[2] While most of her career was dedicated to educational recordings,[3] she is best known for being an electronic music pioneer, owing to her early explorations of sound using the Moog synthesizer.
The back cover of her 1971 release Short Circuits stated that “Ruth White is considered among today’s most gifted arbiters of what is termed ‘the new music’".
Her early recordings 7 Trumps From the Tarot Cards and Pinions (1968), Flowers of Evil (1969), and Short Circuits (1970) all featured surprising uses of the Moog synthesizer as well as other electronic musical equipment.
White credits Antheil with making her fully aware of the principles of classical sonata form, which provided “the key to writing larger works that were logical and structurally sound”.
In 2008 these items were moved to The Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, an institution which opened in April 2010, but has only kept those donations in storage without any anticipated exhibit.
[5] With the creation of her own studio White developed her own brand of electronic music which explored new timbral and harmonic resources without renouncing the order and logic instilled by her classical training.
According to The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, “White’s involvement in electronic music was precipitated by a belief that all experiments in traditional media from impressionism to atonality, polytonality and the like, were closed paths – that ‘this’ medium, with its fundamental key relationships, had been exhausted, had reached its zenith by the end of the nineteenth century, and, since then, its basic principles were being systematically destroyed.
[6] In 1967 White was commissioned by choreographer Eugene Loring (for the University of California) to create the music for a performance titled 7 Trumps From the Tarot Card and Pinions.
The Los Angeles Times reviewed 7 Trumps as ” …a really exciting, organically musical, electronic score by Ruth White.
Short Circuits was a radical shift from her darker soundscapes, and focused on original work, as well as synth versions of classical pieces.
Her accomplishments in education resulted in her earning a Parents' Choice Award (1983) and an American Library Association ‘notable recording’ citation.