[1] She obtained her BA (1987) from Radcliffe College and MA (1994) and PhD (1997) from University of Pittsburgh;[1] her doctoral dissertation was titled Music Drama on the Concert Stage: A Study of Judith Weir's "The Consolations of Scholarship".
[3] Richard Buell of the Boston Globe said that her 1999 composition "No Man's Land" "took us back to the dear dead days of multiphonics and the modish unleasing of "new" tone colors, particularly from instruments you didn't think had a single chord to declare".
[3] In The New York Times' review of Speculum Musicae's 2002 concert at Merkin Hall, Paul Griffiths praised White's piece "Learning to See" as "a real discovery" because "she writes no more notes than she needs, and she has a way of making straightforward quotations (from Varése, Stravinsky and others) her own".
[10] In 2013, White's opera Weakness, based on the Irish mythological story Ces Ulad, was released as part of the album White: Weakness – Cowan: Macha by Albany Records;[11] Barry Kilpatrick called the album's music "strange but fascinating", noting that "it fits perfectly with this very strange story".
[1] Her academic work focuses on the relationship between culture and the basics of music, with examples including art, dance, and film, and she has published several articles in scholarly journals.