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A passion for vegetarianism has been instrumental in Simon Fraser University undergrad James O’Callaghan’s evolution into a recognized music composer by the age of 21.

O’Callaghan says he wouldn’t be pursuing a career in music, never mind enjoying international recognition as an emerging composer, if it hadn’t been for his vegetarian beliefs.

Major orchestras at home and afar are playing the initially self-taught music composer’s first orchestral pieces.

An accomplished visual artist and theatre designer since his early teens, O’Callaghan originally came to the School for the Contemporary Arts to study film. But much to the fifth-year SFU student’s horror, he discovered in his first year that conventional film has an animal-derived gelatinous coating.

“Suddenly my dreams of being a film director were crushed, as I didn’t want to compromise my values as a strict vegetarian,” says the long-haired, soft spoken O’Callaghan. Working with digital film wouldn’t have been an option for him until his third year at SFU.

But a first year electroacoustic music course opened up a new artistic world for the composer, who until then had never studied music theory or listened to anything but electronic pop through headphones.

“I instantly fell in love with the sound of electroacoustic music and that paved the way for my discovery of contemporary avant-garde instrumental music. I am now focused on both equally,” says O’Callaghan, who used computer software to teach himself music notation.

In March 2010, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra played the Langley resident’s first-ever orchestral creation, Work/Werk, a 3 ½- minute instrumental piece with a percussive section that sounds like machinery.

At the end of April, the Victoria Symphony Orchestra will perform O’Callaghan’s second creation, Agoraphobia, an 8 ½- minute instrumental piece inspired by and created during Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics.

The piece’s alternating massive sound and tentative calm moments mirror the mixture of dread and excitement that characterize crowd-drawing events such as the Olympics.

O’Callaghan has used a computer as his music sheet and a mouse as his pen to turn notes from musical instruments into film score compositions for numerous SFU film students.

O’Callaghan adds: “I don’t impose my personal views about vegetarianism on other artists.”

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Backgrounder: Vegetarianism inspires music career

SFU music composer James O’Callaghan has created a new 60-second water and bird sound-filled, electroacoustic piece called Scavengers that will play for the first time at Congress 2010 in May. The University of Concordia in Montreal is hosting the interdisciplinary artistic conference.

Scavengers will make its international premier at the International Computer Music conference in New York this June.

In between creating music and sound compositions for a handful of new dance and film projects, this summer, O’Callaghan is also presenting a research paper at this year’s Electroacoustic Music Studies conference in Shanghai, China.

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