On top of all of these musical activities, White retains a busy schedule teaching undergraduates and graduate students at Princeton University, where she has now taught for 20 years. Many of these works-such as the solo piano piece Reliquary, which explores the fragility of human memory, or her contribution to Dominic Donato’s tam-tam project Desire Lines-were tailor made for their intended performers, which she acknowledged is “the opposite end of the spectrum from orchestra.” In the last five years, White has also immersed herself in performing regularly with musicians who have very different musical backgrounds from her, such as the traditional Cape Breton guitarist Charles MacDonald, with whom she plays in a duo called Fork & Spoon. The deeply personal nature of so many of White’s compositions explains why she has predominantly created music for soloists or small ensembles. I had to put myself in the position of the non-sympathetic bystander, the one who was not doing anything. So what do we do? I asked the choreographer, and she said, “Just look at her heartlessly.” And so we did. Relatively late in the process, it became apparent that … she’s appealing to us. Then she comes and appeals to the musicians. While the singer is indicting the audience, the dancer is appealing to different people on stage-the non-speaking, non-singing, movement chorus and the King. There’s a pairing of a singer and dancer playing the same character. One of the hardest things that I’ve ever performed is in that same spot that I was talking about. In so doing, she made herself as uncomfortable as she was trying to make the audience: ![]() There are only four musicians in the ensemble, and she chose to write a role for herself playing clarinet in it. It’s a plea for compassion.”Īlthough Weakness is the largest-scale project that White has ever created, it-like most of her compositions-is extremely intimate. … The moment where she addresses the audience is her final plea. A victim asks you to do something-to speak, to stand up, to challenge. … Many side with a perpetrator over a victim because all a perpetrator asks of you is that you do nothing. So it was really interesting to me to think the audience becomes complicit in the story. In the theater, that is what the bystander is expected to do. ![]() The problem is that a bystander is passive and is watching, doing nothing, not acting. The community is represented by other dancers, but the members of the audience are also made to feel like they are members of this community as well, which ultimately does nothing to help Macha.Īccording to White, “It’s very easy to be a bystander. The king’s lines of are actually spoken by the conductor! Other significant characters, such as Macha’s husband-who in a moment of bragging caused the king to be aware of her and ultimately demand her compliance-is a speaking role for one of the dancers. He has to stomp her out, and no one helps her.”īut in her telling of this story, White was very aware of Carolyn Abbate’s assertion that female opera characters are often victims, and so she wanted to tell this story somewhat differently than it would be told in a more conventional opera presentation. ![]() There is a woman with gifts, and it’s a problem for this king. “What ends up happening is that there is no empathy,” Barbara White explained when we visited her at her home in Princeton, New Jersey. For Weakness, White chose to set an old Celtic legend about a spirit woman named Macha whom a despotic king forces into a fatal race with his horses despite her begging him, as well as the entire community, to spare her. One recent dramatic musical work that asks a lot of these questions is Weakness, a mostly one-woman opera composed by Barbara White which premiered, presciently, six years ago this month. Why do we venerate various composers and interpreters over others? How is our repertoire chosen? Who are the composers who are included and who are excluded and why? In the case of works that are presented on musical stages or that include a narrative text, there’s an extra layer we’ve begun to more closely examine what stories we are choosing to tell and why. It has caused us to ask some profound questions that take it far beyond the realm of questioning direct personal physical and verbal abuse. The focus on these toxic abuses of power has led many of us in the music community to look more carefully at ourselves, at our own work, and the work we admire and advocate for. Thanks to the rise of the #MeToo movement, our society is beginning to be more aware and sensitive about how gender inequities have resulted in long overlooked and unpunished-and, in many cases, tolerated and even encouraged-scenarios of harassment and assault throughout our society.
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