As a composer, setting an existing text by a living writer can be a nerve-wracking experience. But the pressure mounts even more when your collaborator wins the Nobel Prize for Literature in the middle of the project. This was the situation facing Laura Bowler, whose new work The White Book sets texts by Korean author Han Kang, from her book of the same name. Its UK premiere is given on 4th March with the London Symphony Orchestra and soloist Barbara Hannigan.
Laura Bowler’s music is often uniquely confrontational, politically charged, absurd, dramatic and often funny – but this new work is something of a departure. Lyrical, ceremonial, and highly charged with grief and longing, the music hovers somewhere in and outside of time. What unites it with Bowler’s other output is its directness, and a strong focus on the emotional charge carried by the voice.
Bowler first encountered Han Kang’s The White Book in an emotionally charged situation: in the midst of her mother’s treatment for leukaemia. Kang’s writing is acutely concerned with grief and mourning, with the book being written for and ‘to’ Kang’s elder sister, who died only hours after being born. “If you had lived beyond those first few hours, I would not be living now,” Kang writes.
The aftermath of Bowler’s encounter with Kang made for a strange parallel. While her mother made a recovery, she unfortunately died soon after due to an accident. But she was aware that this work was being composed. In particular, Bowler says that its final movement ‘All Whiteness’ is especially concerned with inhabiting the experiences of another. In this case, the particular feeling of experiencing music written for her mother as she might have heard it, but through Bowler’s own eyes and ears.
At the centre of this new work is Barbara Hannigan, who Bowler describes as a “dream performer”. While the vocal writing is lyrical, it’s also intense and wracked with expression. But even though the vocal writing is at times strenuous – even exhausting – there was only one alteration Hannigan requested. Otherwise, Bowler says, Hannigan has taken the physical and emotional intensity of the vocal writing in her stride.
With the vocal line composed first, the instrumental music – for a sizeable orchestra – was written afterwards. Over 30 minutes, five movements adopt text excerpts from several of Kang’s aphoristic chapters, at times almost prose poems: ‘Wave’, ‘Breath-Cloud’, ‘Sand’, ‘Silence’ and ‘All Whiteness’. The colour white comes with many connotations, but in East Asia it is especially associated with mourning.
“These were the texts that, for me personally, most captured the complexities of grief,” Bowler says. “They were also the ones whose imagery I most associated with thinking about life and breath and the loss of life.” The early texts used in the piece dwell on water, breath, the sea and the seashore. “Standing at this border where land and water meet, watching the seemingly endless recurrence of the waves,” Kang writes, “the fact that our lives are no more than brief instants is felt with unequivocal clarity. Each wave becomes dazzlingly white at the moment of its shattering.”
Bowler describes her initial encounter with the text, while her mother was in hospital, as close to a physical experience. Feeling like she had few people to speak with in that moment, Kang’s writing came to make her feel less alone. In composing her response to these texts, she drew on a similarly physical process, with Bowler frequently singing in the process of writing. “I didn’t try to think too much” she says, imagining her way into Hannigan’s embodied voice and persona.
Unlike recent performances by Hannigan, she will not sing and conduct. Indeed, it was something Hannigan was minded to avoid for this project. Singing and conducting “adds another story to a piece,” Hannigan says. “If you have the idea that the singer is conducting, then that has to have some necessity in the narrative, and we didn’t want to force that.” Hannigan and the LSO will instead by joined on the podium by Bar Avni, winner of 2024’s La Maestra competition.
Hannigan and Avni present The White Book twice, on 4th and 5th March, with the first performance at the earlier time of 6.30pm, where Bowler will join on stage to introduce the work. Large orchestral forces are the order of the day: on 5th March, Hannigan follows her vocal performance with a return to the podium, conducting Ligeti’s colourfully glacial Lontano, and Richard Strauss’ gargantuan universe allegory, Also sprach Zarathustra. Expect fireworks.
Barbara Hannigan and the LSO perform Laura Bowler’s The White Book on 4th–5th March at the Barbican.
More information on Laura Bowler’s The White Book.
This article was sponsored by the London Symphony Orchestra.
