Willyn Whiting

Willyn Whiting (he/him) is a Canadian composer of both acoustic and electro-acoustic music based in his hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba. 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.

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), the Electronic Music Midwest Festival (2023), the Performing Media Festival (2023) 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, was one of four finalists in GroundSwell’s Emerging Composer Competition (2020).

Willyn has had the opportunity to participate in workshops in both Canada and the United States 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 such ensembles as the Bozzini Quartet, and Del Sol String Quartet, and conductor Véronique Lacroix, and gainfully taken masterclasses with composers Javier Torres Maldonado, Laurie Radford, João Pedro Oliveira, Ana Sokolović, and Jean Lesage.

In his large scale projects Willyn is passionate about collaborating with emerging artists and supporting the development of dedicated new music ensembles. Both his Master’s and Doctoral degree projects were written for specific ensembles and produced in close collaboration. For his Master’s Thesis he worked with Ensemble Atlantica, soprano Susan Dworkin, and conductor Baptiste Boiron, to produce his 23-minute song cycle Six Blake Songs (2018). For his doctoral dissertation 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, who at the time was composer in residence for the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. 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. In his academic pursuits 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.

www.willynwhiting.com