The composer John White, who has died aged 87, sought new methods to write down approachably tonal music that, particularly from the early Nineteen Seventies onwards, emphasised consonance, melody, uncommon instrumental lineups – and a extremely developed sense of ironic humour. When greeting him at live shows, I ultimately received used to his unvarying response to my ordinary “How are you?”: the – considerably alarming – “Cosmic!”
The 180 piano sonatas that he composed from 1956 onwards provide the perfect introduction to White’s stylistic vary. A few of the earlier sonatas are substantial, multi-movement works, their musical options providing singular responses to the work of Nineteenth- and earlier Twentieth-century composers who, to him, “sounded extra pungent and fewer comforting” than did the usual German repertoire of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.
White’s positively cosmic array of compositional beginning factors – together with Charles-Valentin Alkan, Ferruccio Busoni, Nikolai Medtner, Erik Satie and Olivier Messiaen – steadily accrued right into a sort of various historical past of music that supplied a large number of fashions. Even Schumann and Bruckner turned helpful on account of their extra idiosyncratic attitudes. Max Reger endeared himself to White for “the sympathetic capability to be concurrently critical and misplaced”.
By stark distinction, a batch of sonatas from the late Nineteen Sixties are dissonant and minimalist. These from 1972 onwards sign a return to consonant and narrative composition and have tended to be fairly brief.
Consultant of those works’ scope are: Sonata No 14 (1960), a 23-minute mosaic of contrasting types and moods; Sonata No 95 (1977), which White described as “a garrulous rondo-casserole of waltz themes”; and Sonata No 164 (2008), shifting “effortlessly between the subtly mysterious and darkly brooding” whereas concurrently appearing as a examine in cross-rhythms.
Such music was achieved with out the recourse to hard-left political opinions that led his actual modern, Cornelius Cardew, to maneuver away from the musical cacophony and efficiency artwork of the Scratch Orchestra, which Cardew had co-founded in 1969. White himself had as soon as belonged to this band of musical renegades, and its temporary storming of the barricades of the institution have been in marked distinction to the actions of the ensembles that he now went on to create.
For some whereas he focused on “Machines”, his personal type of minimalism that developed into “methods” music. White’s personal definition of a “Machine” was “a constant course of governing a sequence of musical actions inside a selected sound-world”.
He went on to type teams of like-minded composers, all eager to carry out their very own works: not solely since no one else would achieve this but in addition out of a perception that “doing it your self” was a wholesome technique. A wider vary of strategies and supplies have been options of The Promenade Theatre Orchestra, based in 1969: a quartet of reed organs, toy pianos and oddball noise-makers wherein White was joined by Chris Hobbs, Alec Hill and Hugh Shrapnel. Subsequent teams included the Hobbs/White Duo, from 1972, and, from 1977, the Backyard Furnishings Music Ensemble, a multi-instrumental lineup – taking its title from Satie’s notion of “furnishings music” for background listening – that included Gavin Bryars, Ben Mason and Dave Smith. A lot later, from 1994, there was Dwell Batts!! – an “electrics” trio that includes the composer’s eventual second spouse, Margaret Coldiron, and Andrea Rocca.
White might additionally flip his hand to any demand for incidental music at London’s Nationwide Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Firm and elsewhere. When a director requested for music like “a moderately fragile Sibelius”, White produced pastiche Sibelius; when, because the costume rehearsal loomed, this director realised that he had actually meant Elgar, White swiftly complied with a rating effortlessly mimicking the brand new mannequin required. Scholar productions on the Drama Centre London – the place he was head of music for 4 a long time, retiring in 2020 – have been served with equally virtuosic compositional resourcefulness.
Born in Berlin after Hitler had come to energy, John was the son of a German mom, Maju (Margareta, nee Jurisch), and an English father, Bob (Arthur Barwood) White, who was working in prewar Germany as {an electrical} engineer. The household moved to London in 1938.
Piano classes from the age of 5 with Hélène Gipps have been adopted by research on the Royal Faculty of Music with Arthur Alexander and Eric Harrison, plus composition research with Bernard Stevens. By the early Nineteen Sixties White was himself educating there; his pupils included the composers Brian Dennis and Roger Smalley.
He had additionally taken up the bass trombone and the tuba, enjoying each within the London Gabrieli Brass Ensemble. His friendship with a variety of proficient instrumentalists resulted in a wealth of brass music, together with a Concerto for Harpsichord and Brass and a Concerto for 11 brass devices in 10 actions. He moreover earned his residing, at numerous occasions, as a musical director for West Finish musicals, and as a instructor on the Menuhin Faculty and Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort College).
In 1980 he married the dancer and choreographer Pat Garrett; they divorced in 1994. His marriage to Coldiron, a theatre director and educational, got here in 2003, and she or he survives him.
