This season is a little more sane for me than last season, but between my work in Seattle with Harmonia and Arizona with the Sedona Symphony, there’s plenty to look forward to. (Links on the Events sidebar to the right.)

Harmonia: Baroque Bangers Vol. 1

Saturday, October 3 • First Free Methodist Church, Seattle
A smörgåsbord of the boppiest movements from Baroque cantatas, oratorios, operas, concertos, and suites.

Sedona: Mozart & Chopin

Sunday, October 18 • Sedona Performing Arts Center
Rossini, Barber Overture; Chopin, Piano Concerto No. 2; Mozart, Symphony No. 39

Harmonia: Rule, Britannia!

Saturday, November 7 • First Free Methodist Church, Seattle
Smyth, The Boatswain’s Mate Overture; Stanford, Songs of the Fleet; Elgar, “Enigma” Variations

Sedona: Simple Gifts

Sunday, November 15 • Sedona Performing Arts Center
Amrhein, Serenade; Garcia, Violin Concerto; Cowell, Saturday Night at the Firehouse; Copland, Appalachian Spring Suite

Harmonia: Messiah

Saturday, December 12 • First Free Methodist Church, Seattle
Sunday, December 13 • Bastyr Chapel, Kenmore

Sedona: Surprise Party!

Sunday, January 31 • Sedona Performing Arts Center

Boccherini, “Celebrated” Minuet and B-flat Cello Concerto; JC Bach La Clemenza di Scipione Overture; Haydn “Surprise” Symphony

Harmonia: Comrades

Saturday, February 6 • Northshore Concert Hall, Kenmore
Khachaturian Masquerade Waltz; Shostakovich, Piano Concerto No. 2; Prokofiev, Symphony No. 5

Harmonia: Dark Choral

Saturday, February 20 • St. Stephen’s Episcopal, Seattle
Selections by Purcell, Lotti, Rachmaninoff, Schnittke, Rautavaara, Messiaen, White, and Barnhill

Sedona: Beethoven Bonanza

Sunday, March 7 • Sedona Performing Arts Center
Coriolan Overture; Piano Concerto No. 4; Symphony No. 5

Harmonia: St. John Passion

Saturday, March 20 • First Free Methodist Church, Seattle

Harmonia: The Americans

Saturday, May 1 • First Free Methodist Church, Seattle
Still, Wood Notes; Bernstein, Chichester Psalms; Thompson, Symphony No. 2

Out of curiosity, I decided to list all the works I’m going to be conducting this season in the chronological order in which they were composed. This pointed out a very peculiar circumstance for an orchestral conductor, namely that I’m not going to be performing any music written between 1831 and 1898:

This was not in any way by design, but perhaps it’s a complimentary to last season, when I conducted Brahms 1 and 3, Mendelssohn 3, Tchaikovsky 6, the Dvořák Te Deum, Robert Schumann’s Cello Concerto, and Clara Schumann’s Three Romances, not to mention piano concerto movements by Brahms and Grieg.

But even that seems like pretty slim pickings in the Romantic department by the standards of most conductors. Am I surreptitiously and unbeknownst to myself becoming an Early-Modern guy!?

I think not; this is just how things happened to shake out this year. But I’ll have to be a tad more deliberate next season and make up for this year’s lack of Romantics. Perhaps the Ring Cycle.

This past summer, I composed a pair of choral-orchestral works that offer, shall we say, a study in musical contrast.

The Angel

The sweet piece is this fantasia that I composed for my friend Marcello’s youth orchestra in Lexington, KY. It’s called We, The People, and it’s a pop anthem that I went full ham on. It’s got a Disneyesque choral and orchestral voicings, a High School Musical montage through American history, and a stomp-clap breakout section that plays to the rafters. It was given its premiere by a group of 350 teenagers (250 singers and 100 instrumentalists) and they did a stupendous job.

The Devil

Whereas We, The People has almost no minor chords in it, my setting of the Dies Irae has almost no major chords in it. In a way it’s grim and unremitting, but more importantly, it’s diabolical fun, basically my attempt at fusing together Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and Schnittke’s A Faust Cantata (plus a little of Ligeti’s La grand macabre and Bernstein’s MASS.)

I guess now that I think about it, these two pieces are united by the fact that I wanted both of them to be entertainment first and foremost. I think the Dies Irae carries a deep and unsettling message, but I worked hard to make it anything but a “message piece.” American audiences — especially where I live in Seattle — are fed a steady diet of moralistic pablum as regards new music on classical concerts, and I could never knowingly bring myself to serve up such a dish.

2025–2026 is going to be an exceptionally busy year for me. Harmonia’s season keeps expanding, with a 7-concert mainstage series, a 4-concert chamber series, a special concerto performance, and a season-closing gala concert. In Sedona, we’ve got a 4-concert classics series (plus a great Pops concert, but I won’t be conducting that show.) Plus, I committed (perhaps foolishly) to writing three large new works.

I’ll have all these events listed in my event listings (which you can see on the right-hand sidebar) but I wanted to put everything in one place in chronological order, partially just to help myself in grappling with all this stuff.

Everett Philharmonic (Guest Conductor)
September 28
BARBER School for Scandal Overture
BOLCOM Violin Concerto
BRAHMS Symphony No. 3

Harmonia Mainstage: A Joyous Trilogy
October 4
MASON A Joyous Trilogy
DVORAK Te Deum
BRAHMS Symphony No. 1

Sedona: The Classics
October 19 & 21
HANDEL Acis and Galatea Overture (arr. Mozart)
BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 1
HAYDN Symphony No. 99

Harmonia Chamber Players I
October 25
N. BOULANGER 3 Pieces
BEETHOVEN Sextet for two horns and strings
WHITE Trio for Viola, Horn, and Piano

Harmonia Mainstage: Dances of Death
November 8
SCHNITTKE Agitato I from Story of an Unknown Actor
RACHMANINOFF “Blessed Art Thou, O Lord” from All-Night Vigil
WHITE Dies Irae (world premiere)
RACHMANINOFF Symphonic Dances

Central Kentucky Youth Orchestras
November 16
WHITE We, The People (world premiere)

Sedona: Mozart and Marimba
November 23
GALBRAITH Midnight Stirring
PUTS Marimba Concerto
PORPORA Carlo il Calvo Overture
MOZART Symphony No. 36

Harmonia: Messiah
December 13 & 14
HANDEL Messiah

Harmonia Chamber Players III
January 24
BRISTOW New work (world premiere)
DVORAK Serenade for Winds
HAYDN Symphony No. 52

Sedona: The Romantics
February 1
C SCHUMANN 3 Romances for Violin (orch. White)
R SCHUMANN Cello Concerto
MENDELSSOHN Symphony No. 3

Harmonia: Reflections
February 7
BEYER Reflections (world premiere)
BARBER Reincarnations
other choral selections by BRISTOW, PURCELL, ESMAIL, etc.

Harmonia: Pathos
February 28
SIBELIUS Karelia Overture
GARCIA Violin Concerto (world premiere)
TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 6

Sedona: Discovery
March 15
GLUCK Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Orfeo ed Euridice
MENDELSSOHN Violin Concerto
CPE BACH Symphony in D
JS BACH Orchestral Suite No. 3

Scottsdale Symphonic Orchestra
March 22
WHITE New Work (world premiere)

Harmonia: Israel in Egypt
March 28
HANDEL Israel in Egypt

Harmonia: The Planets
May 8
KECHLEY Fanfare
L BOULANGER Psaume XXIV: “La terre appartient à l’éternel”
L BOULANGER Psaume CXXX: “Du fond de l’abîme”
HOLST The Planets

Harmonia Gala: Peacocks and Pearls
May 29
WHITE La bonne chose

With all that, I’ve decided to limit my pre-concert lecture work to just two talks for the Seattle Symphony (Jan 8-10, and Apr 16-19) and even that seems like pushing the limits.

Wish me luck!

What
My new album, released today on Navona records. This is the first commercial released album dedicated to my music.

Who
Yes, me, but really, this album is the brainchild and accomplishment of Joseph Vaz. Joey was my student and he’s become my friend and collaborator. Looking back on this project from the beginning, it was all his idea and he bamboozled me into doing it.

His first step was to ask me to write him a piano sonata that he could play on his master’s recital at CCM. I was very happy to oblige him on this, and it was my first of many sanity-saving lockdown-era composition projects. Because of Covid and other exigencies, he wasn’t able to play it on his master’s recital, but he did play it on his doctoral recital* at the CUNY Grad Center, where he’s currently finishing up his DMA in piano performance. He’s also performed it in Maine and in Seattle.

After the success of that piece, Joey asked me to write a set of 11 Bagatelles, an oddly specific request, but he thought it would be a good idea to do some miniatures after a big honking sonata. His logic made sense to me, and when a virtuoso tells you to write more music for them, you do it.

At this point, I felt I had basically written everything I could possibly write for the solo piano. Frankly, I never thought of myself as someone who would or could write well for the piano. It’s an instrument with which I have a fraught relationship, and I’ve always been a little embarrassed by my own lack of prowess at the keyboard.

And yet, it was at this point that Joseph proposed that I write just enough more music so that there would be enough for an album. I will freely admit, he really had to bring me around to his way of thinking about this, both in terms of writing more piano music and in terms of producing a commercially released album of all this stuff.

He wore me down, and I wrote the final solo work for the album**, which ended up being the title track, a suite titled Galanteries. What is a galanterie? Allow me to quote the album’s liner notes: “The term “galanterie” was used by 18th-century composers to describe the optional movements of a Baroque dance suite. A suite required four standard movements — the allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue — but between the sarabande and the gigue a composer could insert a rogue dance: a bourrée, gavotte, minuet, or passacaglia, just to name a few of the options.”

* I continue to be of the opinion that, since my music has now been performed in two recitals for doctoral performance degrees, I should be awarded an honorary doctorate in composition.

** There’s actually one more piece on the album, an arrangement of one of my own hymns, which I made into a pianistic fantasia. It’s really a piano piece with optional voice, which Joey adapted very slightly to account for the few places where the voice has a bit more prominence.

Where
We recorded the album at Oktaven Studios in Mount Vernon, NY, which is the most magical spot imaginable, and a studio that I can recommend most highly to other recording artists (not that they need my endorsement — they seem to be booked 12 hours a day every day.)

The big story of the recording session is that my piano sonata (or maybe Joey’s thumb) is cursed. Every time he’s played it, he’s broken a piano string. Well, we (I) stupidly jinxed ourselves by telling this to the owner of the studio, and he assured us that they had recently restrung their piano (an astonishingly beautiful Hamburg Steinway) with a new extra-tensile string that was all but unbreakable.

Reader, do I have to tell you what happened next? I still have the string.

Shout-out to Oktaven’s amazing emergency piano tech!

How
I mean look, if you want to get an album made, all you really need is money. I don’t have much, but in comparison to many of the delusional, self-aggrandizing recordings I’ve sunk my money into, this one was pretty cheap, and I’m sure it’s the best product I’ve ever made.

To me, the real question here is: how did Joey do it? How did he learn all those notes and dash them off in take after take over so many hours of recording, so consistently? If I didn’t know his parents personally, I’d swear he was a demigod. He’s just a talented, driven, diligent young man, and I can but marvel at his abilities and accomplishments. The fact that he’s chosen to champion my music is an honor beyond belief. I think it’s supposed to go the other way, like with the older musician helping out the younger one, but hey, I’ll take it!

Why
Because we love you. 😘

This past summer (July 2024 to be precise), I found myself on a personal/professional roller coaster the likes of which I never would have imagined when I discovered that several of my compositions had been plagiarized by a teenage scam artist halfway across the world. Not only plagiarized, but passed off as his own compositions, to the point where he had them performed *in concert* by prominent, talented professional musicians in his home country.

This kid plagiarized my music by copying it off of my scrolling-score YouTube videos, admittedly an arduous task that could prove he has the necessary work ethic to write his own music. But here’s the kicker: in spite of the fact that he could have just copied my music without me ever knowing of his existence, the whole time that he was plagiarizing me, he was also writing me lengthy emails, kicked off by an anonymous, out-of-the-blue fan letter:

The story has several more unlikely (and frankly, insane) twists and turns. I’ve recounted it in full detail to several friends and colleagues in private, but now it’s very much a matter of public record, as it’s been voluminously chronicled by Hugh Morris in VAN Magazine.

Because my plagiarist was/is a minor, the editorial team at VAN decided to redact his name and any identifying details, and I’m honoring that same policy here on my website. If you’re a composer who read my story on VAN and you’ve gotten an email similar to the one above, please do send me a (non-anonymous) message, because I’m not the only one who got plagiarized. (For more on that, you’ll have to read the article.)

Also unmentioned in the article — and rather unfortunately, in my view — were the specific works of mine that got caught up in this whole affair, and for the benefit of readers who have navigated their way to willcwhite.com in the hopes of finding out more, I’m happy to assemble them below:

My piano sonata, a huge, dissonant, virtuosic work, is the piece that I first discovered had been performed under false pretenses. I don’t think I can convey my level of shock when I watched the video of this work being performed in No one’s home country. As is mentioned in the article, the most galling thing was when No one bounded on stage, handed the pianist a floral bouquet, and took several bows. (That’s not even counting his speech!) It was the first time I had ever even seen what he looked like.

This next one was actually kind of funny. No one changed the title from “The Seafarers” to “The Mariners,” quite unaware, I’m sure, of the additional layer of irony: the Mariners is the name of Seattle’s professional baseball team.

As far as I know, there was no public performance of the Bagatelles, but after No one had been exposed, he admitted to having plagiarized them, and I can only presume he was trying to pawn them off as his own and arrange a performance.

Lest anyone feel sympathy for me, let me assure you: I’m not the victim here. For me, this has wound up as a wild, unforgettable story. The victims are No one’s friends and family, not to mention the musicians he duped into playing my music under false pretenses.

Anyway, that’s the story of my insane summer!