstätter, among many others, delivering performances and premieres of their guitar pieces. He has performed in contemporary music festivals in Chile, Venezuela, Cuba, Germany, Spain, Estonia and the UK. He has also recorded several solo and collaborative albums, published by labels such as Huddersfield Contemporary Records/NMC Recordings, Another Timbre and First Hand Records.
Diego has published peer-reviewed articles on topics related to contemporary performance, performance studies and artistic research in specialised journals such as Tempo, Divergence Press, Revista Vortex, Revista Musica Hodie and Revista Resonancias, and a chapter book at Leuven University Press. He has also been an invited speaker at numerous international conferences and workshops, including events at the University of Surrey, University of York, University of Leeds, Durham University, Brunel University London, Northwestern University, Hong Kong Baptist University, Lund University and the Orpheus Instituut, highlighting his participations at the ORCiM Seminar 2015 ‘The Making of Musical Time’ and DARE 2015: The Dark Precursor.
Diego has served as Associate Professor in Music at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, supervising Master and PhD students in topics on music performance and artistic research. He was Director of Research and Head of the Doctorado en Artes at the Faculty of Arts, chairing two versions of the international conference Congreso Latinoamericano de Práctica Artística como Investigación at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 2022 and 2024, respectively. Currently, he is the Director of the new transdisciplinary journal Artexégesis (artexegesis.uc.cl) devoted to artistic research.
Since 2025, Diego is the Principal Investigator of the project ‘Radically Embodied Performance as Musical Structure’, supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme and hosted at the Orpheus Instituut.
Current research
- Complex and experimental Performance Practices
- Embodiment, analysis and Performance Practice
- Intersections between Music and Philosophy
Topics
- Performance
- Embodiment
- Experimentation
Further expertise
- Guitar performance
- Complex music
- Improvisation
Current research collaborators
- Paulo de Assis
- Michael Clarke
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
