Lawson White

Biography

Lawson White is Adjunct Instructor of Percussion at Belmont University, where he teaches applied classical percussion, leads the classical seminar for commercial percussion majors, and performs with the faculty percussion quartet.

A former member of Sō Percussion and a founding member of Alarm Will Sound, he performs regularly with the Nashville Symphony. He has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Kennedy Center, working closely with composers including Steve Reich and David Lang and with choreographers including Merce Cunningham, Shen Wei, and Eliot Feld. Lawson is equally at home on stage and in the studio, across orchestral and chamber repertoire, drumset, auxiliary percussion, hand drums from around the world, electronic percussion, and drum programming.

As a producer and engineer, he has worked on multiple GRAMMY-winning and -nominated recordings, including the 2025 Best Instrumental Composition winner "Are We Dreaming The Same Dream?" by Akropolis Reed Quintet, with further credits alongside Béla Fleck, Brittany Howard, Twenty One Pilots, Jamie xx, and Shakira. He manages The Parlor, a recording studio on Music Row, and is president of the label and publishing company Good Child Music.

A former Graduate Teaching Fellow at Yale, he has given master classes at Juilliard, Yale, Princeton, Peabody, and Northwestern, and runs a studio internship program at The Parlor that has mentored Belmont students.

He holds an MM from the Yale School of Music and a BM and Performer's Certificate from the Eastman School of Music.