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Composer Barbara White has a long-standing interest in concert music as well as in interdisciplinary collaboration—specifically, dance and video.  She is also an active clarinetist, an insightful scholar and a devoted teacher.

Many of White’s works, including Life in the Castle  and Repetition Compulsion,  have been presented with live dance.  More recently, she has been making video works both independently and collaboratively. Black Air is a forty-minute “choreography for camera” on Dante’s telling of the story of Paolo and Francesca, conceived and directed by the composer, with choreography contributed by Terry Araujo and music performed by Synergy Vocals.  Gather / Shed / Lift is a trilogy created in collaboration with filmmaker Alison Crocetta, to be performed with live music scored for flute, viola, harp and percussion.  Lift was commissioned by Boston Musica Viva, and the other two films by janus. 

Recent and current work embraces the theater of the concert stage.  Several years ago, at the invitation of percussionist Dominic Donato, White undertook a series of works for solo tamtam entitled Nothing Doing.  Some of these are ritualistic, others conceptual; some are not quite intended to be performed.  Soon after entering into the world of the gong, White began to study the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute).  The chance (or not) meeting of the gong and the shakuhachi led to an evening-length performance, Desire Lines, wherein White performed clarinet alongside Dominic Donato’s gong and Ralph Samuelson’s shakuhachi.  Incorporating video, spoken word, movement and White’s own moving images, Desire Lines explores the intersection between contemplative and creative practices. The program as a whole prizes stillness, silence, and nuance, honoring the richness that can emerge from focusing on simple materials; it also seeks mindfulness through humor, paradox, and the unexpected.

March 2012 saw the première of Weakness, a one-act opera for which White wrote the libretto as well as the music. Weakness  is based on a Celtic story White learned from shamanic practitioner, author and storyteller Tom Cowan and uses words, song and movement equally to explore the mysterious and elusive aspects of the myth.  More recently, White has begin research and participating in the rich and lively musicaal culture of Cape Breton (Nova Scotia, Canada). As a member of the Board of Kitchen Rackets, she will be teaching and performing at this year's Music Camp on the Canal, including a premiere with Fork and Spoon, her duo with guitarist Charles MacDonald.

As a composition teacher and dissertation advisor, White aims to listen receptively to young composers’ ideas and to cultivate an attention both open-minded and rigorous.  In addition to teaching the standard and essential fare of music theory and composition, White has developed a number of courses and seminars on wide ranging topics, including "outsider music"; interculturalism and exoticism; autobiography and masquerade; and a new freshman seminar concerning silence, noise, sound, and music.  In Spring 2012 she hosted Riley Lee in her graduate seminar concerning composing for shakuhachi.

Born in Boston in 1965, White was educated at Harvard/Radcliffe (A.B.) and the University of Pittsburgh (M.A., Ph.D.).  Honors and awards include a Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, three awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, most recently an Academy Award in Music, and a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship.  In 1998, she joined the faculty of the Princeton University Music Department, where she is now Professor.

White has received commissions from the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York New Music Ensemble, Boston Musica Viva, the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, the Fromm Foundation, and the Koussevitzky Foundation.  Recent and upcoming performances include the Aspen Music Festival, Speculum Musicae, New Millennium Ensemble, Zeltsman Marimba Festival, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, eighth blackbird, Boston Musica Viva, Dinosaur Annex, Boston Cecilia, Earplay, and the Chameleon Arts Ensemble.

White has performed her clarinet works with the Fromm Foundation Contemporary Music Series at Harvard, Frente de Danza Independiente (Quito, Ecuador), and the Florida International Festival of New Music, as well as on her first solo CD, When the Smoke Clears.   A second CD, Apocryphal Stories, was released in 2004 and a third My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon, in 2011.Apocryphal Stories and I can now see the moon are both published by Albany records, as is the forthcoming CD recording of White's opera Weakness, which includes a "bonus track" of Tom Cowan performing his version of the myth of Macha.

White’s scholarly writings concern the relationship between musical “nuts and bolts” and cultural context, focusing on such matters as the coordination between sound and movement and the relationship between creative activity and everyday life, as well as the impact on music of gender, listening, and spirituality. “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mickey Mouse” considers synchronization in music-dance and music-film relationships. “The Vastness of Each Moment,” for an upcoming anthology, considers the way interdisciplinary artists represent traumatic experience onstage and poses a relationship  between the shatteredness of  the traumatized psyche and the expansiveness of “Buddha Mind.”  An ongoing series for Open Space Magazine called “I Am Not Making This Up” muses on the relationship between life and art, juxtaposing musical observations with informal recollections of everyday moments.  The most recent installment, “In Search of Silence,” considers the elusiveness and preciousness of quiet, both within and outside music.  Other articles have been published in Cambridge Opera Journal, Opera Quarterly, Intercultural Music, Indiana Theory Review, andthe American Assembly’s Creative Campus.

In addition to being a prolific composer of chamber music, composer Barbara White has a long-standing interest in collaborative and interdisciplinary work, specifically in working with dance. In addition, she is an idiosyncratic clarinetist and is increasingly active as a video artist.  A recent performance, Desire Lines, places music for solo gong, clarinet, and Japanese bamboo flute alongside video, movement and onstage ceremony.  Other recent performances have been presented by the Aspen Music Festival, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, Earplay, Lontano, Eighth Blackbird, janus, and the Chameleon Arts Ensemble.  Honors and awards include a Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, three awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her third CD, My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon, was released by Albany Records in 2011. A fourth, of the opera Weakness, is forthcoming from Albany. White’s scholarly writings address such matters as the coordination between sound and image and the relationship between creative activity and everyday life, as well as the impact on music of gender, listening, and spirituality. In 1998, she joined the faculty of the Princeton University Music Department, where she is now Professor.