Michael White
Composer Michael White
Visiting Composer
2011 Wintergreen Summer Music Festival and Academy
Michael White was born in Chicago and received his musical education at The Juilliard School, where he studied with Peter Mennin and Vincent Persichetti. He has composed music in virtually every medium, with an emphasis on vocal works. One of his operas, Diary of a Madwoman, was commissioned and premiered in Riga, Latvia, and another, The Dybbuk, had its premiere at the World’s Fair in Seattle, Washington. A third opera, The Metamorphosis, had its first performance at the Theater of Living Arts in Philadelphia. Mr. White has also written a children’s opera based on the stories of Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass. His other compositions include a large number of chamber works, song cycles, and the recent Concerto for Viola. He has received multiple awards and grants for his compositions, including three Ford Foundation Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship; grants have come from the Soros Foundation, the Fels Foundation, the Arts Councils of New York and Pennsylvania, ASCAP, the Oberlin Conservatory, and UNESCO.
Mr. White has lectured extensively for the New York Philharmonic, the New York Youth Symphony, and for several music festivals, including those in Bowdoin (ME), Rockport (MA), and Long Island, among others. He has written articles on various musical subjects for the Seattle Times, the Philadelphia Post-lntelligencer, the Musical Review, and other journals. He has taught on the faculties of the Oberlin Conservatory, and the Philadelphia Musical Academy, where he served as the chairman of the Composition and Theory Department. Since 1979 he has been a member of the graduate faculty at The Juilliard School, where for ten years he served as the chair of the Department of Literature and Materials of Music. Although he also teaches such graduate courses as “Chamber Music” and “20th Century Opera”, Michael White’s area of expertise has always been the life and music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He has described this subject as “a true obsession”, and as his “first and last love”. To quote from the book which he is now writing (Imaginary Letters; Mozart Remembered) “…he has drawn upon a lifetime of research, teaching, listening, and — most of all — admiring and loving Mozart and his music.”
