The composer John White, who has died aged 87, sought new ways to write approachably tonal music that, especially from the early 1970s onwards, emphasised consonance, melody, unusual instrumental lineups – and a highly developed sense of ironic humour. When greeting him at concerts, I eventually got used to his unvarying response to my usual “How are you?”: the – somewhat alarming – “Cosmic!”
The 180 piano sonatas that he composed from 1956 onwards offer the best introduction to White’s stylistic range. Some of the earlier sonatas are substantial, multi-movement works, their musical features offering singular responses to the work of 19th- and earlier 20th-century composers who, to him, “sounded more pungent and less comforting” than did the standard German repertoire of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.
White’s positively cosmic array of compositional starting points – including Charles-Valentin Alkan, Ferruccio Busoni, Nikolai Medtner, Erik Satie and Olivier Messiaen – gradually accrued into a kind of alternative history of music that offered a multitude of models. Even Schumann and Bruckner became useful on account of their more idiosyncratic attitudes. Max Reger endeared himself to White for “the sympathetic ability to be simultaneously serious and lost”.
By stark contrast, a batch of sonatas from the late 1960s are dissonant and minimalist. Those from 1972 onwards signal a return to consonant and narrative composition and have tended to be quite short.
Representative of these works’ scope are: Sonata No 14 (1960), a 23-minute mosaic of contrasting styles and moods; Sonata No 95 (1977), which White described as “a garrulous rondo-casserole of waltz themes”; and Sonata No 164 (2008), shifting “effortlessly between the subtly mysterious and darkly brooding” while simultaneously acting as a study in cross-rhythms.
Such music was achieved without the recourse to hard-left political beliefs that led his exact contemporary, Cornelius Cardew, to move away from the musical cacophony and performance art of the Scratch Orchestra, which Cardew had co-founded in 1969. White himself had once belonged to this band of musical renegades, and its brief storming of the barricades of the establishment were in marked contrast to the activities of the ensembles that he now went on to create.
For some while he concentrated on “Machines”, his own form of minimalism that developed into “systems” music. White’s own definition of a “Machine” was “a consistent process governing a series of musical actions within a particular sound-world”.
He went on to form groups of like-minded composers, all keen to perform their own works: not only since nobody else would do so but also out of a belief that “doing it yourself” was a healthy strategy. A wider range of methods and materials were features of The Promenade Theatre Orchestra, founded in 1969: a quartet of reed organs, toy pianos and oddball noise-makers in which White was joined by Chris Hobbs, Alec Hill and Hugh Shrapnel. Subsequent groups included the Hobbs/White Duo, from 1972, and, from 1977, the Garden Furniture Music Ensemble, a multi-instrumental lineup – taking its name from Satie’s notion of “furniture music” for background listening – that included Gavin Bryars, Ben Mason and Dave Smith. Much later, from 1994, there was Live Batts!! – an “electrics” trio featuring the composer’s eventual second wife, Margaret Coldiron, and Andrea Rocca.
White could also turn his hand to any demand for incidental music at London’s National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and elsewhere. When a director asked for music like “a rather fragile Sibelius”, White produced pastiche Sibelius; when, as the dress rehearsal loomed, this director realised that he had really meant Elgar, White swiftly complied with a score effortlessly mimicking the new model required. Student productions at the Drama Centre London – where he was head of music for four decades, retiring in 2020 – were served with similarly virtuosic compositional resourcefulness.
Born in Berlin after Hitler had come to power, John was the son of a German mother, Maju (Margareta, nee Jurisch), and an English father, Bob (Arthur Barwood) White, who was working in prewar Germany as an electrical engineer. The family moved to London in 1938.
Piano lessons from the age of five with Hélène Gipps were followed by studies at the Royal College of Music with Arthur Alexander and Eric Harrison, plus composition studies with Bernard Stevens. By the early 1960s White was himself teaching there; his pupils included the composers Brian Dennis and Roger Smalley.
He had also taken up the bass trombone and the tuba, playing both in the London Gabrieli Brass Ensemble. His friendship with a number of talented instrumentalists resulted in a wealth of brass music, including a Concerto for Harpsichord and Brass and a Concerto for 11 brass instruments in 10 movements. He additionally earned his living, at various times, as a musical director for West End musicals, and as a teacher at the Menuhin School and Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University).
In 1980 he married the dancer and choreographer Pat Garrett; they divorced in 1994. His marriage to Coldiron, a theatre director and academic, came in 2003, and she survives him.
• Edward John White, composer and pianist, born 5 April 1936; died 4 January 2024
