Duration: 14'
Commissiond by BalletNEXT, Hub New Music, and the Park City Institute.
WHITE OUT is a chamber ballet commissioned by the Park City Institute (Park City, Utah), BalletNEXT, a professional dance ensemble based in Park City, Utah, and the Boston-based Hub New Music. Even though I had already engaged in some great conversations with flutist Michael Avitabile of Hub New Music about the scope of the piece, I didn’t write a note until I also had the opportunity to chat with Michele Wiles, choreographer and dancer with BalletNEXT. In my mind, more than anything else, dance and the vision of the choreographer had to drive all musical ideas for this chamber ballet.
In talking with Michele, I learned of her desire to give movement to the natural phenomenon of a “whiteout.” This is a term that describes a very severe winter storm condition featuring blowing snow, wind drifts, and high winds. The result of this combination of events is extremely reduced visibility. Given a white, overcast sky with snow already covering the ground, the high winds blowing additional snow in a frenzy throughout the atmosphere renders everything solid white, a world with no visible horizon. As Michele described this to me, I was reminded of the two times I found myself engulfed in whiteouts while living as a graduate student in Cleveland, Ohio. These were terrifying experiences - especially for a person raised in the warm weather of Atlanta!
From Michele’s vision and my own personal experiences, the music for WHITE OUT was created. Within the small confines of this piece, I have tried to capture the small beginning of a winter storm with its first few flakes of snow and its growth into a furious, powerful, disorienting, and dangerous whiteout. The piece is in two general sections. The first section introduces music representing the snow and its escalation into a more severe event. However, before the actual whiteout occurs, the music pulls back giving way to a slow introspective moment. Despite its danger, a whiteout is nevertheless an awesome event and this quiet moment at the center of the piece is meant as a reflection of the power of nature. It is also quite literally the calm before the storm. The gradual increase of musical gestures mimicking snow begins again in the second section of the piece and continues until the music reaches a thunderous climax with all players performing collections of pitches as fast and as loud as possible so that all musical lines and harmony disintegrate into a chaotic soundscape representative of an intense world that has no visible horizon. The music, like all storms, eventually plays itself out and the composition comes to a gentle conclusion and the listener is left to ponder, as had this southern-raised composer who was twice forced to pull over to the side of the road during actual whiteouts, “What just happened???”