commission : State command (Ministère des Affaires culturelles)
creation : 26 October 1969, Semaines Internationale de Musique Contemporaine de Paris
musicians : 6 percussionists, 1 piano
publisher : Alphonse Leduc, nº AL25362
Archipels is a series of five chamber music works by André Boucourechliev. The composer inaugurates a new approach to interpretation based on the musician’s free and responsible choice of form, duration or articulation of the music. The author specifies: “the choice made by each performer at each moment determines the unforeseeable course of the work; that is to say, it is a function of an infinity of constantly renewed collective situations that mutual listening appreciates, provokes and leads”.
Composed in 1969 for the Percussions de Strasbourg, the ensemble is made up of six percussion groups associated in pairs, with a stereophonic effect resulting from their spatialization.
Source: François-René Tranchefort, Guide de la musique de chambre, ed.Fayard 1989, p.147