Get to Know: Laura Bowler's The White Book

Laura Bowler came across Korean writer Han Kang’s 2016 The White Book in 2019 and was reading it while her mother was in hospital in Manchester, being treated for acute myeloid leukaemia. ‘The book reflected a lot of what I was feeling at the time,’ says Bowler, ‘and it was a great comfort in some ways. I didn’t feel as lonely when I was reading it.’ Bowler’s mother was given the all-clear in 2022 but, tragically, died in an accident two months later. Kang’s book takes the form of 65 short prose reflections on the death of an older sister who had died two hours after being born, each one seen through the prism of a white-coloured object – salt, snow, sugar cubes, breast milk – which together, the author has said, ‘can be read as a narrative poem’. It’s an exploration of loss, memory and survival.

Bowler selected five fragments from the book – ‘Wave’, ‘Breath-Cloud’, ‘Sand’, ‘Silence’ and ‘All Whiteness’ – to set to music in a work for amplified soprano, orchestra and live electronics. ‘These were the texts that, for me personally, most captured the complexities of grief. They were also the ones whose imagery I most associated with thinking about life and breath and the loss of life.’ Bowler has been delighted by soprano Barbara Hannigan’s penetrating interpretative abilities. ‘It’s thrilling. It’s like she read my mind. She completely understood the piece, beyond what’s written on the page, and the range of expressions of grief that I tried to portray in the vocal line.’ The White Book received its world premiere only a few weeks ago, in Sweden. The 4 March Half Six Fix concert allows us, for the first time in the UK, to hear this deeply personal work – part meditation, part memorial, part ritual. ‘The grief,’ says Bowler, ‘isn’t operatic, it’s not explosive or wailing. It’s very ‘internal’. I think anyone who has grieved will understand it.’

The orchestra is large – including low contrabassoon, bass clarinets and bass trombone – but the layering is light. Bowler explores an inventory of less common playing techniques, a range of bell-like percussion and live-sampling to create a sound-world of the unreal and ephemeral – an examination around the fringes of existence. The voice in ‘Wave’ is contained mostly within monotones but undulates on the word ‘wave’ and rises to the point at which the white spray of Kang’s wave breaks. This song also brings the first instance of players freezing in time, a physical expression of breathlessness and tension.

Introduced by icy strings, the voice in ‘Breath-Cloud’ oscillates more widely, echoed by the soprano saxophone, the text exploring the proof of life captured in chilly air when we breathe out into it. As Hannigan sings of the ‘dark lungs’ that are filled with cold air, the music reflects the pain held in the voice when experiencing grief.

Kang’s text ‘Sand’ likens the body to a fragile ‘house of sand’. The vocal line strains to coalesce and the shattering is graphically expressed by a rhythmic figure in the orchestra that grows in brutality across its ten repetitions. In the ‘slipping’ of the sand we hear painful decay.

In the voice part, ‘Silence’ mainly features cycles of effortful descending scales, the pitches of which are successively frozen in time and held as a cluster by the electronics. The line ‘I hold my stiff hands out to the silence’ was key for Bowler. ‘It really captured the feeling of tension and longing in the body, the sensation of being stuck and not being able to change anything.’

Another title defined by absence, ‘All Whiteness’ describes seeing the world in place of the lost loved-one. The idea here, says Bowler, is ‘to evoke some sense of coming to a place of peace while acknowledging the continuing weight of grief’.

The idea is to evoke some sense of coming to a place of peace while acknowledging the continuing weight of grief.
Laura Bowler

‘Laura asked if I would be interested in collaborating on a work that she would write for me. She was very interested to find a way to set some passages from The White Book and managed to get the rights to do so. When talking about my voice, she of course is aware of the way that I perform, the range of my voice, the possibility of my presence in concert pieces and how it’s never just a stand and sing kind of piece.

The other aspect about this piece is that I didn’t want it to be singing and conducting, because that adds another story to a piece. 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. So we decided that we would invite a younger colleague of mine who I had mentored in the past, conductor Bar Avni, and I’m very happy to share the podium with her.’

Composer and vocalist Laura Bowler creates and performs works that are rooted in thought-provoking, challenging subjects. The human voice often plays a central role, as do multimedia elements (video, electronics, wearable technology) and unusual instruments (melodica, aluphone). From the start, theatre has been a key element. In her final year at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music, she wrote the chamber opera My Friend Annie (2008), presenting the stream-of-consciousness expressions of an anorexic teenager.

Among her works are SHOW(ti)ME (2022) for Zubin Kanga (piano, live video and MiMU sensor gloves), performed at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and Aldeburgh Festival. Just as that piece examines our presence on social media, ADVERT (2023, for voice, ensemble and tattoo artist) questions our need to convey a socially expected depiction of ourselves. Wit and satire occur in FFF (Freeze, Flight or Fight, 2017) and the recent Things Are Against Us (2025), both of which showcase her virtuosic vocal and theatrical abilities as performer.

Bowler typically deep-dives into her subject matter. She learnt to box before performing Jennifer Walshe’s Training is the Opposite (2014) and travelled to Antarctica, gathering audio and video and listening to ice and silence, ahead of writing her work of the same name, which she premiered with Manchester Camerata (2023). She reads around the subjects on which her works focus and engages actively with environmental issues, mindful that this work is ‘about probing and provoking questions, not necessarily about expressing demands or solutions’. Bowler recently became Deputy Head of Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music.

Written by Edward Bhesania – a music journalist and editor who writes for The Stage, The Strad and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.