Alastair White: Woad

Featuring

Kelly Poukens
Suzy Vanderheiden
Alastair White

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Historical Context

Created in 2020, WOAD contextualizes its themes of metamorphosis and quantum 'flickering' against the social change foregrounded by that year's health crisis.

Composer Biography

Alastair White, the Scottish composer of WOAD, is known for his 'spellbinding' and 'passionately atonal' work, which draws influence from technology, science, politics, and materialism.

Performer Biography

Kelly Poukens has collaborated with Alastair White, the composer of WOAD, and UU Studios since the beginning of the fashion-opera cycle, singing leading roles in WEAR and ROBE.

Performer Biography

Suzy Vanderheiden, the saxophonist on this album, began her music education at age 8 and studied saxophone and chamber music at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp.

Performer Biography

Kelly Poukens, the Belgian soprano performing on this album, has won multiple awards, including the Stiftung Blatow prize in the International Anton Rubinstein Competition in 2018.

Compositional Technique

WOAD creates a sense of material objectivity for the listener by overlaying different compositional methodologies, each implying mutually exclusive ways of listening.

Composer's Artistic Vision

WOAD is a fashion-opera that re-reads the Scots myth of Tam Lin to explore metamorphosis and parallel worlds, questioning what becomes of our potential and regret in a multiverse of endless possibility.