Music other people played, that I later arranged and/or transcribed.

As Arranger

From April 17th, 2014
Philip T. Young Recital Hall 
University of Victoria School of Music

Featuring:
Lee Whitehorne
Solomon Cheung
Romaine Gehring
B.T. Williams Saxophone Quartet

From the Saxophone Studio of Mr. Wendell Clanton. This fourth-year non-degree graduating recital was presented in partial fulfillment of the University of Victoria Saxophone Class performance requirements.

In Recital

Music I played (in reverse chronological order)

As Performer

Music I wrote.

Most tracks are computer-generated demos but will ideally be replaced by live recordings if and when pieces get performed by real people.

As Composer

Duo semplice (2010)
for oboe and alto saxophone

My second composition, written to a prompt to employ counterpoint, the superimposition of multiple melodies with various degrees of harmonic and rhythmic independence. At this point in my music theory studies, I had not yet breached the topic of species counterpoint, a rather rigid pedagogical system for learning the principles of contrapuntal composition within the European classical tradition. This left me uniquely unencumbered and free to explore the interaction of freely composed melodies in a more intuitive way (not that academic study of counterpoint is without its merits, of course). The result is this short and simple duet for alto saxophone and oboe, written with myself and an oboist friend in mind (though the piece was only workshopped using a muted trumpet instead).

Reflecting on this piece with more experienced ears, I hear some serendipitous parallels to Renaissance counterpoint and other non-classical, non-Western European musical vocabularies in the bare, two-voiced texture – a tentative and untrained initial exploration of the infinite expanse of musical pitch, without much concern for desires of functional independence and coherence. No specific musical languages were intentionally employed in this composition, though familiar sonic elements emerge – much like the piece’s title.

Version notes:
This playback demo was created using MuseScore 4 and the Muse Sounds library.

Duo semplice (2010)

Pimpin' (2008)
for saxophone quartet and boombox
by Jacob Tel Veldhuis (1951)

Lee Whitehorne, baritone saxophone
Austin Nicholl, soprano saxophone
Seán Maynard, alto saxophone
Zach Smith, tenor saxophone


Content Adivsory:
Pimpin' contains explicit language and mature subject matter not suitable for all listeners. Listeners are encouraged to read the notes below.


Pimpin', by Jacob Tel Veldhuis (Jacob TV), is based on the rhythm and pitch of speech culled from conversations between sex trade workers and pimps. The composition is not for the faint of heart. It is not meant as a caricature nor presented for its shock value. though the stories contained therein are understandably shocking.

The composition is a frank artistic take on a very gritty, disturbing and dangerous subculture. The composer manages to create a work that requires much technical skills from the musicians. By creating a relentlessly shifting groove, JTV lends respect for the virtuosic musical elements hidden in a culture marked by violence and other controversial distractions.

The spoken text is wrapped in an authentic funk arrangement, frequently polymetric due to the nature of spoken dialogue, with an accompanying audio track originally intended for the boombox. The funk aspect and the boombox serve as references to iconic aspect of the subculture JTV has attempted to portray. The boombox, though utilized as a prop in this performance, normally serves a practical function. The artistic references temper the understandable temptation to limit judgement of the piecce to its more controversial elements.

"Pimpin' released by American Modern Recordings, is "... a pastel neon scene straight out of Purple Rain. But the music is serious: seriously tuneful, atonalism taking a backseat to melody almost all the way through, and much of it seriously noir. Fans of dark sounds have a lot to enjoy here." -from the New York Daily review of Jeremy Justeson's album Pimpin' in November 2011, featuring this work

Pimpin' strikes rhythmic sparks that illuminate an otherwise dense and depressing text.

Jacob TV: Pimpin'

Intermède champêtre
by Philippe Gaubert
trans. M. Mule (1879-1941)

Lee Whitehorne, alto saxophone
Romaine Gehring, piano

Philippe Gaubert: Intermède champêtre

Study on Silence (2009)
from "Three Studies for the Spectator"
by Kira L.E. Hall

Lee Whitehorne, tenor saxophone
Teigan Cosgrove, assistant


Kira Hall is a former student of the University of Victoria School of Music. Study on Silence was premiered by UVic alumnus Mr. Alex Richards (DMA cand.).

Kira L.E. Hall: Study on Silence

Sonata (1960) 
for alto Saxophone and piano
by Alec Wilder (1907-1980)

I. ♩= 96
II. ♩. = 96
III. ♩. = 126
IV. ♩= 64

Lee Whitehorne, alto saxophone
Solomon Cheung, piano


Alec Wilder was born in Rochester, New York on February 16, 1907 and died on December 24, 1908. His formal education in music was confined to two years of counterpoint at the Eastman School of Music, but he was otherwise self-taught as a composer.

Wilder wrote in every form of music, from the popular song-of which he has written a large number of "classics"-to instrumental solos, chamber music, works for orchestra and wind ensemble, musical comedies, film music, even operas. Gunther Schuller has summed up one fellow musician's reaction to Wilder's music thus: "What so many of us respect in Alec Wilder was his absolute independence as an artist. For years Alec wrote music of taste and quality with that personal melodic touch that was all his own, undaunted by musical fashion or fads. And who else has been as devoted to the musician in providing a playable, functional literature for all those instrumental ensembles whom most composers generally ignore? It was almost a mission in Alec's life to assuage the thirst for good music of the so-called underdog instruments, much in the manner that composers did in the Baroque era, for example. In short, Alec was the musician's friend and an American 'original'. His death was a great loss to American music. Fortunately his music lives on."

Solo part edited by Donald Sinta.

Alec Wilder: Sonata for Alto Saxophone

Quatuor (1963)
pour saxophones
by Alfred Desenclos (1912-1971)

I. Allegro non troppo
II. Andante
III. Poco largo ma risoluto - Allegro energico


B.T. Williams Saxophone Quartet:
Austin Nicholl, soprano saxophone
Seán Maynard, alto saxophone
Lee Whitehorne, tenor saxophone
Zach Smith, baritone saxophone


Quatuor, by Alfred Desenclos, is an intense exploration of rapidly shifting sonorities, elegant melodies fragmented into motives, bold transitions and contrasting tempi that, like his Prelude, Cadence et Finale for alto saxophone and piano, requires virtuosity for its full realization. Desenclos creates conversations between the players in various combinations: solos, duos and trios that condense or evaporate with astonishing surprise. Players are frequently pitted against each other in pairs making for some very exciting encounters that threaten cohesion and test the listener's sense of the direction of the highly animated counterpoint.

Alfred Desenclos: Quatuor

Calloused Bodies (2010)
for solo cello

My first composition, written days after beginning the intro to music composition course at the University of Victoria. The class was prompted to write a short piece using only one note, an invitation to explore and embrace all the other dimensions of music beyond pitch. For me, this initial foray into composition focused on the open C string of the cello, my secondary instrument at the time (I studied saxophone). 

The musical ideas in this work are set apart by how that one string is set into vibration, how the player’s two hands articulate the single low C. The string is plucked with the fingertip and fingernail, bowed at different positions and in different manners, and both struck and bowed with the wooden stick of the cello bow, with gestures occasionally trading between the left and right hands. The performer’s score is also notated to indicate the relative location on the string where it is to be articulated, when necessary. At times, these alternations of bow position can emphasize various audible frequencies present in the vibration of the string (musical pitches) other than its fundamental low C, conjuring ethereal melodies without changing the “note” itself. What is a “note” to you?

Initially titled “Conscious Dialogue,” the piece's name was changed in current revision to the seemingly unrelated title one finds now. However, “Calloused Bodies” draws directly from its predecessor, taking its psychological undertones and adopting a direct translation of “corpus callosum” instead – the thick tract of neural fibres that serves as a main bridge between the left and right hemispheres of the human brain – informed by my later academic pursuits in psychology and neuroscience. This new title further emphasizes the role of lateralization in this piece: how the cellist’s left and right hands (like their respective hemispheres in the brain) join in dialogue via the vibrating medium between them.

Version Notes:
This demo was created using MuseScore 4 and the Muse Sounds library. Several modifications were made in the demo score to make playback more accurate to reality, as many notated articulations sound very different to what a human performer would interpret. Some samples are also mapped incorrectly, leading to anomalous gaps in the cello’s col legno, different dynamic levels, etc. Message me for more information about how I worked around these limitations.

Calloused Bodies (2010)

This Sound is Your Reckoning (2010)
for clarinet, alto saxophone, horn, 2 trumpets & organ 

Following a short piece for solo voice (of which I have no means to record), this work was my fourth composition, initially scored for winds and solo baritone voice. Written in December 2010, this brief sketch represents both a culmination of my initial few months of writing music and the early stages of a personal unravelling that would shape the coming years of my life. I have no recollection of how or why I wrote this piece, besides presumably being prompted by my composition teacher regarding the needed instrumental forces or some other constraint (possibly to employ unconventional harmonies). The unfocused and ad hoc process that birthed this, as well as much of my university work at the time, would destabilize further over the coming months, as I became increasingly desperate to keep up with expectations that I was underpowered to fulfill.

This work initially set the first lines of the “Tuba mirum” section from the liturgical Dies irae sequence, sung by the baritone voice and accompanied by searing fanfare-like material in the winds. This Latin text describes the sounding of a heavenly trumpet, announcing to the world that the day of judgment has arrived. Upon recent revision, I chose to replace the vocal part with a pipe organ to better stand up to the unrelenting wind instruments. The obscuring of the Latin text and the newly-monumental character created by the use of organ led me to update the title of the piece in kind. 

Though the intent and origins of this sketch remain unclear to me, I am compelled by the harmonic syntax that emerged, especially in the final crescendo and climax. I may expand these ideas into a larger-scale piece in the future.

Version notes:
This playback demo was created using MuseScore 4 and the Muse Sounds and MS Basic libraries.

This Sound Is Your Reckoning (2010)

De toonstudie (2011)
for quarter-tone organ

At the beginning of 2011, I continued my intro to composition course with a new instructor. Our first prompt was to compose a piece for solo violin, using pitches based on the eighth partial of the harmonic series and above – in essence, a first foray into exploring “pure” musical intervals based on simple mathematical ratios between the frequencies of notes, not the approximated compromise (twelve equal divisions of the octave) that most Western music employs. 

At that time, I struggled to define a framework for understanding and using this expanded harmonic vocabulary, especially in a compelling way. I was experiencing a period of intellectual and emotional overwhelm, and the deluge of novelty that most new university students experience only compounded this – I was without the time or capacity to integrate new ideas with much sophistication. The result for this assignment was a limited engagement with these new microtonal possibilities: a simple étude using approximations of upper-harmonic ratios by merely dividing the octave into twenty-four equal intervals (known as quarter-tones).

On revisiting this piece, the exclusive use of quarter-tones appears to be an ironically hindering but understandable misstep. Though it is fairly easy to conceptualize dividing the octave into twice as many steps as is common practice – imagine adding a key between each existing key on a piano – deviations by a quarter-tone only appear relatively high in the harmonic series, and its use can sound more grating than other simple frequency ratios. The history of quarter-tone use by other composers has robustly illustrated these challenges but also the new possibilities for expression that emerge. This short composition does at least avoid more severe dissonances by placing the microtonal intervals in a scale with steps never smaller than a typical semitone (the pitch distance between two keys on a normal piano) and mostly avoiding harmony (sounding multiple pitches at once). To this day, the challenges of microtonal (or xenharmonic) composition pose many interesting questions to me, particularly regarding how music can be structured, notated, and perceived – more recent developments to come.

The current version of this piece has adapted the violin part for a (somewhat hypothetical) organ with twenty-four keys per octave, as microtonal playback is not yet fully supported by the software used to generate this track. Since the landscape of possible articulations and tone colours differ wildly between these two instruments, I manipulated the registration for the organ playback (simulating the instrument’s different stops) to enhance the timbral and dynamic interest. A rendition of the violin version will be released when possible. This playback demo was created using MuseScore 4 and the Muse Sounds and MS Basic libraries.

De toonstudie (2011)

OM-EИ (2011/2023)
for solo piano

This piece was my first experiment using the twelve-tone technique (also known as dodecaphony), an influential compositional approach that rose to great prominence throughout the twentieth century but has largely been set aside by modern composers. By only using all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale (all the notes within an octave) in a fixed order and not repeating any pitches before the full list has been expended, practitioners of the technique attempted to forge new musical grammars and cast off the hierarchies of common-practice harmonic syntax they had inherited from centuries of composers that came before. This often-rigid ordering of pitches in “tone rows” still provided room for permutation (and therefore, intellectual complexity), through presenting rows in reverse, inverting the intervals within (making all upward movement go down, for example), or transposing the row to start on a different pitch but still proceeding through the same order of intervals. The rules of counterpoint, tonal centres, and conventional chord relationships that defined Western art music from the Baroque period to that point were intentionally being cast aside, the culturally accumulated standards of consonance and dissonance being flattened. This initial framework spawned many streams of compositional practice from the mid-century on, known widely now as “serialism.”

The prompt that generated this specific piece was to write a short solo work for piano using said twelve-tone technique. We were permitted to choose our own tone row and employ its permutations how we saw fit. My personal intent was to explore how a conventional tune (often birthed from a traditional harmonic framework) could still be expressed within the twelve-tone idiom. From my limited understanding of what was possible in this system at the time, I set forth interweaving rows – some inverted, transposed, and/or presented in retrograde – with the goal of perserving a traditional melody throughout and allowing new harmonies to emerge from this tapestry. As with the turbulence I experienced with my preceding microtonal violin piece, my challenges to bring this idea to fruition resulted in what was ostensibly just a plan for the arrangement of the tone rows, without much attention to other musical dimensions. The main criticism I received on my submitted draft was that I used a very restricted range of the instrument. It was left as mostly a sketch, and I never made it to the class where we got to hear these compositions read through by an actual pianist. 

On revisiting this piece recently, I finally fleshed out the texture and character that I had always intended, indicated primarily by my original marking of a “moderate rag” tempo and style. With the familiar tune still present throughout, the composition has become a bit of a piano showpiece, perhaps a fun encore to a recital. 

As for my relationship to twelve-tone composition: like many, I now appreciate that its framework for organizing pitch and the manipulations used to elaborate within that system suffer from being opaque to perception by the listener, especially those not versed in the theoretical underpinnings of the style or the particular work at hand. Most people cannot identify that a tone row has been repeated – let alone in reverse or with its intervals flipped upside down – and the complexity of how these processes are then superimposed and woven together cannot be casually appreciated without that foundation, especially on first hearing (assuming a listener might grant a second). Expect an upcoming follow-up that will explore this a little further. With that in mind, the sonic palette that twelve-tone composition can create remains fruitful and still free of the trappings of classical harmony that permeate much of modern music today – it is yet another tool of expression, to be kept in the back pocket for when the need arises.

OM–EИ (2011/2023)

Blitz (2018)
Ricercare for 31EDO organ

Seven years after my first and only other exploration of microtonality to date (De Toonstudie), this work was composed to demonstrate a Max patch I had developed for a course in computer music. Using Max, a graphical programming language for music and multimedia art, I created a digital synthesizer that allowed performers to play subsets of notes from an octave divided into thirty-one equal parts (31EDO) – but by using a traditional piano keyboard, which has only twelve notes per octave. Through a set of virtual switches, the player could shift exactly which pitch each key would play, making all thirty-one steps in the octave accessible, much like how a harpist uses pedals to select which seven pitches of the usual twelve-note octave the instrument will sound. This whole project was inspired by the Fokker organ, a 31EDO instrument developed in 1951 by the Dutch composer, theoretician, and physicist, Adriaan Fokker. The version presented here replaces the pure synthesized tones of the Max version (coined the “Lil Fokker”) with organ samples, to best approximate the timbres of the original Fokker organ.

The subtitle “ricercare,” an Italian label for often-contrapuntal works of the early Baroque, refers to my process of “searching out” new harmonic perspectives within this novel (to me) tuning system. Based on a subset of pitches that includes best approximations of lower harmonics (7-limit) of three adjacent 31EDO fundamentals (approximately A-flat, A, and A-sharp), this piece moves quickly between musical styles, traversing “absolute” experiments with temperament – echoing spectralism, but also common-practice counterpoint  – and familiar yet contorted sounds, evoking Indonesian gamelan, blue notes of American jazz, and warped quotations from another of my electronic works.     

Version Notes:
This playback demo was created using MuseScore 4 and the MS Basic library, using different samples and EQs to roughly approximate the stops of the original Fokker organ.

Blitz (2018)

Blue Hour Crucible (2011)
for saxophone quartet, piano & offstage bass trombone

Premiered April 6, 2011 (as “Nachtstücke: III. Dämmerung”)
Phillip T. Young Recital Hall, University of Victoria, Canada
Quartet Axis, Allannah Montgomery (piano), Tim Pearce (trombone)

This work was composed and performed as a final assignment for the introduction to music composition course I attended in my first year of university. No constraints were placed on the techniques or instrumentation the composers could use, as long as they could find, organize, and rehearse the players needed. Initially intended as the final of three movements, this piece is one of my few compositions to actually receive a public performance. I had aspirations to recruit an even larger and more diverse ensemble, but the conditions under which this project was put together demanded increasing economy along any dimension possible. However, I hold a deep gratitude to musicians I worked with on this project: first-year friends and saxophone studio peers. Their patience and openness was more than I could have ever asked for.

By April 2011, I had hit a productivity wall: a culmination of multiple self-defeating dynamics my life that I lacked the framework to even begin dismantling. Undermining my academic, personal, and emotional worlds, this situation turned the creation of this composition into a breaking point. The writing was not happening and, despite trying to make progress for days, hours, and minutes before the performance, I only managed to squeeze something together at the last  minute possible: during the concert itself, though slightly before my own performance. I felt a lot of shame during this process, compounded by later being rejected from the composition program. In reality, it took years to untangle the factors that led to that failure and those that followed in the years to come – I was not ready for those opportunities. Future pieces will address the explorations that helped me pull myself out of that situation, beginning to develop a compositional process that worked for me.

The piece itself adopts a formal structure inspired by Terry Riley’s “In C”: each musician is assigned a set of motivic cells, repeating one cell at a time as long as they choose and then moving on to the next. Unlike Riley’s piece, each player has unique musical material and the repeating cells are preceded by a rhythmically-free introductory section. In the original performance, the unified pulse was given by an audible metronome, though my current preference would be to use a conductor giving unmetered beats. The saxophone quartet and piano remain in one harmonic space, while colourations from the distant trombone shift the overall context, creating a free sense of progression. As the piece progresses, all players are instructed to crescendo to a final fortissimo and complete all cells by the end. Ideally, the duration of the work follows the timing of the local blue hour, though the initial performance ran until the metronome stopped.

Version notes:
This playback demo was created using MuseScore 4 and the Muse Sounds and MS Basic libraries. Modifications to the original score include minor shifts in register (to increase transparency between the different instruments) and removal of an audible metronome as a timekeeper.

Blue Hour Crucible (2011)

Fantasia (2019) 
on “Highland Cathedral”
for saxophone quartet

Premiered August 2019 at a private wedding in Metchosin, Canada
B.T. Williams Quartet

In 2019, a dear friend hired the currently-defunct B.T. Williams Quartet and I to provide music for her wedding. In addition to helping put together programs of various classical and pop hits for their ceremony and reception, I composed this short piece to act as a recessional, as the conventional wedding repertoire lacked a certain personal resonance for the occasion.

A set of free variations on the Highland bagpipe tune, “Highland Cathedral,” the work takes inspiration the formative bonding my friend and I experienced in high school concert and jazz bands, as well as whatever the opposite of bonding is, regarding her adoration of bagpipe music. (The B.T. Williams Quartet had spent many summers jockeying against strident pipers for the prime busking locations in Victoria’s Inner Harbour, and I had worked nearby, within earshot of too many dubious renditions of “Scotland the Brave.”) The bride and groom got engaged while travelling Europe, in an ancient Scottish church where ancestors of the bride had once been married, so this particular melody seemed especially appropriate. 

Version notes:
This playback demo was created using MuseScore 4 and the Muse Sounds libraries.

Fantasia (2019)

Arranged in 2019 for the B.T. Williams Quartet, a saxophone quartet (with added percussion instruments) busking in the Victoria, British Columbia area

Original written by Angus Young and Malcolm Young, recorded by AC/DC

This playback demo was created using MuseScore 4 and the Muse Sounds and MS Basics libraries. Tracks were processed to repair artifacts in the Muse Sounds samples before final mixing and mastering.

Nightmare-fuel AI artwork courtesy of Leonardo.ai

AC/DC – Thunderstruck (arr. for sax quartet)

Arranged in 2019 for the B.T. Williams Quartet, a saxophone quartet (with added percussion instruments) busking in the Victoria, British Columbia area

Based on the version composed by Michael Giacchino for Mission: Impossible III; original theme by Lalo Schifrin.

This playback demo was created using MuseScore 4 and the Muse Sounds and MS Basics libraries. Tracks were processed to repair artifacts in the Muse Sounds samples before final mixing and mastering.

AI artwork courtesy of Leonardo.ai

Mission: Impossible Theme (arr. for sax quartet)

Transcribed and arranged in 2019 for the B.T. Williams Quartet, a saxophone quartet (with added percussion instruments) busking in the Victoria, British Columbia area

The Marvel Studios fanfare was originally composed by Michael Giacchino
"The Avengers" was originally composed by Alan Silvestri

This playback demo was created using MuseScore 4 and the Muse Sounds and MS Basics libraries. Tracks were processed to repair artifacts in the Muse Sounds samples before final mixing and mastering.

Nightmare-fuel AI artwork courtesy of Leonardo.ai

Avengers Assemble! (arr. for sax quartet)

Transcribed and arranged in 2019 for the B.T. Williams Quartet, a saxophone quartet (with added percussion instruments) busking in the Victoria, British Columbia area

The Pokémon Theme, from the TV series, was originally written by John Siegler and John Loeffler.
The Battle Music was originally composed by Junichi Masuda

This playback demo was created using MuseScore 4 and the Muse Sounds and MS Basics libraries. Tracks were processed to repair artifacts in the Muse Sounds samples before final mixing and mastering.

Actually cute AI artwork courtesy of Leonardo.ai

PokéSax

Arranged in 2019 for the B.T. Williams Quartet, a saxophone quartet (with added percussion instruments) busking in the Victoria, British Columbia area

Original written by Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, and Desmond Child, recorded by Bon Jovi

This playback demo was created using MuseScore 4 and the Muse Sounds and MS Basics libraries. Tracks were processed to repair artifacts in the Muse Sounds samples before final mixing and mastering.

Nightmare-fuel AI artwork courtesy of Leonardo.ai

Bon Jovi – Livin' On A Prayer (arr. for sax quartet)

Arranged in 2011 for the saxophone studio of the University of Victoria School of Music. Years later, this arrangement was performed more widely by the B.T. Williams Quartet, a saxophone quartet (with added percussion instruments) busking in the Victoria, British Columbia area. Sax memes were big in 2010/11, though we didn't call them that yet.

"Careless Whisper" was originally written by Wham! (George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley) and performed by George Michael/Wham!
"Run Away" instrumental solo (Epic Sax Guy) was originally performed by Sergey Stepanov and SunStroke Project
"I Am So Glad I'm Finally Returning Back Home" was written by Arkady Ostravsky and made famous by Eduard Khil, known to many as the "Trololo Song"

This playback demo was created using MuseScore 4 and the Muse Sounds and MS Basics libraries. Tracks were processed to repair artifacts in the Muse Sounds samples before final mixing and mastering.

Nightmare-fuel AI artwork courtesy of Leonardo.ai

Careless Memer

The third and so far best performance of a piece I wrote in January of 2016 for my good friend Matthew Bell, to be performed at his graduating recital in February 2016. It was intended to feature baritone saxophone, and somewhat unintentionally features snare drum as well.

This performance is from my saxophone/composition recital in April 2016.

Performed by: Matthew Bell, baritone saxophone; Lee Whitehorne, contrabassoon; Dayna Waller, tuba; Tristan Holleufer, snare drum; DJ Lochead, bass drum; and Dave Riedstra, electric bass.

Image: "Black, Red and Black" by Mark Rothko

you don't make rails out of glass for a reason

The first movement of Electromagnetic, entitled "Radio", is based on the radio waves region of the electromagnetic spectrum. It was performed at my graduating composition recital on April 2nd, 2017.

Performed by: Adam Jasieniuk, contrabass clarinet; Lee Whitehorne, contrabassoon; and Dave Riedstra, double bass.

Conducted by Thomas Nicholson.

Compositions

Electromagnetic – I. Radio

MOTTE (2017) is a chamber piece in Just Intonation that investigates the perceptual relationship between tuneable (natural) intervals and the various (enharmonic) paths they may take over an extended duration. 

As discerning listeners of a particular tradition, we are often preoccupied with a rhetorical study of harmony as having a “functional” meaning; stepping back for a moment and allow-ing oneself to get lost in the web of the sound itself, however, may allow for an emancipation of increasingly expressive and subtly shaded consonances and dissonances — a free tonality. With this in mind, the experience of listening need not be passive or of habit, in which lis-teners invariably make decisions about the “meaning” of what they are hearing, no matter how apparently familiar,  based on preconceived philosophies of consonance, dissonance, and their interplay. Instead, it may be molded and reshaped in real-time, allowing its own per-ception and memory to be informed by and to evolve alongside events happening in the moment.

MOTTE (2016/17)

I - Music For Saxophones

ConcertoForAltoSax

Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist, composer and music educator with diverse roots in classical, jazz and contemporary art music, as well as street performance and musical theatre. Frequently juggling a unique array of saxophones, bassoons, and clarinets (even cello) within a single performance, he has performed alongside ensembles from across southern British Columbia, including the Victoria Symphony, Theatre Under the Stars Vancouver, and as a founding member of the BT Williams Quartet. Whitehorne earned a Bachelor of Music from the University of Victoria in 2018 and currently pursues academic research into music, language, and the brain, as part of graduate studies in psychology. As a composer, his output includes works for solo musicians, chamber ensemble and larger forces. Whitehorne has often been heard in an eclectic mix of venues around Victoria, from the Royal Theatre to the Inner Harbour causeway, passionate about sharing fresh, engaging music with new audiences.

Lee Whitehorne

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