Digital village

Year: 2025

Duration: c. 30 minutes

Instrumentation: string quartet, alto recorder (doubling sopranino and Paetzold), grand piano, live electronics, three narrators/singers of any voice type

Premiere information: 4th April 2025, 4:00pm, Royal College of Music Performance Studio

Larli Davies - recorders
Harry Nim | Mira Steenbrugge - violin
Molly Frances Arnuk - viola
Robert Baird - cello
Minh Trang Nguyen - piano
Thomas Shorthouse - electronics
Chauncey Burghart | Rowan Burghart | Molly McGrath - narrators

Notes: DIGITAL VILLAGE (or DiVi) was an immersive audiovisual piece for chamber ensemble over eight social media livestreams and low-latency wired connections. It was heavily inspired by the piece Ugnayan by Jose Maceda, and premiered in April 2025 as part of the student-curated Great Exhibitionists concert series at the Royal College of Music, which is dedicated to exploring innovations in performance practice.

The majority of the text consists of Filipino myths and folktales that I remember from my childhood, in styles that range from storybook narration, to dramatic monologue, to TikTok GRWM. These tales overlap with poetry by longtime collaborator Molly McGrath.