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Willyn Whiting (he/him) is a Canadian composer of both acoustic and electro-acoustic music. His current research has involved the reassessment of trends in contemporary classical music with an emphasis on metaphor and analytic philosophy. His stylistic interests include Microtonality, Spectralism, Acoustic Ecology, and Algorithmic Design.

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Willyn's acoustic works have been performed by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Fort-Worth Symphony Orchestra, Bozzini String Quartet and Del Sol String Quartet. His orchestral piece Framework (2020) won a SOCAN Foundation Emerging Composer Award shortly before its premiere as part of the Winnipeg New Music Festival in 2024.

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His electro-acoustic works have been featured in such festivals as the annual Conference for the Society of Electroacoustic Music in the United States (2021/2024), the Electronic Music Midwest Festival (2023), the Performing Media Festival (2023), the Napoleon Electronic Media Festival (2024) and the Electric LaTex Festival (2022) in America, as well as the Resilience Festival (2022) in Italy. In Canada his first essay in fixed media, For Dancer and Projection (2020), was one of four finalists in GroundSwell’s Emerging Composer Competition (2020).

 

Willyn has had the opportunity to participate in composer workshops including the Creative Music Intensive (2022), Orford Academy Composition Workshop (2017 & 2018), Domaine Forget Composition Workshop (2018), Montréal Contemporary Music Lab (2018 & 2019) and the SPLICE Institute (2022 & 2023). Through these opportunities he has had the privilege of working with conductor Véronique Lacroix, and composers Javier Torres Maldonado, Laurie Radford, João Pedro Oliveira, Ana Sokolović, and Jean Lesage.

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In his large scale projects Willyn has collaborated with emerging artists and dedicated new music ensembles. Both his Master’s and Doctoral degree projects were produced in close collaboration with specific new music ensembles. He worked with Ensemble Atlantica, soprano Susan Dworkin, and conductor Baptiste Boiron, to produce his 23-minute song cycle Six Blake Songs (2018). More recently he collaborated with Boston-based Re:duo to produce HOWL (2023), a 34-minute work for viola, baritone saxophone, and four-channel audio.

 

Before pursuing his post-secondary education Willyn had the opportunity of studying composition privately with Vincent Ho. Since then he has completed a Bachelor of Music at the University of Toronto, a Master of Music at the University of Western Ontario, and a PhD in composition at the University of North Texas. He has studied with composers Chan Ka Nin, Larysa Kuzmenko, James Rolfe, Gary Kulesha, Paul Frehner, Joseph Klein, Kirsten Soriano, Jon Nelson and Panayiotis Kokoras.

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