WHIMSICAL SKETCHES OF FANCIFUL BIRDS Book 2

Vincent Ho’s Whimsical Sketches of Fanciful Birds transforms his childhood fascination with birds into vivid musical caricatures, combining playful storytelling with the saxophone’s expressive possibilities.

Emerging from collaborative saxophone and piano improvisation sessions during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, these pieces explore the sonic and expressive possibilities of this partnership. Each piece is a musical caricature, the composer imagining his fanciful birds as larger-than-life cartoon characters represented by musical moods and gestures that are at times correspondingly exaggerated for comic or tender effect. The pieces in Book 2 exhibit a range of contrasting but complementary moods. In “Stoned Vulture”, the piano and saxophone trade languid, cascading lines; “Mobster Magpie” is a jazzy moto perpetuo; in “Baby Phoenix”, strange otherworldly calls emanate from the saxophone’s mouthpiece, accompanied by Aeolian harp sounds strummed within the piano; the saxophone’s “Sedated Seagull“ floats dreamily above limpid piano chords that traverse the piano’s full register; and “Paranoid Hummingbird” alternates nervous, disjointed, darting motifs with implacable, motoric rhythms.

Adventurous performers will relish the scope the composer offers throughout these pieces to exercise their own creative freedom of interpretation. While each collection forms a satisfying group when performed as whole, individual pieces will make a pleasingly quirky contribution to a recital.

From the Composer
When I was a child, birds fascinated me and I spent a great deal of time learning about their many varieties. For each species I learned about, I would create imaginary cartoon-like characters based on them and dream up little stories to amuse myself. Whimsical Sketches of Fanciful Birds is my recreation of some of those childhood fancies in musical form.

• Stoned Vulture
• Mobster Magpie
• Baby Phoenix
• Sedated Seagull
• Paranoid Hummingbird

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