The annual Sonic Boom festival, which runs at the Western Front from next Thursday to Sunday (April 10 to 13), is a rare chance for listeners to hear new work from a diverse array of local composers—everyone from talented music-school students to celebrated veterans. And that’s one reason why Christopher Butterfield, this year’s composer in residence, is excited about his first-ever visit to the event.

“I’ve actually never been to Sonic Boom,” says the University of Victoria composition professor, on the line from his office. “I always see it from a distance, year after year after year, and think it’s wonderful that Vancouver has this very real and very local festival. I can’t really think of anything else like it in the country.”

Butterfield is looking forward to connecting with his peers on this side of the Strait of Georgia—and with some dusty pages from his past, courtesy of Sonic Boom’s organizers, Vancouver Pro Musica. “They asked me, ‘Would you write a piece?’ ” he says. “And I said, ‘No. I’d really like to hear something I’ve written before, but never heard since.’ And, you know, it’s been a long time since I’ve had anything played in Vancouver. It’s about time we went back to the catalogue, so to speak.”

He laughs, because Catalogue is also the title of the piece that he’s unearthing for Sonic Boom’s final night. It’s a 1981 opus for woodwind quintet, and it represents a turning point in Butterfield’s artistic evolution.

“My whole view of composition changed after I wrote that piece, because I realized that although I could try and imagine the sound of a music that I would write, I would never, ever really know the whole remarkable world of what would be the end result,” he says, admitting that he was originally dubious about writing for this particular combination of instruments.

“Maybe I’m just talking about taking pleasure in getting sound back from this bizarre silent action that you do, writing music,” he continues. “All of a sudden I was presented with this magical organ—the combination of woodwinds and a French horn—that was like a revelation. I said ‘I’ll never make rude comments about the woodwind quintet again!’ ”

Revelatory though Catalogue’s Toronto premiere may have been, it was also the piece’s only performance—a problem common to new music in Canada, which is rich in talented composers but underserved at the infrastructural level. “You make a sound, and the sound goes out and keeps on going and doesn’t hit anything,” Butterfield notes. “There isn’t a hard surface there to reflect it back at you, in the sense of a critique.”

This, at least, he will be able to address in his other role as Sonic Boom’s éminence grise. Part of his mandate, Butterfield explains, will be to offer editorial expertise to those composers still struggling to find their voice.

“For me,” he says, “it’s exciting to see new work and to just sit down and talk about it and say ‘What’s going on here? What do you mean by this?’ and ‘Is this necessary?’ or ‘You might want to think about that.’ So I would like to think of my function as being of some value in that respect—being able to look at people’s work and comment on it, hopefully intelligently.”