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.

I did a pre-concert talk this past weekend for the Seattle Symphony. After a beautiful opening work by Anna Clyne, the orchestra performed Schumann’s piano concerto and Mendelssohn’s “Scotch” Symphony, easily my favorite of his large-scale works.

An acquaintance who heard that I had given the talk asked what my area of expertise was, and the best I could come up with was “charm.”

Cheeky, I know, but the fact of the matter is, we conductors are generalists who immerse ourselves in research for specific projects for short periods of time, and after enough years and enough projects, all those mini-spates as experts at up to an interesting and personalized view of the repertoire and of music history.

This was a great talk to give because there was so much to explore in the relationship between these great composers. They were total bros! Almost exact contemporaries (Mendelssohn: 1809-1847; Schumann 1810-1856), they both grew up in “Germany,” and they were both on the early edge of Romanticism in music.

And yet, given that narrow set of constraints, they were about as different as you could get. Mendelssohn came from immense wealth and privilege. His grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn was considered the ‘Father of the Jewish Enlightenment’, a period in history when the German states were liberalizing their laws towards Jews, and Jews were liberalizing their stance towards assimilation into German society.

When Moses was born, he was named in the conventional Jewish system as Moses ben Mendel, but he Germanized his surname to Mendelssohn. He raised his children with a very liberal brand of Judaism, such that his son Abraham raised his children—including Fanny and Felix—with no religion at all.

Abraham became a banker, and he went to work at his family’s branch in Hamburg, then an independently governed city-state. There, he set about financing the smuggling operations that would bring an end to Napoleon’s “continental system,” a blockade of goods between Britain and Europe. Fearing retribution when Napoleon’s forces invaded, the Mendelssohn family had to escape Hamburg in disguise under cover of night. Which is how Felix ended up back at his family’s seat in Berlin. (The Mendelssohn & Co. bank lasted well into the 20th century—until, 1938, in fact, when it was liquidated by the Nazis and its assets were folded into Deutsche Bank.)

In Berlin, Abraham and his family were taken in to his wife’s mother’s estate. The maternal line of Felix Mendelssohn’s ancestry is just as interesting as the paternal. His maternal grandfather had been Court Jew to Frederick the Great of Prussia, back when German kings had things such as “Court Jews” (really a type of banker.) Using his clout, this Court Jew was able to convince FGP to liberalize many laws surrounding the Prussian Jewry, including opening up the ghettos.

This grandmother of Felix’s would have an important role to play in music history. The family owned several rare manuscripts, and for Felix’s 17th birthday, she commissioned a new manuscript copy of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, which is of course the work with which Felix would inaugurate the modern Bach revival.

Robert Schumann, on the other hand, did not come from a wealthy background. His father was a bookseller, and young Robert’s earliest ambitions were literary. He thrilled to the novels of Jean Paul (whose Titan was similarly adored by Gustav Mahler) and the poetry of Goethe, Rilke, and Heine. He came to music late, and didn’t have a proper piano lesson until he was 19.

His piano teacher was Friedrich Wieck of Leipzig, and it was at Wieck’s house that young Robert would meet a child named Clara. Clara was on her way to becoming a virtuoso pianist; by the age of 18, she would be appointed “Imperial Concert Pianist” to the Hapsburg Emperor. (Another long-gone courtly title, although it should be noted that the Prince of Wales still employs an official harpist.)

After several years in close quarters, Robert and Clara fell in love, and this is where things became challenging. Herr Wieck did not feel that Robert—a poor young piano student with dreams of composing but little to show for himself—was a worthy match for his daughter, already a star on the European musical stage. And thus he launched into a lengthy court proceeding to keep the two apart.

This is where Mendelssohn steps into the story. Robert and Felix had become friends and admirers of one another during the 1830’s, in spite of the fact that when they first met, Mendelssohn was already an adept composer, pianist, and conductor, and Robert had only a few unpublished compositions to his name. (Not to mention the fact that he had rendered his right ring finger totally lame by trying to speed up his muscular development with a hack gadget called the chiroplast.)

And yet, Robert and Clara found a way. They mainly carried out their clandestine romance via musical composition. Clara, as we all know, was herself a distinguished composer. While she was under lock and key, forbidden to see her beloved Robert, she would compose piano pieces that were coded with motifs that had private meanings between her and Robert. Robert would then work these same motifs into his own piano works and arrange to have them delivered to Clara. Old Herr Wieck simply heard Clara practicing new works, and was none the wiser.

Oh right, back to Mendelssohn. Wieck mounted an outright defamation campaign against Robert Schumann, so much that Robert had no recourse except to countersue his father-in-law-to-be. First on the list of character witnesses for the prosecution: Felix Mendelssohn.

Their bromance was one for the ages. They visited and wrote to one another often. Felix likely conducted* the first read-through performance of Robert’s Phantasie for piano and orchestra, which would later become the first movement of the piano concerto. (*Sources differ; some say it was Ferdinand David.) When Felix died at the tragically young age of 38, Robert was one of the pall bearers at his funeral.

The two also wrote pieces that begin in a dreary a minor and end in a triumphant A major, Schumann’s piano concerto and Mendelssohn’s Scotch symphony. (Mendelssohn, however, has the distinction of having the only work in the standard repertoire that begins in major and ends in the tonic minor: his “Italian Symphony.”)

The Scotch is my personal favorite of Mendelssohn’s five symphonies. It’s another one of those cases where the numbering is out of order: though he conceived of it as early as 1829, he didn’t complete it until 1842, making it the last—i.e. the 5th—of his symphonies that he would bring to completion.

The original conception came from a trip that he took to Britain at the age of 20. Mendelssohn went there in order to perform and conduct his own music in London, where he was a huge hit. After that, he and a friend took a pleasure tour of the north of Britain, hitting the major Scottish industrial centers as well as its craggy coasts.

As you probably know, the Hebrides made a major impression on the composer, but so did the derelict ruins of the Holyrood palace chapel.

Of COURSE Mendelssohn was obsessed with this place. It was the most prototypical Romantic-with-a-capital-R site imaginable: a Gothic ruin, decaying and being taken over by nature, not to mention the site of the crowning of Queen Mary, whose story had been immortalized in a play by Goethe. There is literally NOTHING more Romantic that he could have stumbled upon, and so he wrote the opening bars of this symphony as a memento of that visit.

Schumann’s a minor-to-major piano concerto also has a deeply personal story. Naturally, it was written for Clara, shortly after they were married (she played that first, perhaps-conducted-by-Mendelssohn reading while 8 1/2 months pregnant.) The piece can easily be read as a retelling of their courtship. The stormy opening that seems to capture the moment when they were torn apart by Friedrich Wieck. Then the moody opening melody, based on the notes “C-B-A-A,” or in German “C-H-A-A,” which, if you fill in a few gaps, gives you “C-H-i-A-r-A”—”Chiara” or Italian for “Clara”. (I know it sounds far-fetched, but let me assure you: they were into stuff like this.)

The second movement reads as the delicate flirtation between two coquettish people who are taken to flights of fancy together. And of course the finale has the character of a romp, full of joy and optimism, perhaps reflecting their recent nuptials.

So that’s it, that’s the interesting stuff I learned about Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, and now I can forget it until the next time I have to become an expert on these pieces.

It’s a busy and thrilling moment for me up here in the Pacific Northwest, all to do with preparing new music, by me and by my friends. I can honestly say that I’ve been embraced by a regional community of composers, arguably for the first time in my professional life.

This Sunday, Northwest Art Song (aka my friends Arwen and Laura) will premiere a piece I wrote for them, Stabat Mater, about which:

On the concert, I’ll conduct a new song cycle by Robert Kyr, and playing the viola in my piece will be Kenji Bunch, whom, frankly, I’ve thought of as a big famous composer ever since the Ahn Trio released “Music for my Favorite Insomniac” in 2008:

This summer, I spent many an hour creating “critical editions” of the music of two Seattle composers, Carol Sams and Huntley Beyer. I’m currently in rehearsals for Carol’s The Earthmakers, a monumental work if ever there was one, and, in my view among the very best oratorios composed in the past 50 years (if not the past 100.)

Kia (that’s Carol) wrote The Earthmakers in 1986 (which, she continues to claim, was before I was born, in spite of my protestations to the contrary.) It’s an oratorio in 16 movements that tells the story of the creation of the world from a variety of cultural perspectives—Zuni, Inuit, Melanesian, Biblical, scientific, etc.

Every second I spend with this piece is filled with excitement as it comes to life in my inner ear and in rehearsals with the chorus, soloists, and orchestra. Each section flows naturally from what came before, but never in the way you’d expect. Simply put, it’s a masterpiece, and I can’t wait to perform it, not only now, but many times in the future.

The Earthmakers is on a concert I’m doing with OSSCS called “Origins,” and we’re kicking things off with music by a composer who wrote his first concert work for this very occasion. Carlos Garcia (whose instagram, @carlosgarsizzle, is highly recommended) created this little mockup, which to me sounds like a fully produced Hans Zimmer score, to give you a taste of the real thing until we make our live recording.

Hoo boy have I signed myself up for some projects this season. Visit OSSCS for more details.