In his orchestral work Degrees of White (2006), composer Nils Henrik Asheim invites an author, an actor, and a noise musician into the symphony orchestra.

The orchestral work allows the frost and the stark whiteness to be expressed in several ways. The work consists of four parts. The color white is explicitly introduced early in the first section, when a recording of the actor’s voice complements the small outbursts in the orchestra, with the words “White. In the white.” Within the orchestral landscape we find the winds placed into three groups, each containing both woodwinds and brass, creating a sound more uniform across the room. A quartet, plucked out of the string section, lies far ahead within the soundscape, with musical material consisting of short, pale white tones and friction sounds.

The color white also serves as a motif in the text, where the woman tells us about a wedding dress “so white that I almost disappeared.” We also learn that Greenland sends off blocks of 25,000 year old ice “encapsulated air from a time when no human being yet walked the earth” for exclusive ice cubes for Japanese bars. Variations of this story return as a refrain throughout the work.

The narrators are acclaimed, Norwegian actresses Laila Goody (Norwegian, CD1) and Petronella Barker (English, CD2). Also contributing is noise musician Lasse Marhaug (electronic sounds) and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, led by conductor Christian Eggen.

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Recorded in NRK Radio Concert Hall, Oslo, 20–23 February 2017, and Notam, Oslo, 22 February 2018 and 14 May 2019