Frances

I’m delighted to announce that I just received a commission from The Crossing, a fantastic professional chamber choir based in Philadelphia.  I was one of three composers chosen to create a new work for the group, to be premiered next June at the Crane Arts Center in Philadelphia, in their exquisite Icebox performance space.  This project is exciting for me for a number of reasons.  First, it will be another collaboration with James Pritchett, who will create a text for me.  Second, the Icebox space has an amazing,  utterly beautifully reverberant acoustic, which I find uniquely inspiring.  And finally, its a chance to write for a really magnificent ensemble, and to further explore the fascinating world of choral music.

In other news, my CD In the library of dreams, available on the Pogus Productions label, was selected as Best Modern Classical Album, New Music, at Gapplegate Music Review!

I am honored to be a guest composer with Random Access Music composer’s collective this season, on a concert of new music for the viol consort Parthenia : “Prisms: Ancient Courses in a New Light”.  I was invited to write a new composition for the consort, and was delighted to be given the opportunity to work again with these fantastic musicians!  My new piece, From a fairy tale, is accompanied by a text by James Pritchett, which will be narrated by Valeria Vasilevski.  To read more about the text, and to hear Valeria read it, visit James’ blog post.  Parthenia is presenting this concert twice, on Friday November 8 and Saturday November 9.

The details:

Friday November 8, 8pm, Benzaquen Hall, DiMenna Center for Classical Music
450 W 37th Street, NYC

Tickets: $20 (800-838-3006)

Saturday, November 9, 8pm, Waltz-Astoria
23-14 Ditmars Boulevard
Astoria, NY 11105

Table fee: $10 (718-956-8742)

I’m excited about the upcoming 2013 Ussachevsky Memorial Festival at Pomona College in Claremont, CA (near Los Angeles) where I’ll be guest composer this year. What makes it particularly nice is that my husband James Pritchett, writer and expert on the music of John Cage, will also be a guest at the festival! There will be performances of several of my pieces, and James and I will be giving a lecture about our work. For more information, visit the Pomona music department calendar.

In particular I wanted to mention that violist Cynthia Fogg will be playing my The book of roses and memory.  Here’s a link to a video of  her beautiful performance of my A veil barely seen at last year’s festival.  Enjoy!

I’m delighted to announce that I received an award from Commissioning Music USA to create a new work in collaboration with the brilliant artist Karen LaMonte.  Music for emptiness/music for empty chairs will be a 20 minute work for flute, viola, electronic sound, and video.   Karen describes the video:  “The objective is to create a visual experience that parallels the phenomena of echo and sound as it travels toward silence.”  In the music, I will attempt to embody these phenomena as expressed by the visuals.  The empty chairs suggest absence, and their disintegration the inevitability of loss.  The musical language will start with the human, emotional experience of loss, and gradually erase that into silence.  In particular, I will explore the nature of sonic decay – what Morton Feldman called “this departing landscape.”  Thus the starting point for the piece is the idea of transformation:  sound disappearing into silence, form into abstraction, longing into emptiness.

Music for emptiness/music for empty chairs is commissioned by The New York Viola Society.  The NYVS will present the premiere in late 2013 or early ’14.  I’d also like to thank The Classical Recording Foundation for acting as our fiscal sponsor.  I’m very excited about this new project, and look forward to starting on it soon!

I just found out that I am featured as one of the composers of the month (September 2012) at the Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music. If you’d like to check out the page, here is a link:

www.pytheasmusic.org/white_frances.html

If you are not familiar with Pytheas, here’s a description from their home page:

“The Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music is a wide ranging web nexus for contemporary concert music. Our mission is to promote contemporary composers and their music through information, understanding and performances.

Contemporary classical/art/concert music is a living art form, fed by the creativity of composers across the country and around the globe. Finding inspiration from a multitude of sources, this music springs from a well-known and beloved past, yet travels new avenues and explores amazingly diverse sound worlds. There are more composers writing music now than there ever have been in the history of the world, and our goal is to help you connect with them and enjoy their art.”

You can visit at:

www.pytheasmusic.org

I also have another video link to share.  This time, its to a beautiful piece of fabric art by Ke-Sook Lee, called Green Hammock.  Scott Anderson created the video, and used an excerpt from my Walk through “Resonant Landscape” No. 2 as the sound track.  Enjoy!

I have another video to share!  This one is the world premiere of my piece The root of the wind at the 2008 World Shakuhachi Festival in Sydney, Australia.  It was performed by TaikOz, with Hozan Nomura on shakuhachi.

Still thinking about Parthenia’s gorgeous performance of my piece A flower on the farther side at the Queens New Music Festival  on Sunday May 13.  And now I have a link to share:

Traces on the Farther Side

This is a music visualization created by Wendy Steiner and Andrew Lucia to go with A flower on the farther side.  Here‘s their description:

TRACES ON THE FARTHER SIDE (2011), a music visualization in real time, seeks visual expression for the delicacy and otherworldliness of Frances White’s A FLOWER ON THE FARTHER SIDE (2010), whose inspiration in turn lies in a chant by the medieval mystic, Hildegard of Bingen. TRACES assigns each of the four viols and the prerecorded track of wind sounds and viol chords to its own panel, where they generate colored marks according to the characteristics of their unfolding sound. The prerecorded line in the middle panel keeps within its bounds with the stability of a cantus firmus, whereas the four viols are given the freedom to interact unpredictably, simulating the communicative nods and glances of PARTHENIA’s musicians as they play. No two runs of the app for TRACES can be exactly the same, and so the final frames of this programmed creation have the individuality of handmade works of art.

Enjoy!

Welcome to my new website! I’m very excited about it. I hope it will be much easier to explore, and much easier to find music! I will be adding more audio clips on the Music page soon, and I will be making all my scores available for purchase on the Recordings and scores page.

I’m also very excited about my new CD In the library of dreams, available from Pogus Productions.  It features magnificent performances by Ralph Samuelson, eighth blackbird, David Cerutti, Liuh-Wen Ting, and Thomas Buckner, and gorgeous cover art by Lothar Osterburg.

For more information and orders, please visit the Pogus website.