Bio

Music by Gayle Young places the tactile experience of sound in the foreground of a listener’s experience. In her text-based pieces Young’s evocative descriptions act as phantom conductors, shaping intricate details of sound. In addition to composing for traditional instruments, Young creates sound installations, and performs on unique microtonal instruments she designed and built.

Young wrote The Sackbut Blues, the biography of pioneering electronic instrument inventor Hugh Le Caine (1914–1977). As editor of Musicworks magazine over her decades, she established an inclusive perspective on the complex and multifaceted sound worlds that characterize experimental music today.

I look for connections and relationships among sounds, and present them almost as if they were natural phenomena. It's a process of discovery, of un-heard or un-noticed worlds of sound, taking my listening outside my previous experience.

Gayle Young has been awarded an ACWC/ACC Honorary Membership in November, 2019 for her exceptional accomplishments as an innovative composer, instrument creator/inventor, writer, feminist and administrator. She has been an ACWC member since the very beginning, serving on the ACWC Board for many years. For decades she has edited Musicworks (Canada’s leading publication on new and unusual music). As well she has written extensively on tunings, wrote the definitive biography on Hugh LeCaine (Canada’s principal inventor of electronic instruments), written for our ACWC Journal, and was recently featured in a CMC Presents Concert, along with jaw-harp virtuoso Chik White on November 21, 2019 at Canadian Music Centre, Toronto. Young’s compositions, many of them electroacoustical and/or soundscape oriented, rank among the most highly esteemed Canadian works today. CMC suggests her tonal soundscapes “link natural sound with the musical worlds of tuning and harmony.” (CMC post).

A 2018 recipient of the ACWC Roberta Stephen Award, she was able to present her compositions with her new 9-stringed instrument, the Allium, at Visiones Sonores, an annual festival of electroacoustic music held in Morelia, Mexico. (ACWC Journal Spring/Summer 2019, 38-40). All along Gayle Young has championed women’s music as part of her ongoing life work.