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)

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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.

Blue Hour Crucible (2011)

Lee Whitehorne

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