Barbara White

Professor of Music

My recent works range from an exploration of "misplaying" the clarinet (No-Man's Land) to a collaborative dance/opera (Life in the Castle) to a portrait of a community's musical history (Raging River, Rolling Stone). Composing for dance and community-based residency projects has kindled my interest in reworking "found music," a habit which has begun to bleed into my concert music as well. Recently I completed a series of pieces, Apocryphal Stories, in which I assemble and deform a motley collection of preexisting materials, creating new artifacts out of excavation, appropriation, and commentary. Apocryphal Stories places reverent homages alongside mischievous misreadings, but the pieces share a common preoccupation with memory and identity-with the ways my formative experiences continue to haunt me and to inform my compositional practice.

My scholarly work combines analyses of the "nuts and bolts" of musical design with investigations of cultural context, approaching such topics as jazz analysis, interculturalism, signification in contemporary opera, and the workings of gender in composition and analysis. My graduate and undergraduate courses, similarly, tend to investigate interdisciplinarity and/or cultural context. Recent topics include the perplexing relationship between high and low cultures in our current musical landscape; strategies of autobiography and masquerade in composition; and the interdependence of sound and image in dance and film.