Dr. Andrew Malilay White is a Filipino-American theorist and artist from Guam, where his family still resides. He first began studying music theory and piano performance at the University of Guam. He received degrees from the University of Notre Dame, New York University, and the University of Chicago.

Andrew researches how nineteenth-century pianists practiced in order to improvise. These improvisatory practice methods were linked to thoroughbass and related eighteenth-century practices like the partimento tradition, but in many cases were both chordal and textural in conception. This research is based on the pedagogical materials of Carl Czerny, Simon Sechter, and Friedrich Wieck, as well as sketches and works by Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt and accounts of their playing and improvisation. Andrew researches the musical properties of ballet dance, and has presented his work on ballet at the conference for the Society for Music Theory and at the conference for Practitioner Centered Music Theory at the Ohio State University. His secondary interests include live-coded music and the anthropology of skill. Andrew performs improvised music not only at the piano, but also using electronic live-coding environments, and has mounted performances that combine the two in a continuous piano-and-electronics texture.

Andrew’s research has been supported by a Eugene K. Wolf Grant for European Research from the American Musicological Society. He received the Indiana University Press award from AMS Midwest for his paper entitled “Teaching by Example: ‘Practical’ Pedagogies of the Postclassical Thoroughbass.” Andrew has given research talks for graduate students at the University of Oregon and undergraduates at St. Mary’s College in Indiana and at the University of Guam. He was a 2019–2020 Stuart Tave Teaching Fellow of the University of Chicago’s Humanities Division, where he taught a seminar-workshop for undergraduates titled “Improvisation: Critical Studies in Music.” Andrew is currently on the music faculty at Austin Community College. He was previously a Graduate Fellow of the interdisciplinary Franke Institute for the Humanities, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Chicago’s Humanities Division, and Visiting Assistant Professor at UT Austin’s Butler School of Music holding the Grace Hill Milam Centennial Fellowship in Fine Arts.