{"id":10831,"date":"2026-04-19T18:20:40","date_gmt":"2026-04-19T17:20:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/?p=10831"},"modified":"2026-04-19T18:20:40","modified_gmt":"2026-04-19T17:20:40","slug":"the-many-hands-of-john-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/2026\/04\/the-many-hands-of-john-white.html","title":{"rendered":"The Many Hands of John White"},"content":{"rendered":"

John White would be ninety this year, had he not died in 2024. There was a large concert that year<\/a> to celebrate his life and work, but there is still much to celebrate and more yet that has been so far overlooked. Music We’d Like To Hear began its extended twenty-first season with a concert dedicated to White<\/a> yesterday which demonstrated both of these aspects. As a pre-concert event, Tim Parkinson gave the premiere of White’s Piano Sonata No. 47 from 1969. Relatively longer than most of his 179 other sonatas, it’s a spacious work that “quietens the mind” in the Cagean sense, although the lean but unyielding structure bears a closer relationship to Christian Wolff. Mixing single notes and chords harmonising the upper leading voice, the piece moved slowly in a largely stepwise way with occasional displacements, the extended duration creating a sort of slow-motion long line of melody. Strange how you could tell it was over. <\/p>\n

The concert itself featured performances by frequent White collaborator Christopher Hobbs with Dave Smith on piano. Most of the works were duets for piano four hands, with Smith pairing with Mary Dullea, Rob Grassie, Mark Viner and Hobbs. The piano duets were mostly written in the mid-1970s and tended to be all of a similar style, reflecting White’s interest in the Romantics and in theatre music. The programme notes describe these as non-system works, as opposed to the pieces for which he remains best known, but traces of machinery could still be heard here, both in his fondness for sequences, applied meticulously or haphazardly, and the salon-cum-player piano approach that Smith et al.<\/em> took to interpreting this self-consciously anachronistic music. There’s a bone-dry humour at work in these pieces if you’re looking for it, mostly in their form, either cutting off the romanticist rhetoric in mid-flow or extending it until it verges on bluster. The English reticence at play here also ensures the seductive effects are blunted. This would all appear to be a way for White to have his cake and eat it, and an evening’s worth of the stuff did start to play on the nerves.<\/p>\n

To break things up, Hobbs and Ian Gardiner played a couple of White’s machine pieces for untuned percussion. Yet Another Exercise<\/em> and Photo-Finish Machine<\/em> both date from 1972 and use irregular patterns of sounded and unsounded events to produce fleeting, elusive textures out of a game-like situation. Tammas Slater gave the early Toccata for Organ<\/em> (from 1961) a rendition on the St Mary At Hill instrument, the first airing of this piece in about, oh, sixty-five years or so. It’s a lively, exuberant work, composed to show off the pipes of the newly-commisioned organ at Guildford Cathedral. There were also surprise items not announced in the programme: Smith and Hobbs performing a piano arrangement of Nordic Reverie<\/em>, and a newly-discovered work from 2019 dedicated to John Tilbury, adapting material from Rossini’s Sins of Old Age<\/em> into a sly, quasi-obsessive indulgence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John White would be ninety this year, had he not died in 2024. There was a large concert that year to celebrate his life and work, but there is still much to celebrate and more yet that has been so far overlooked. Music We’d Like To Hear began its extended twenty-first season with a concert […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,44],"tags":[55],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10831"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10831"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10834,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10831\/revisions\/10834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}