LJ White's music serves ideals of direct, focused and socially relevant expression, assimilating an unrestricted array of influences through strange and evocative sonorities and rhythms, concise gestures, and apposite forms.  He is interested in the physical voice (spoken, sung, emulated, and as metaphor,) popular culture, issues of gender identity and queerness, and sociopolitical conditions.  LJ has worked with many of the leading performers in contemporary classical music, including Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble SIGNAL, The Crossing, Ensemble Dal Niente, the JACK Quartet, the Spektral Quartet, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Third Angle Ensemble, Third Coast Percussion, Lucy Dhegrae, Transient Canvas, and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Roomful of Teeth, the Talea Ensemble, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars.  Additional recent collaborations include the La Jolla Symphony Orchestra under Steven Schick, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Music NOW series, the Chicago Civic Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony’s SFSymphony+ media channel, and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s “Live at the Pulitzer” series. LJ has held residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Byrdcliffe, the Banff Arts Centre, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Manship Artist Residency, among others, and his work has been featured at venues and festivals including the Bang on a Can Marathon, the Ecstatic Music Festival, Nief-Norf, the Aspen Music Festival, the Ravinia Festival, the Resonant Bodies Festival, REDCAT, the Ear Taxi Festival, the Breckenridge Music Festival, Omaha Under the Radar, and ChamberQueer’s Constellation festival.  

LJ’s recent choral work a carol called love, with text by Alex Dimitrov, was commissioned by The Crossing and released on their Grammy-nominated album Carols After A Plague in December 2022 (New Focus Recordings.) His work on the evening-length Everything Means Nothing to Me, created in collaboration with composers Christopher Cerrone, Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, Robert Honstein, and Scott Wollschleger and based on songs by the singer-songwriter Elliot Smith, was released by Third Angle Ensemble in September 2020 (Jackpot Recordings.)  LJ’s vocal/instrumental septet We Don’t Eat Dead Things, commissioned by Ensemble Dal Niente, was released on the album object/animal in March 2022 (Sideband Records,) and his string quartet Zin zin zin zin was included on the Spektral Quartet’s album CHAMBERS, released in 2013 (Parlour Tapes+).  LJ is also represented on NewMusicShelf’s Trans & Nonbinary Voices Vol. 1 anthology, with the art song “Labor Day.” LJ’s song cycle for four voices with live electronic processing, The Best Place for This, was commissioned by the Quince Ensemble with support from a Chamber Music America grant in 2016.  A forthcoming EP titled Songs from “The Best Place for This,” featuring selections of the piece recorded with his own voice, combining low and falsetto registers with older recordings from before his gender transition, will be released in July 2024.

LJ completed his DMA in composition at Northwestern University in 2017 and has held full-time teaching positions at Washington University in St. Louis and New College of Florida. He is a current “Composers and the Voice” Fellow with American Opera Projects and the Joseph E. and Grace W. Valentine Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Amherst College for 2024-25.