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          David Lidov is a music theorist, occasional pianist, and a composer best known for works for small ensembles or voice.  His music has been performed in North and South America and in Europe.  Except for short stints in Mexico, Brazil and Germany, he has taught in the York University Department of Music, where he was a founding member, since 1970. His theoretical investigations, beginning with a computer algorithm to write melodies in 1972, were an early and influential source for musical semiotics.  St. Martin's Press published his general theory, Elements of Semiotics (1999) and Indiana University Press released a collection of his best known writings on music, Is Language a Music? (2004).  His never up-to-date website is www.yorku.ca/lidov. 

                Bill Westcott was born in Southern Illinois near St. Louis, Missouri.  When he was a student at the University of Illinois, he also studied blues piano for several years with Eurreal "Little Brother" Montgomery in Chicago, a major blues-recording artist of the 1930s and of the later blues revival. From that time, he has dedicated himself to transcribing, preserving and performing the outstanding music of the early blues pianists of the teens, twenties and thirties. While working occasionally as a soloist and accompanist in classical performance, he has performed as a band member in various rock, Dixieland, country and western, ragtime, jazz and blues ensembles over the past 35 years. Since 1979, he has lived and worked in Toronto, Canada, maintaining an active career as pianist, composer, arranger, lecturer, singer, writer and teacher. For several years, he provided concert notes for the TSO programs.  He has appeared as pianist and singer in blues, jazz, ragtime and folk festivals in Canada and the United States. He has published articles on the subjects of early jazz and blues piano and the history of African-American music in general.  Orchestras in Canada, the United States and Eastern Europe have performed his original compositions and arrangements.  He taught music through the 1980s in the Department of Music at York University, leaving the academic life in the '90s to work as a freelance musician but returning recently as an Associate Professor teaching composition.