Bill White is a classical guitarist and composer who moved to Homer about two years ago when his wife, Dr. Elizabeth White, started directing Homer OPUS. Formed in 2019, Homer OPUS is a nonprofit organization that delivers string-based music programs to youth ages kindergarten through 12th grade and adults in Homer. Bill White has provided several compositions and performances for the community and the one coming up this week is “The Raven” that will take place at the West Homer gym at 5:30 on October 27th. The Raven is a Homer Spooky Strings concert featuring the Homer Youth String Orchestra Club, Codas Orchestra and the Cosmic Warblers. White talked about what The Raven will offer to the audience at the show this week:
“it's rather a big production, kind of drawing in all these disparate groups, and then of course the piece itself has been evolving as we go. Like oh that's not quite working. Oh we need to reassign this part over here instead of to the kids. It's been very much a living, breathing sort of organism in that way. So that's been exciting,” White said.
White described some of his own background in composition and how this relates to The Raven:
“My music is generally based on ideas that come from the spectralism tradition. So, this is a tradition of composing based on the overtone series, which is this thing where whenever you play any note on any instrument, you have sort of resultant pitches that happen at integer multiples of that fundamental frequency. In the 1960s, we could analyze that and say, okay, we can see this now with electronic devices. You know, let's use that in our composition, and that sort of became a old thing. The other half of that is process-based music, so getting from one point to another, that kind of thing, to really sum up in a moment. And you'll hear some of that in the Raven. The other thing that I'm very interested in is “The Raven” is based on some less tonal ideas, so it's not atonal music, right? We're not talking Schoenberg, we're not talking Milton Babbitt, but it's not traditional tertian harmony, where we say okay, a C major chord or a G minor chord, for example. Rather, we're working a lot of times with quartal harmony, so chords that are stacked by spelling in fourths rather than in thirds, which is what our ears are used to when we say things like G major, C major. A lot of it is also based on a whole tone scale, again as opposed to a major or minor scale, which gives it sort of a dream-like quality. If you've heard, for example, Debussy or Ravel, the early sort of impressionist composers of the 20th century. That's what's happening there,” White said.
According to White, the concert is based on the poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe. The music follows the structure of the poem, and the choir presents a portion of that text. There are also two youth members of the scherzos, the upper after school group, that serve as narrators, White explains. At its core, this is a children’s concert contributing to the intended theme of Spooky Strings, White said.
White concludes with final musical details of the piece:
“The internal discussion of the piece has been, “oh, this is very strange.” The words atonal have been passed around. It's very difficult to to tune for the strings, that kind of thing. It is very non-traditional, for sure. There's a lot of these, like I mentioned, unfamiliar harmonies and things like that. But the piece is still squarely in D minor, right? It's in three movements. The first movement is the most kind of collaborative, and the first movement itself is about 10 minutes long. And this is where sort of the adult orchestra brings us in, but all of the separate groups are kind of weaving in and out. There's a little bit of a kids feature. There's support from the adult orchestra while the kids play the melody,” White said.
The show is open to anyone interested, is free of charge and will be at the West Homer Elementary School gym on Tuesday October 27th at 5:30.
“At the end of the day, I think the most important thing is that these kids are having fun and, you know, having exciting experience with music, and they've put a lot of work into this thing. It's really quite dense music, and they've done really really well at bringing it all together in just you know two months of whatever after school rehearsals they can get. So, this is an opportunity for them to share that, and have some fun. They get to do some funny sounds throughout it, some stomping, some yelling, some snapping pizzicatos on their violins, along with the actual pedagogical stuff like how to bow and stuff like that that's in there. And, they get to wear costumes, so they're going to have a great time,” White said.
Reporting from Homer, this is Emilie Springer.
