Dylan Fitzhenry
Dylan Fitzhenry is a Winnipeg-born, Vancouver-based composer specializing in contemporary music for winds, strings and electronics, with a focus on expanding the repertoire for winds as both a member of the Prairie Composer Collective and as the 2025-27 Composer- In-Residence for the University of British Columbia Symphonic Wind Ensemble. As a composer, Dylan’s main goal is to make contemporary music accessible and compelling for both performers and audiences. To that end, Fitzhenry’s music has been described as “complex, in a fun way” by performers and peers. Dylan’s style in chamber music aims towards emotion and philosophy, often mixed with a subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) undertone of humour, as a way to make performers audiences feel more at home within a space of adventurous harmony and strange orchestration. This combination of philosophy and humour takes form in several ways in Fitzhenry’s portfolio, from heavy use of polystylism and unconventional extended techniques in his piece “Portals” for String Quartet, and the more overtly non-serious use of quotation, extreme juxtaposition, emotional contrast, and distraction in “the veil is thin, and sometimes is plaid” for Saxophone Quartet and Metal Bucket. Dylan’s chamber music has found recognition across Canada, writing for Winnipeg’s 2024 CLUSTER Festival, 2025 Contemporary Music Interactive concert season, and for Vancouver’s esteemed Standing Wave Ensemble.
Featured at CMI
Portals
When writing a piece, I try to make it my goal to explore one musical idea as much a possible before bringing in a new idea. In my mind, this reduces the compositional “clutter” that so many of my earlier pieces yielded. So nowadays, most of my pieces have only 2 or 3 definite recurring ideas. Portals is an experiment to see just how far I could push a piece with just one idea, while also not sacrificing any creativity or individuality. It consists of just one musical motive which, over the course of the piece, leaps between different styles, tonalities, metres, emotions, and techniques. I imagine it as a single character leaping through musical portals between vastly different places and times, to gradually morphing the melody in increasingly more extreme ways. This gave me a good excuse to step outside of my comfort zone in terms of writing juxtaposition, extended techniques, and very dissonant polytonality, and ended up being an incredibly fun project to write and hear!