The Faculty Composition Recital at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 29 in Westbrook Music Building Rm. 119 will feature the work of Tyler White, professor of composition and conducting and Director of Orchestras in the Glenn Korff School of Music.
White’s program, titled “An Afternoon with Friends,” will include four world premieres.
The first is “Two Little Pieces” for clarinet and bassoon featuring Diane Barger, clarinet, and Jim Compton, bassoon.
“They’re relatively light and fun,” White said of the work. “One is lyrical, and the other is a Venezuelan salsa dance.”
The second piece is “3 a.m. Elegy” to be performed by Scott Anderson, trombone, and Michael Cotton, piano.
“It was originally the slow movement of a trombone concerto, and then I realized the concerto was simply too long and demanding to be performed by one trombonist,” White said. “So I took out the slow movement and made it a standalone work.”
The third piece is a variation of the work he composed for the “Tangling with the Epic” project organized by Kevin Hanrahan that featured texts from a poetic conversation between UNL Professor Kwame Dawes and Australian poet John Kinsella with music composed by White and Australian composer Diana Blom.
“There were four solo songs—two for tenor and two for baritone—and then two duets,” White said. “I’ve taken all of the solo songs and made tenor versions for all of them, and this will be the world premiere of the tenor version of the four songs from ‘Tangling with the Epic.’ One of the songs, as a tribute to Kwame, provides my first foray into the composition of reggae.”
Hanrahan will perform the four solo songs, accompanied by Cotton.
The final work on the program is the largest work on the program, “Sinfonietta Concertante” which is a small chamber orchestra of solo players with a solo oboe and solo harpsichord performed by William McMullen and Christopher Marks, respectively. The three-movement piece lasts about 19 minutes.
“I’ve always adored the sound of the harpsichord,” White said. “It can be both very spiky and very lush, sometimes at the same time. It’s always been a real fondness of mine, and it blends so beautifully with the reedy sound of the oboe.”
White said it means a lot for him to present his work in this concert.
“I think it serves an important function, in a variety of ways,” he said. “I’ve been extremely active, compositionally, in the last five or six years, and it’s just really important to get my work out in front of the UNL and Lincoln public as much as I can. It also provides a great modeling of composer behavior for our students. Since our students have to present their own recitals, it seems a little unfair if the faculty don’t necessarily have to do the same.”
White said diversity is the theme that runs through all four pieces.
“There are two South American-inspired movements. There are dark and brooding pieces. There are upbeat and happy pieces. There is good lyricism and a lot of rhythmic energy,” he said.
This summer, Parma Recordings released “Symphonic Chronicles Vol. III” on their Grammy-winning label Navona Records, which included the recording of White’s string orchestra work, “The Four Elements (Chamber Symphony No. 2),” performed by the Brno Contemporary Orchestra (Czech Republic) and conducted by Pavel Snajdr. It is available on Spotify and other streaming platforms.
“They did a wonderful job,” White said of the orchestra’s performance of his work. “It’s really wonderful to see the places where that sort of Slavic, Eastern European soul comes out where they took a certain sort of leisurely amount of time in some passages, which really enhances the expression really beautifully.”
As of a few weeks ago, his piece had more than 5,000 streams worldwide.
“Largely in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.,” White said. “But also—this is interesting—with extensive interest and play in Turkey and Argentina.”
The Sept. 29 concert is free and open to the public. The concert will also be live webcast. Visit https://music.unl.edu/webcasts the day of the concert for the link.