All composers develop their musical language over the course of their careers — it’s inevitable. Some composers’ outputs, it seems to me, can be rather neatly divided into Early, Middle, and Late periods. With others, the situation is slipperier. 

This kind of thing is navel-gazing in its purest form, but since there’s nothing else to do right now…

Early-Middle-Late

Beethoven
Beethoven’s output is not only neatly divisible, but it established a paradigm: during the Early period, the composer masters the common style of the era, infusing it with their own particular genius (1st symphony, Pathétique); in the Middle period, the composer breaks out in bold new directions (the Eroica symphony, zum beispiel); in the late period, the composer condenses what they’ve learned into a more austere, introspective language, wrestling with the ghosts of their predecessors as they contemplate the end of their own life (the late quartets).

Verdi
The early stuff literally nobody listens to (aside from subscribers to the Sarasota Opera) — Giovanna d’arco, per esempio. Then there’s the essential three operas from the early 1850s, Il Trovatore, Rigoletto, and La Traviata, which sparked his middle period (lasting as long as, say, Aïda). Then the output becomes sparser, finally arriving at the late glories of Otello and Falstaff (with Don Carlo and Bocanegra pointing the way there).

Schoenberg
The early style, many are surprised to find, is Mahlerian and tonal (Gurrelieder, Pélleas, Verklärte Nacht). Gradually he pushes past tonality until we get the mid-period free atonality of Pierrot Lunaire and the Fünf Orchesterstücke. Round about 1925, he invents a new, more stringent set of compositional rules for himself, giving us the blockbuster Moses und Aron, the violin and piano concertos, Survivor from Warsaw, etc. 

Now that makes for three periods clearly enough, but they’re not of the Beethovenian paradigm wherein the Late style is a reckoning with the early style. But, Schoenberg did have a brief and sporadic dalliance with tonal music once again at the end of his life, so do with that what you will.

Stravinsky
Early: the “Russian” style — Firebird through Les Noces
Middle: the neoclassical pieces (Octet, Dumbarton Oaks, The Rake’s Progress)
Late: the dodecaphonic works (Agon, Septet)

Once again, Stravinsky breaks the mold in that the Late style isn’t a look back to earlier days.

Ligeti
The early style is primarily influenced by Bartók and Kodály (no surprise). Then he defects to the West and encounters Stockhausen, Berio, and Kagel, sparking the Middle period, his own very particular brand of modernism: Atmosphères, Lontano, Apparitions and the like. Then he takes a decade to compose Le grand macabre, which turns out to be both a capstone and a transitional piece. After that, there’s a clear condensation of his style (gone are the ginormous pages of micropolyphony) and we get my personal favorites: the Violin Concerto, the Hamburg Concerto, the Nonsense Madrigals, the Viola Sonata, and Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel.

Schnittke
Ma boyyyy. Probably the composer whose output most clearly hews to the Beethoven model. Early Schnittke is beholden to the Soviet modernists, particularly Shostakovich (who would always remain an influence, but whose influence on Schnittke is, I think, overrated). This includes the Symphony No. 0 (“Nagasaki”), and a few pieces of a more modernist bent such as the first string quartet and the first violin concerto. Then there’s the great polystylistic breakthrough in the early 70s: the first symphony and the first Concerto Grosso, most notably. Then in 1985, he dies for the first time, comes back to life, and thence embarks upon his late, STARK style. For us serious Schnittkephiles, this is the best stuff. The language still nods to his roots, but the polystylism has been dialed way down, and now exists as shadows. Pieces from this era include the late symphonies (especially no. 8), the 2nd cello concerto, Faust, and Peer Gynt.

Easley Blackwood
I know this won’t mean much to many people, but he was my teacher, so I know a lot about him. His early music from the 1950’s was very much in the style of Shostakovich, Schoenberg, and Messiaen and even veered into higher modernism. Then he got involved into mathematical research surrounding various tuning systems, both historic ones and newfangled equal temperaments. This led to his studies of tonal music in tuning systems in octave divisions of 13-24 notes, after which he decided the one system he hadn’t engaged with was 12 notes. For the last 30-some-odd years, he’s written tonal music in the style of Franck and Saint-Saëns.

Other Neat Periodizations

Rossini
All the operas are Early Rossini, then yada yada yada, 25 years later we get Late Rossini! There is no Middle Rossini, since he was just chillin.

Robert Schumann
With Robert Schumann, his stylistic development is much more attached to genre, since he would devote entire years (or more) to, say, writing songs, or symphonies, or chamber pieces. There is, perhaps, an organic change of style over his career, but it’s harder (for me) to pick up on.

Brahms
The first and second piano sonatas are Early Brahms. Everything else is Late Brahms.

Janáček
All Janáček is Late Janáček.

A Less Distinctive Blurring

Tchaikovsky
So many experiments (third orchestral suite, Manfred), yet constantly on the verge of neoclassicism (fourth orchestral suite). Did his style ever actually change, or did he just get better at it?

Sibelius
His music definitely got colder and bonier as it went on, but when did it happen? It’s such a large output, and I’m no specialist. And if he had continued to compose during the last 30 years of his life, would there be a clearly-demarcated Late style? We’ll never know.

Debussy
His opus 1 string quartet sometimes gets assigned into an “early period” of its own, but I think there are many reminiscences of the quartet in Pélleas et Melisande, to the point where you’d have to group (at least) those two together. I guess you could argue that there’s an early period from the quartet through Pélleas, and then a middle period starting with La Mer, but just as much of Pélleas sounds like La Mer. There are the three late sonatas which are kind of doing their own thing, but the piano music and chansons suggest a continual working-through of similar ideas over the course of his career. It’s all very blurry.

Ravel
There’s clearly a development; you can’t say that Une barque sur l’océan sounds much like the G major piano concerto. You could maybe make a bipartite division into Early (impressionist / neoclassical) and Late (jazzy / neoclassical), but that doesn’t sit right somehow. It’s a slow development where you can see some interesting signposts along the way, but I think his style incorporates changes very conservatively and always excellently. The experiments are always successful, and he stays true to form.

Ended Pretty Much Where They Started

J. S. Bach
I mean, I actually have no idea, but it seems like it was all equally exquisite, experimental, and perfect all the way through?

Richard Strauss
With the exception of a mid-career genre change from tone poem to opera, and perhaps a slight mellowing of his musical language after Elektra, I don’t see much to suggest that he really changed styles.

Inconclusive

Schubert
People get all bent out of shape talking about Schubert’s “Late Style”. The guy was 31. Give him a break!

Mozart
See above. I’d say a case could be made that Mozart was moving into a distinctive Middle Period, but we’ll never know!

Lili Boulanger
The greatest tragedy in 20th century music. Even though she was developing rapidly, sadly, all Boulanger is Early Boulanger.

And as for me? 

As for me… I think I’m probably one of those smooth operators who experiment and gradually change, but that’s really for the musicologists to figure out. I hear they’ve got four more detectives working on the case down at the crime lab. All I really hope is that I never have a “late style” because honestly, I really don’t want to have to pretend to care about fugues.

Tonight we shall be bombarded by the bloody racket of those blasted, blasting gunpowder follies known as “fireworks.”

(Alas, not the Stravinskian variety. A pity.)

Not only are they an unabated nuisance that literally frighten some birds, pets, and wild animals to death, but they are also a harmful pollutant to water, air, and land. (This year, we’ll be able to find out just how harmful various types of fireworks are.) They are almost all manufactured by child laborers in Asian and Latin American countries.

Most civic institutions have cancelled their fireworks shows this year. Jolly sensible, and something I hope should continue past the socially distanced era of Covid-19.

I wish people would take more care of their aural health. We live in an obscenely loud era. Sounds are blasting at us from all corners, every day. As far as I’m concerned, the worst offenders are the power tools driven by gas motors: cars, motorcycles, trucks, buses, airplanes, seaplanes (a particular nuisance here in Seattle), lawnmowers, power washers, power tools, weed-whackers, and my most hated of all, the leaf blower.

Why do leaf blowers gall me so? Perhaps it’s something about their particular frequency, but I think it’s more the fact that their job is so easily replaced by the humble rake. (You could say the same of the lawnmower of course — all one really needs is a scythe. Read Anna Karenina, people!!)

And let’s not forget the “flash-bangs” employed at the protests recently. These are getting less attention than the tear gas and rubber bullets (and perhaps rightly so) but those things can cause permanent hearing damage. Of course, it’s entirely possible that cops and protesters alike routinely subject themselves to grotesque levels of volume at amplified music shows, but that’s another story.

And here’s an idea for Elon Musk: instead of sinking your billions into space rockets, why not make a Tesla for electric airplanes? I guarantee you that would advance the cause of humankind a hundredfold over space exploration.

So many diatribes (and I haven’t even mentioned by neighbors’ dog yet.) I used to lodge these noise complaints on Twitter, but I’ve recently renounced the tweet as a mode of expression. Twitter, it seems to me, is part of the same problem. Has anything that is technically silent ever been quite so loud?

Gentle readers, I bid you this fourth of July, at the very least, not to set off any firecrackers. That’ll earn you a passing C. If you want to go for a B, then do whatever you can to avoid singing or hearing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” easily the worst national anthem in the entire globe (right up there with “La Marseillaise.”) If you want an A, then be sure you’re grilling veggies on the grill instead of any dead animal carcasses.

And for those looking for extra credit, perhaps take a quiet moment to consider whether our violent founding is even worth celebrating at all. Don’t forget, had we not declared independence from the British crown, today we would simply be Canada, and our head of state would be that glorious monarch Elizabeth II. Vivat regina!

People often ask me what the “C.” stands for in “William C. White.” They usually guess Charles or Christopher or Connor, but what it actually stands for is Coleman.

I got the name from my father, Coleman Livingston White, Jr., who, naturally, got it from his father. As a child, I wished I had been named Coleman Livingston White III. I thought it sounded fancy and English, and fanciness and Englishness are two things of which I’m rather fond.

Beyond my grandfather’s generation, I knew nothing more of the name “Coleman Livingston” — it was just an axiom of my paternal heritage. Other than that they hailed from South Carolina, I knew little of the history of that side of the family. I never so much as thought to wonder where the name had come from until I was in my late 20s. Let’s put a pin in that for now.

✥

The first job I had after graduating college in 2005 was as music director of the Hyde Park Youth Symphony, a small community music program on the south side of Chicago near the U of C, where I had gone to school. I was with those kids for three years, a period that was probably more formative for me than it was for them.

That orchestra was truly as diverse a group as you’re likely to find anywhere. There were rich kids and poor kids, black, white, Asian, and Latino, and, crucially, every possible permutation of economic circumstance and ethnicity. They ranged in age widely, as tiny youth orchestra programs tend to. It was a little musical one-room schoolhouse.

It was a ragtag assemblage of instruments. One year we might have 5 flutes, 4 clarinets, a saxophone and a trombone, the next year might be 3 oboes, percussion, and piano. We took the kids because they wanted musical instruction, not because they were highly accomplished players or they formed a coherent “symphony orchestra.” This meant that I had to arrange and orchestrate every single piece we played, both for their skill level and for the instrumentation we had available.

As you can imagine, this was excellent training for me as a composer, but crucially, it gave me total freedom in programming. Yes, I was chained to my desk for hours upon hours drawing up Finale scores, but the truth was that since I was writing all the music myself, I could program anything I wanted to.

So left to my own devices what did we play? Among classics by Corelli, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, we played “The Advantages of Floating in the Middle of the Sea” by Stephen Sondheim, a selection of waltzes by Alfred Schnittke, the Vertigo Suite by Bernard Herrmann, a scene from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, and the Chopinesque “Valse” by Billy Strayhorn. My tastes may have expanded since then, but they certainly have not changed.

✥

Every year, our major concert took place at the DuSable Museum of African American History, and the program naturally featured music by African American composers. Certainly the greatest height we achieved at in the museum programs was premiering an orchestral work composed by one of the students, a wide-ranging young man who not only wrote this tone poem but created a comic book to illustrate it.

Another project from the DuSable museum that I’ll never forget though, is a concert of selections from Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha.

Treemonisha comes from the year 1911 and combines strains of ragtime, light opera (aka G&S), and even Wagner. The story concerns a community of ex-slaves in Arkansas near the Red River. It was all but unknown until the 1970s when it was resurrected by Katherine Dunham and Robert Shaw.

Treemonisha was the second opera composed by Scott Joplin. The first, A Guest of Honor, has been lost, but it is supposed to have memorialized the 1901 visit of Booker T. Washington to the White House. We’ll likely never know the exact contents of A Guest of Honor, but given that the libretto Joplin wrote for Treemonisha was very much in line with Booker T. Washington’s outlook, we can assume it was a sympathetic and laudatory portrayal.

Alas, Joplin’s was not the only artistic response to that dinner. Booker T. Washington’s White House dinner caused a considerable backlash among white southerners, memorialized in an anonymous poem that was printed in several newspapers called “Niggers in the White House”.

You can click on that Wikipedia link and read the poem, and maybe you should, but if you don’t want to, just take it from me that it’s every bit as vile as you’d suspect.

The great tragedy is that whereas A Guest of Honor was lost to time, “NitWH” kept cropping back up. In 1929 it resurfaced when Lou Hoover, the first lady, invited Jessie De Priest to a White House tea for congressional wives. Jessie’s husband Oscar Stanton De Priest was the first African-American to be elected to congress since the days of reconstruction, and the first ever from a northern state. He represented Illinois’ 1st congressional district, which is in the south side of Chicago. It includes Hyde Park.

This time the poem wasn’t just printed in the papers. It was read on the floor of the senate. The senator who read it represented the state of South Carolina. His name was Coleman Livingston Blease.

Before he was a senator, Blease had served as governor of South Carolina in the first years of the 20th century. His unadulterated brand of white supremacy was so popular with poor white South Carolina mill workers that many of his constituents named their children after him. It’s what my great-grandfather did.

✥

Black history is American history, and it touches us all no matter what our race may be. I’m lucky that my parents raised me in an explicitly anti-racist manner, but we’re not only raised by our parents — we’re also raised by ghosts.

Black history matters. Black kids matter. Black parents matter. Black teachers matter. Black communities matter. Black art matters. Black music matters. Black lives matter.

Oh wait and I’m just now realizing I forgot to post Quarantine Cabaret 3: Songs from the Rusty Anchor!

I’ll be livestreaming again on Friday, April 3 at 8:00 pm ET / 5:00 pm PT.

Once I get things up and running, I’ll embed the stream so you can watch it right here on this site, or you can head over to my YouTube channel (which, by the way, if you haven’t subscribed to yet, now would be a great time!)

Songs by the usual suspects, such as Sondheim, Bernstein, Weill, Gershwin, but also by unusual suspects Carol Sams, Colin DeJong, Erik Satie, Nina Simone, and maybe even Mahler, Barber and Schubert if I have time.

You’re highly encouraged to make yourself known in the chat, ask questions, make requests, and share in the fun. See you then!

I was supposed to conduct Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion this coming Friday, but by now, in the throes of the Coronavirus outbreak, it should be obvious that that’s not happening.

So instead, I’ll go deep into the catalog of cabaret songs that I’ve amassed over the past 20 years. It’s a livestreamed YouTube event, Friday, March 20, 2020 at 8 pm ET / 5 pm PT / other times in other places.

Now, likely if you’re reading this, you know me mainly as a composer or a conductor, so what’s all this about cabaret songs? Well it all started when I was in high school, hanging out with these wannabe jazzbos. They didn’t really like me that much or think I was great at the piano (I wasn’t) but I was the best they had if they wanted to practice their soloing skills.

So I learned to be a one-man rhythm section, walking the bass lines and comping in my right hand. And since I always loved singing, it was a natural next step to add my own voice to the mix. By the time I went away to college, I had a big chunk of The Fake Book and The Real Book under my fingers.

It turned out that that was a valuable asset in Hyde Park. Through various machinations, I ended up falling in with a hard-drinking, highfalutin garden party crowd mainly centered around the old Quadrangle Club (not to be confused with its current incarnation. For more, see this and this.) For the next several years I played piano in a variety of lounges, living rooms, cocktail bars, and cast parties.

I learned a lot of songs over those years. A lot of the attendees were born in the 20’s and 30’s, but even the ones who were born in the 60’s and 70’s expected me to have complete familiarity with the Noël Coward songbook. I was also doing lots of theatrical work, conducting musicals and operettas, which nursed my lifelong love of showtunes.

The big thing that’s kept me in the lounge lizard game though, has been my participation in the famous Sara Salon series in Hyde Park, which has been going on for at least 10 years now. From what I can tell, it’s the only 19th century Parisian salon in 21st century Chicago.

The idea is this: my friends Sara Stern and Ted Fishman invite all of their artistic friends over for an evening of food and performing. Everyone brings a number or an act. It can be anything from an aria to a poetry reading to a karate demonstration. One time, members of eighth blackbird played Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase” on toy pianos.

I’ve tended to accompany myself at the piano, preferring to do songs with multiple characters. So for example, “Erlkönig” has become a cabaret song for me, as has “Someone in a tree” from Pacific Overtures. Whether or not I’m in drag, you can assume that I’m singing my songs in the style of an aging chanteuse, such as Marianne Faithfull, Lotte Lenya, or Bea Arthur.

So anyway, that’s the idea. Have requests ready and I’ll take them if I can. See you Friday.

Now look, I know this quarantine thing probably isn’t impacting me as much as it is some of you. I’ve spent several years of my life as a self-employed freelance composer, plus I don’t drink, and I’m a vegan. So social distance is par for the course for me.

But some of you might be going stir crazy, so I’m posting a bunch of pieces that I’ve worked on and tinkered with over the years, or that I’ve written for friends and special occasions, and you’re welcome to download them and try them out. Send me feedback (willcwhite@aol.com) or tag me (insta / twitter @willcwhite) and let me see what you do with them. It’ll be fun.

Solo cello suite (also with viola and bass)

For many years I played around with writing a solo cello suite. Some of the movements I’m happy with, others not so much. Some of it is probably unplayable. But give it a try.

Here’s a version for viola:

And here’s one of the movements arranged for bass:

Trumpet Duets

These were an exercise in keeping my composition chops up to snuff. I wrote one a day during January 2017. No idea if they’re any good.

Kin for percussion trio

I wrote this for my friend Kyle Ritenauer and his brothers, all amazing percussionists. They were trying to get a percussion trio off the ground way back in 2013 but they ended up pursuing different avenues (all very successfully!) so they never tackled this. It’s very hard, but conveniently for a quarantine situation, it only requires materials commonly found in a suburban garage.

Lemn de Viata for violin and clarinet

I wrote this one for my friends Peter and Lisa, who have been chewing on it for a bit but haven’t yet been able to perform it. They’ve sent me some rehearsal clips though, and I think it works!

Circumpolar for 2 oboes

This was an auxiliary piece to the Oboe Quintet I recently wrote. It was written for a scientist who works at the north and south poles, and who happens to play the oboe.

The Will White Songbook

Various songs that I’ve written over the years for cabarets and revûes, few of which will make sense outside of their given contexts, but do with them what you will. I’ll be singing them at my livestream cabaret on Friday, March 20, 2020.