DFMM presents featured composer Barbara White

As part of its inaugural season, the Dallas Festival of Modern Music and Ars Nova Dallas are pleased to be presenting three performances of My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon, a work for Pierrot ensemble by American composer Barbara White.

Composer Barbara White was born in Boston and was educated at Harvard/Radcliffe Colleges (A.B.) and the University of Pittsburgh (M.A., Ph.D.). She also studied in Paris with Betsy Jolas under the auspices of Harvard’s Paine Traveling Fellowship. She is Professor in the Music Department at Princeton University, where she began teaching in 1998. White spent the 2000-01 academic year on sabbatical as a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

White has received commissions from the Philadelphia Orchestra, New York New Music Ensemble, Boston Musica Viva, the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, and marimbists Nancy Zeltsman, Dominic Donato, and Stephen Paysen. Her music has been presented by Speculum Musicae, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the New Millennium Ensemble, the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Fromm Foundation Contemporary Music Series at Harvard, the Longy School’s new-music group Longitude, Dinosaur Annex, and Music on the Edge. Recent honors and awards include an ASCAP Award to Young Composers, three awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (including a 2009 Academy Award in Music), a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Interdisciplinary Arts Award, and several MacDowell Colony residencies. She received a 2000 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship.

White has a long-standing involvement in interdisciplinary collaboration, especially in composing for dance. She has worked extensively with choreographers Marcela Correa and Joan Wagman; in 1996, White and Wagman founded Momentum Interdisciplinary Arts, which has since premiered several of their collaborative dance works. In the last several years, White has been engaged to complete a number of community residency projects, commissioned by organizations such as Chamber Music America Rural Residencies the American Composers Forum and National Endowment for the Arts's Continental Harmony initiative. In 2007 she is completing an outreach residency with the M.O.R.E. Program at the Aspen Music Festival.

As a clarinetist, White has performed her clarinet works with Momentum Interdisciplinary Arts, the Fromm Foundation Contemporary Music Series at Harvard, Tasto: Dois Compositores ao Piano (Rio de Janeiro), Frente de Danza Independiente (Quito, Ecuador), and the Florida International Festival of New Music.

White’s scholarship combines the analysis of the "nuts and bolts" of musical design with an investigation of cultural context, approaching such topics as jazz analysis, interculturalism, signification in contemporary opera, and the workings of gender in composition and analysis. Recent articles include “'As if they didn’t hear the music,’ Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mickey Mouse," in Opera Quarterly; "Music Drama on the Concert Stage: Voice, Character and Performance in Judith Weir’s ‘The Consolations of Scholarship,’" in Cambridge Opera Journal; "Making Mischief in the Melting Pot: The Eclectic Music of Don Byron," in Intercultural Music 3, and "Difference or Silence? Women Composers Between Scylla and Charybdis," in Indiana Theory Review. Reviews and shorter pieces have appeared in Notes, Open Space, and newmusicbox.

Women Composers

In 1966, James Brown famously crooned that “It’s a Man’s World,” and as far as the world of classical music composers is concerned, this has generally been the case. The reasons for this are many. Most obvious is simply a lack of musical education. Until the 20th century, classical education tended to limit how far a woman would go in her schooling, and the only real chance a girl had at even a basic music education was to be born into a musical family, the aristocracy, or to be sent to a nunnery.

Other reasons that historical women composers are few and far between are darker. For much of the past millennium, it was generally held that the serious study of music was for men only. In the 19th century, Abraham Mendelssohn, father to Felix and Fanny, famously wrote to his daughter, “Perhaps for Felix music will become a profession, while for you it will always remain but an ornament; never can and should it become the foundation of your existence." With such a restrictive attitude very much the cultural norm, it should come as no surprise that Clara Schumann would confide a resulting lack of self confidence in her diary. "I once thought I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose - there has never yet been one able to, and why should I expect to be the one?" Both Fanny and Clara have gone on to claim their rightful spots in history, but during their life, that was certainly not the case.

Much like Susan B. Anthony serves as the figure head of American women’s suffrage, Hildegard of Bingen may serve that role for women composers. Born in 1098, Hildegard was a Renaissance Woman 400 years before that was possible. Tithed to the church as a young girl, Hildegard’s creative and scholarly output is impressive; in addition to her composition activities, she conducted early studies in to linguistics, developed her own alphabet, was an accomplished naturalist, herbalist, poet, magistra, channeller, and founder of several spin-off monasteries. However, her place in music history is solid. While over 70 of her works survive today, her Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues) is considered the oldest morality play with music. While Ordo Virtutum tells a story of the Devil and the Virtues battling for a human soul, the genre as a whole would develop in to a European institution for the next 500 years.

While a handful of other women composers’ names are sprinkled throughout the Middle Ages, the next woman composer of significance doesn’t appear until the middle Baroque in the 1600’s. Not only unique for publishing her music in single-composer volumes, Barbara Strozzi has been called "the most prolific composer-man or woman-of printed secular vocal music in Venice in the Middle of the century." However, for every woman composer we might think to mention for the next 300 years, the general musical public could more easily produce the names of dozens of male composers. Even given the quality of output by Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn, the average classical music concertgoer would be hard pressed to recall ever hearing a live performance of one of these composers’ works.

Thankfully, heading beyond 1900, that trend has very slowly begun to change. Amy Beach’s early 20th century American and European concert tours brought her music to the masses, and to this day she is the only woman included among the 87 composers listed on the Boston Pop’s “Hatch Memorial Shell.” And Nadia Boulanger, although not typically remembered for her own compositions, is considered among the greatest composition teachers ever, counting among her students Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, John Adams, Daniel Barenboim, Philip Glass, Astor Piazzolla, and hundreds of others. When asked about being the first woman to conduct the Boston Symphony in 1939, she replied, "Well, I have been a woman for 50 years now and have recovered from my initial astonishment." Perhaps it is this attitude that has begun to provide parity for women composers today.

In our inaugural season, the Dallas Festival of Modern Music is proud to present ensemble-in-residence Ars Nova Dallas, who will be presenting concerts featuring two of today’s leading women composers, Joan Tower and Barbara White. Visit our Performance Calendar for a list of performances and come hear the music of these remarkable women!