Eric Whitacre
This Christmas, churches and chapels across the globe will echo to the haunting sound of Lux Aurumque by Eric Whitacre, a composer and conductor who has got literally thousands of people singing together. Terry Blain meets choir music’s modern-day superst
Terry Blain meets the brilliant composer bringing the world together with choral music
‘He completely altered the course of my life.’ Eric Whitacre is talking about David Weiller, director of choral studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and about the scary way in which the course of an entire future can hinge on chance encounters and the decision of a moment.
Whitacre was a raw-boned freshman student out of Reno, Nevada, when he first encountered Weiller, and an unlikely recruit for the university choir. His main interests at the time were the British techno-poppers Depeche Mode and synthesisers, but somehow Weiller got him singing. The first piece on the rehearsal stand was Mozart’s Requiem, and for Whitacre it was a Damascene moment.
‘Like seeing colour for the first time,’ is how he remembers it. ‘I was regularly moved to tears during rehearsals, crushed by the impossible beauty of the work.’ From that day forward Whitacre’s course was set. He started taking music seriously, learned to read it, and became ‘a choral geek of the highest magnitude’.
A LITTLE UNDER three decades later, he is a choral composer of the highest magnitude, his music widely performed and recorded, his image as a happy, shiny poster-boy of the 21st-century classical music establishment widely disseminated. How did the remarkable transformation from callow, musically semiliterate undergraduate to confidently selfadvertising scion of all things choir-related actually happen?
The process was not, he says, without its moments of doubt and extreme uncertainty. ‘When I started my Masters degree at the Juilliard School in New York I was hugely intimidated. There were people around me who were such spectacularly trained musicians, including my future wife, and I thought “what am I doing here really?”’
In retrospect, though, Whitacre identifies the relative ignorance of his younger self as something of an advantage. ‘I was so naive about the traditions of classical music and the immense baggage that comes with knowing all of that,’ he remembers. With naivety came
Fly to Paradise involved a staggering 8,409 singers
freedom, and a lack of rule-bound inhibition. By the time he left Juilliard in 1997, he had already published his first choral settings, and Ghost Train, the piece for wind band whose runaway success persuaded him that a full-time career in music might be possible.
A wide-eyed openness to new ideas and a willingness to venture well beyond the traditional parameters of classical musicmaking have continued to characterise Whitacre’s work as a mature composer. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ‘Virtual Choir’ project, an envelope-pushing internet experiment enabling singers from around the globe to submit their audiovisual recording of a voice-part in a piece by Whitacre. These individual submissions are pieced together digitally into a complete performance and put on Youtube.
Four ‘VC’ videos have so far been created, the most recent of which, Fly to Paradise, involved a staggering 8,409 singers from 101 countries, and the project as a whole has long since gone viral, amassing over 15 million views and counting. How does Whitacre account for the extraordinary social media impact of his ‘Virtual Choir’ creation?
Although offering the same kind of epiphany for participating singers as he himself experienced in his first Mozart Requiem rehearsal was not, says Whitacre, a conscious aim when he devised the ‘Virtual Choir’ concept, he believes that the effect is ultimately somewhat similar.
‘There was no evangelical sense of “Let’s be the gateway drug for these budding singers”,’ he says. ‘But there’s no question that that seems to be happening now. And as it’s evolved and become that big – we’ve had over 20,000 singers from 115 countries in the different projects – and there’s this buzz about it, I now feel a real responsibility toward it.’
‘Virtual Choir 5’ is now in development, and aims to take the participatory concept further. ‘With some of the next projects that we’re starting to plan,’ explains Whitacre, ‘there’s a focus on education itself – encouraging singers to learn to sing better, training in sight-reading, using slightly more accessible music. So now it’s becoming a bit more intentional, to bring as many into the fold as possible.’
While aware that some might view the whole ‘Virtual Choir’ phenomenon as contrived and gimmicky, Whitacre insists it never felt that way when he was making it.
‘To be honest, when we were first conceiving it, it was with the innocence of a five yearold, putting toys together and saying “Will this work?” I honestly thought that no one outside our tiny circle of choir geeks would be remotely interested.’
So why are they interested? What prompts the thousands of ‘virtual choristers’ to sit down at a table in their bedsit, office or living room, click the record button on their computer, and sing along to one of Whitacre’s compositions? For the composer himself, the sense of community that has sprung up among ‘Virtual Choir’ participants is a key factor in the project’s popularity: ‘They’ve reached out to each other, they meet up in person. We’ve got a couple that met on Virtual Choir who are engaged to be married. We’ve had several young people who have died. There’s a young woman who has terminal cancer and is dying, and you can’t imagine the outpouring from all these Virtual Choir members – some of them got together and made her own little Virtual Choir for her, with her face in it. It’s extraordinary, so beautiful.’
The Virtual Choir, though hugely popular, has also had its detractors. ‘When it went viral,’ Whitacre recalls, ‘there was a bit of pushback from the choral community initially. And I think part of that came from the idea that this was somehow attempting to replace a traditional choir.’
That is a prospect he finds literally unthinkable. ‘For me, nothing will ever replace the magic that is a group of human beings together in a room, breathing and singing at the same time. To me, that’s the most fundamental demonstration of humanity that we have. To me, the social media just becomes an extension of the rehearsal space, of the concert hall.’
Whitacre’s experiments at the interface between digitalia and classical music continue. For Deep Field, a recent work for orchestra which had its European premiere in the 2015 BBC Proms season, listener involvement was again solicited. Towards the end of the 25-minute piece, a choir begins singing a repeated pair of chords, and the conductor cues audience members to activate the pre-prepared ‘Deep Field App’ they have downloaded previously to their smartphones.
The app emits shimmering noises, suggesting the sense of mystery and wonder in the ‘Deep Field’ images of distant galaxies captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, the
‘You see these 3,000 galaxies, and it brings you to your knees’
subject matter of Whitacre’s composition.
The technical legerdemain in Deep Field again sparked allegations of gimmickry and superficiality, one critic decrying the work as a ‘long exercise in sonic paint drying.’
Whitacre himself insists that the smartphone idea came more organically than that. ‘I was somehow trying to capture musically the magnitude of that deep field image. You look at this thing, and you see these 3,000 galaxies 13 billion light years away, and it brings you to your knees. And so in an attempt to recreate that feeling of wonder and awe, my idea was to submerge the audience in sound, if you will. The inspiration for using the phones came when I was sitting in a traditional classical concert, and they started with the typical “Please make sure your phones are turned off” announcement. I remember in that moment thinking “We’re silencing 2,000 video players. Why are we turning these things off? Could they be used?” Then I thought I could design Deep Field so that each person was seeing something, and hearing this delicate electronica that would help make this shimmering pool of sound all around them. And it would help to bring people into that image.’
You’ll soon be able to judge the results more fully for yourself, as Deep Field is set to be recorded with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Los Angeles Master Chorale, where Whitacre was recently appointed artistin-residence. It’s the latest staging post in a strand of his career that runs parallel to composing – that of performing musician.
One of Whitacre’s first assignments with the Los Angeles choir will be to lead a Christmas concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in December. His choice of repertoire will have a European, Old World flavour to it, drawing particularly on Whitacre’s extensive experience of music making in the United Kingdom. That is where his own choir – the Eric Whitacre Singers – is based, and where he recently completed a five-year stint as composer-in-residence at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
‘There’s an ancientness to the UK Christmas tradition I experienced even doing my own Christmas concerts in London,’ he comments. ‘These ancient hymns – plainchant, Praetorius – seem not only new but relevant; it’s still in the water somehow. In my experience, Christmas in America is generally much more tied to the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Unless you’re in a religious setting it’s Bing Crosby and “White Christmas” – which makes me equally sentimental and filled with warmth.’
The glitzy, showbiz connotations of the American Christmas will, however, be absent in Whitacre’s Los Angeles programme. ‘What’s very interesting is that the Chorale very specifically don’t want me to do that American thing. They’ve asked that it should be a cappella, and have that candle-lit, warm, austere feeling to it. So that’s what I’m going to be working on.’
Whitacre’s attraction to the more reflective, religiously infused ethos of the European Christmas, and the numinous qualities found in many of his own choral pieces – Cloudburst, Lux Aurumque, Sleep and others – raise a string of inevitable questions, which he is asked frequently. What is his personal belief system? Is it Christian? What accounts for the spiritual impact many listeners experience from his music?
‘For me, it’s a conversation that requires three Martinis just to get started!’ he laughs.
‘Nothing seems to cut through these days like authenticity’
‘What I usually come up with is that I’m agnostic, that I simply don’t know. The truth is, at heart I think of myself as a scientist, a sceptic, that I’m looking for evidence. Thus far, metaphysically, I haven’t seen evidence to make me believe, to become a Christian. That said, I’m so gratefully aware of the limitations of my own understanding, of even my daily life, let alone the wonders of the universe. What I do feel I share with people of religious faith is that sense of wonder and awe – that, regardless of whether or not there was a creator, the architecture is profound and exquisite, and sophisticated beyond my understanding. So I think what seems to come naturally when I’m writing music is that shared sense of wonder and awe.’
The vein of existential contemplation in Whitacre’s work is set to continue in two new compositions he is currently preparing: Sagrada Família, an unaccompanied choral piece inspired by Gaudí’s extraordinary Roman Catholic basilica in Barcelona; and The Sacred Veil, another choral setting of a poem by Whitacre’s friend and longtime collaborator Charles Anthony Silvestri.
Add Bachianus Americanus, a new Villalobos-inspired orchestral piece commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra that he is also working on – ‘a very American deconstruction of a Bach piano prelude’, he says – and the picture of the hyper-busy, constantly in-demand composer, musician and educator is complete. ‘Brand Whitacre’ is a global phenomenon in the world of classical music, and will almost certainly expand further.
Does Eric Whitacre himself ever feel a sense of disconnect between the gleaming, quasi-messianic figure depicted in his press releases and record company photographs – his golden-haired looks saw him signed up by the Storm model agency in 2011 – and the man he is privately, when he wakes up in the morning?
‘I do,’ he replies. ‘It’s a very odd experience sometimes, to walk into a concert hall or a large group of people, and almost be the bearer of this concept of me. What I try to do in my daily life is to work constantly on a sense of gratitude and humility. And hard work – just focus on the purity of the art form, and hope that everything else then emanates out from that, and retains its sense of authenticity and integrity.’
‘Nothing seems to cut through these days like authenticity,’ he adds. ‘My first experience of singing in a choir, which has stuck with me, was that I felt for the first time part of something larger than myself. I was hearing my true name, and my true name included others – a sense of community, a sense of belonging, in this great sea of humanity. And I’m hoping that part of the reason for the popularity of my work is that people are drawn to that very thing, to a sense of them being part of something larger than themselves.’