Featured UBC Faculty and Alumni: Vern Griffiths percussion; Christie Reside, flute and UBC Alum AK Coope, clarinet (BMus)
Release: October 2025 on Redshift
Description:
in an archipelago (2020) – James O’Callaghan
In an archipelago is a work for sextet and electronics, or any combination of its constituent parts, from solos, various possible duos and trios, and so on, all the way up to the full band, for a total of 127 possible combinations. The work was composed during the COVID-19 pandemic, where an uncertain future led to the idea of affording the extracting of solos from the commission of a chamber piece-to-be. Each instrument’s part was composed one-by-one, first as a mockup assembled from recordings of my past pieces, among other sources. I listened to each of these parts in different combinations and fine-tuned them as I went in order to compose in such a way that they could exist on their own or in this variable company. I then transcribed the parts into a notated chamber score. Each instrument has a phoneme attached to it, drawn from the title, and the title of each performance becomes an assemblage of its parts.
Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s 1985 essay The Repeating Island set out a way of thinking borne of the postcolonial conditions of the Caribbean that challenges the binary ontologies of Analytical and Continental Thinking. An Archipelagic Thinking is one of multiplicity and polyrhythm which conceptualizes through fragmentary interrelations rather than a system or a totality. In composing this piece, I was thinking about connectivity through isolation, and the idea that repetition brings necessarily a difference and a deferral. The kind of densely modular repetition I experiment with, where every moment is densely recontextualizable, is one that I hope offers an opportunity to collapse binary listening