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.
Book 1 for alto saxophone and piano, introduces five contrasting personalities, from “Inebriated Crows” and “The Watchful Owl” to the explosive “Short-Tempered Parakeet”, using glissandi, pitch bends, rhythmic instability and piano clusters to suggest movement, calls and temperament.
Book 2 extends this imaginative world through “Stoned Vultures”, “Mobster Magpie”, “Baby Phoenix”, “Sedated Seagull” and “Paranoid Hummingbird”, giving each bird recognisably human characteristics while exploring further possibilities of saxophone technique.
Book 3 retains the same instrumentation but broadens the cast with “Caffeinated Robyn”, “Corporate Puffin”, “Charming Goldfinch”, “Love Birds” and “The Angel and the Mockingbird”, continuing Ho’s affectionate, cartoon-like approach to musical characterisation.
Book 4, written for the Proteus Saxophone Quartet, shifts attention from individual personalities to collective identities, depicting a murder of crows, a murmuration of starlings, a charm of goldfinches, a parliament of owls and an ostentation of peacocks, extending the series’ imaginative premise into ensemble writing through five avian group portraits inspired directly by these evocative collective nouns.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was inspired to write two follow-up collections to Whimsical Sketches of Fanciful Birds. The first collection had become quite popular among professional and student saxophonists, and this motivated me to continue the series with new works. As well, I had numerous improv sessions with my friend and colleague Jeremy Brown that generated many new ideas for me to develop for these new collections.
Like Book 1, these new collections explore the many sonic and expressive possibilities of the saxophone in an attempt to recreate numerous birdlike sounds. The movements are musical caricatures of various birds presented as cartoon-like characters in humorous situations. Approaching each bird as a cartoon character opened up many creative possibilities for me while reconnecting with my inner child, one that grew up watching Looney Tunes cartoons.
My sincerest thanks go to saxophonists Dr. Jeremy Brown and Dr. Timothy McAllister for their inspiration and input during the creation of these works.
