A.J. McCaffrey

AJMcCaffreyA.J. McCaffrey
March 2006

      Meeting the British

A.J.’s music has been performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, as well as by several Boston-area ensembles. He has been featured on Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s “The Next Next” new music series, and has recently been named Composer-in-Residence for the Radius Ensemble, a Boston-based chamber group. He currently lives in the Boston area, where he is the Chair of Theory and Composition at the Community Music Center of Boston.

In a reading of his poem, “Meeting the British”, Paul Muldoon identifies the speaker as the spirit of the Ottawa, meeting a pair of British officers around the time of the Pontiac Rebellion in 1763. “The eventual betrayal of the native North Americans by the British in this poem struck me as quiet and intimate, almost shockingly so,” Mr. McCaffrey said. “In setting this text to music, I wanted listeners to discover this stillness gradually, as if by accident.”