Several weeks ago we gave the world premiere of a new piece for sextet and electronics by Frances White at University of Richmond’s 3P Festival of Electroacoustic Music. This is what I wrote at the time:
Each year the festival commissions one or two new works for 8bb to premiere. Last year it was pieces by Michael Barnhardt and Ashley Fure; this year it was a new composition by the polite, soft-spoken composer Frances White, called The Ocean Inside. As you will hear on a forthcoming podcast interview with Frances, since 1995 the composer has studied the shakuhachi (a Japanese end-blown flute). She particularly loves “honkyoku, the traditional meditative music for this instrument.” These melodies function in their culture rather like Gregorian chant did in ours: “like chant, they exist not so much as “pieces of music” but rather for the purpose of devotion.” In her slow, soft, lyrical piece, The Ocean Inside, Frances used one of these tunes as a cantus firmus, and as such “it is the hidden melodic heart out of which the entire piece grows - ‘the ocean inside’.”
Here is that interview, including excerpts from The Ocean Inside. Enjoy!
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