Notes by Dave Smith

At the time of writing (September 2010), John White has composed 173 piano sonatas which cover a 54-year period from no.1

(1956), his earliest acknowledged work, up to the present. The earlier ones (1-18) include several substantial multi-movement works, but since the mid-1960s, they have tended to be single movements of a few minutes duration. Back in 1971, Brian Dennis suggested that “Even as late as 196[8], a critic with eccentric tastes might have discovered in John White’s music a unique regression, a kind of anti-development. The numerous piano sonatas (36 at the time) would have revealed a gradual withdrawal from the world of accepted innovation. Gloomy bass lines, deadpan harmonies would have replaced the richness of early works . . . White’s thinking was, and still remains essentially lateral; which is to say that it is concerned not with direct linear development (historical or personal) but with ideas quite beyond technique”. Even so, the same critic would probably not have anticipated an apparent sudden shift to the dour, dissonant constructivism of sonatas 37-52 (mostly 1969 – several are “satellite” works of the monumental Cello and Tuba Machine of 1968), nor an equally sudden return to the tonality-orientated narrative writing of 53-55 (April 1972). It would be fair to conclude that working with Cornelius Cardew provided the catalyst not only for the “experimental” works from the mid-1960s onwards but also for the more radical reassessment initiated by the 1972 sonatas. Nos 56-90 followed over a period of only 11 months, the last 21 all dating from the autumn of 1973. Almost all of these are brief works - “an immediate communication in which there’s minimal development of the situation” - in which the composer was both distancing himself from the notion of composition as “private research” and applying the experience of working in theatrical productions. The piano’s unique ability to suggest instrumental timbres and orchestral colours is much more in evidence (most specifically, the opening of no.55 bears the indication “As if written for strings by Berlioz and conducted by Beecham”) – indeed, a somewhat bizarre and unnerving 20-minute orchestral piece (37 Orchestral snapshots), made up entirely of excerpts from sonatas 53-69, appeared in 1973. The last three of the 1973 sonatas (88-90) and the relatively few in the years immediately following are less brief, allowing more “development of the situation if not an actual argument” and more varied in terms of character and level of difficulty.

Since that time, the approach has diversified to the extent that thirty years on, one can have few preconceptions about a new John White piano sonata beyond a probable duration of a few minutes and a safe bet that there will be surprises in store. However, as ever, one is likely to  encounter a wry humour, the odd “dangerous mood-swing” or an “incomprehensible monument”, let alone an approach which appears to encompass anything from subversive conservatism to visionary experimentalism. Amongst the permanent “fixtures and fittings” may be mentioned an element of historical reference present in most of the sonatas (apart from those of 1969), whatever the date of composition. Whereas most other composers are anxious to cover their traces, White, as can be seen from his own notes on individual sonatas, encourages us to make connections with other music for reasons which have little to do with conventional “influence” and nothing to do with pastiche or a retrogressive artistic stance. As Brian Dennis wrote, “White’s thinking was, and still remains essentially lateral”. Since the 1970s, the range of reference has become ever more likely to encompass enthusiasms of the moment as well as areas of musical investigation occasioned by a vast amount of work in the theatre. But some of the more permanent musical concerns were clearly expressed in a programme note written for a concert in 1974 (the sonatas performed on that occasion were 81, 76, 86, 87 and 90): “[The 1972-3 sonatas] have tended to be one-movement pieces less than 5 minutes long. They reflect my enthusiastic absorption with aspects of 19th [and early 20th] century music, e.g.,

ALKAN:         The exposition of mysterious order

SCHUMANN:    The wealth of inner life concealed behind the engaging and mobile nature of the musical patterns (Kreisleriana!)

BUSONI:            The masterful containing of a wide range of musical vocabulary, structure and resonance

SATIE:                The arcane charm of apparently simple musical statement

REGER:              The sympathetic ability to be simultaneously serious and lost

SCRIABIN:         The volatile and winged nature of the musical thought and its manifestation

MEDTNER:        The tactile fluency of pianistic layout and the intellectual fluency of thematic and structural organisation

BRUCKNER:      The dignity and magnificence of diatonic chord progressions and unswerving metre”

Bibliography:
Brian Dennis – The music of John White – Musical Times MT 1539  May 1971 (http://www.jstor.org/pss/955946) 
Dave Smith – The piano sonatas of John White – Contact 21 Autumn 1980. Republished JEMS (Journal of Experimental Music Studies - http://www.users.waitrose.com/~chobbs/smithwhite.html) 
Sarah E.Walker – The new English keyboard school: a second “Golden Age” – Leonardo Music Journal, Vol 11 2001 (http://www.jstor.org/pss/1513422

Notes by John White

“I write a lot for piano for two main reasons: (a) being a pianist allows me to be in touch with a rich and exciting repertoire, which gives me a great variety of role models in terms of vocabulary and gesture with which to formulate and ‘clothe’ the ideas which come to me and seem to need expression, and (b) being an idealistic rather than a ‘career’ composer, I find the piano a handy vehicle for the uttering (‘outering’) of compositional thought, in that the inspiration goes directly into a performable medium without the salesmanship required for getting ensemble pieces played.” [email to Sarah Walker quoted in The New English Keyboard School: A Second "Golden Age" - Leonardo Music Journal Vol 11 2001]

136 (from 1995/7) 

This started out life as a music cue from Les enfants du paradis (stage adaptation by Simon Callow for the Royal Shakespeare Company) and as a piano duet entitled Scherzo (the street of many murders). Ancestry in the opening section of Busoni’s Carmen fantasy.

81 (1973)

An autumnal reverie exploring various shades of grey over a serenely rocking tonic/dominant bass.

71 (1973)

Visits the jauntily mechanistic world of the "valse-musette" and its association with Les Six, the recently lost savour of Gitanes and the slow burn of a cheap Beaujolais.

76  “The rustic” (1973)

Owes its nature to instructions given by a session keyboard player on how to do the accompaniments of Country and Western waltzes.

78 (1973)

Inspired by an account of the resident piano trio at the Pump Room, Bath.

55 (1972)

This is an exploration of a Berliozian melodic mindset, fluent, mobile, changeable, wilful and wayward.

65 (1973)

A “non-satirical” piece, it represents a chance encounter between Schumann and the last of the Busoni Elegies.

171 (2010)

An extended concert version of a music cue that I wrote for a production of Maxim Gorky's play Summerfolk in which Kaleria, a modernist poet (of the early 1900s) who knows her Scriabin from her elbow, goes to the piano and plays a moody piece.

29 (1966)

Statement of a lean and dour aesthetic at odds with what I perceived to be a fluttery and hysterical tendency in the music of the 1960s avant-garde.

111 (1987)

Starts out energetically, hammering out permutations of some basic rhythmic shapes encouraged by Antheil’s Ballet mécanique, then goes into a quietly sonorous trance-like berceuse.

127  On themes from "Les enfants du paradis” (1996)

A piano transcription of two Romantic themes from my incidental music from Simon Callow’s adaptation of Les enfant du paradis for the Royal Shakespeare Company.            

137  “Gothick pastel” (1999)

No.137, dedicated to Dave Smith in celebration of his 50th birthday is composed in compound triple time, a  favourite pulse of mine. The opening is dark and steady, the middle section fraught with demonic parallel semiquavers, and the coda serenely afloat in a shimmer of angelic harps.

132 (1997)

A brief piece that muses on some introvert aspects of Bill Evans’ playing. 

109 (1984)

A set of free variations whose style bestrides the world of Gregorian and football chant. 

135 (1999)

Lasting c.23 minutes, this was composed for an event which featured John Tilbury as both actor (in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s last tape) and pianist (premièring new works relevant to the Beckett). The mood of the sonata was prompted by an episode in which the eponymous hero ruefully recollects a romantic episode in a rowing boat. The language and gestures take the barcarolles of Busoni and Fauré as role-models. 

Born in Berlin in 1936, John White studied piano with Arthur Alexander and Eric Harrison, and composition with Bernard Stevens at the Royal College of Music. Since that time, he has been continually active as a composer, performer and teacher, and his career has involved a variety of activities including composing and directing music for the theatre and ballet, taking part in concerts of experimental music and in electronic ensembles, heading the music department at the Drama Centre, London, and performing as a solo pianist and accompanist. His vast compositional output includes 3 operas, 26 symphonies (none for traditional orchestra), 29 ballets or “dance-works”, a number of large-scale works involving brass, “the longest work ever written for cello and tuba”, 173 piano sonatas and literally hundreds of pieces for ensembles he has initiated. These have included the Promenade Theatre Orchestra, Hobbs-White Duo, Garden Furniture Music Ensemble, Farewell Symphony Orchestra, Nordic Reverie Trio, Instant Dismissal Symphony Orchestra, Lower Edmonton Latin Lovers’ Choral Society and Live Batts, in which unusual, even bizarre combinations of instruments and/or other sound sources have often featured. In the 1960s and 1970s he was closely associated with English experimental composers and invented the early British form of minimalism known as “systems music”.

As a performer he has also played bass trombone with the Royal Ballet Touring Orchestra, tuba in the London Gabrieli Brass Ensemble and has toured widely as a piano recitalist specialising in late Romantic music in addition to his own and, in particular, that of Erik Satie. His activities in the world of theatre music have included composing the scores for the Royal Shakespeare Company productions of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Les Enfants du Paradis, many productions for the Royal National Theatre and various regional theatres as well as musical direction of the Western Theatre Ballet and numerous musicals in London’s West End. He has held a succession of teaching posts at the Royal College of Music, the Royal Academy of Music, the Yehudi Menuhin School, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University) and the Drama Centre, London as well as fulfilling visiting lectureships in various foreign institutions and conducting workshops with CoMA (Contemporary music-making for amateurs) who have commissioned two works for large ensemble.