Eric Whitacre

Eric Whitacre
Whitacre conducting in 2009.
Background information
Born	January 2, 1970 (1970-01-02)
Occupations	Composer Conductor Lecturer Model
Website	ericwhitacre.com

Eric Whitacre (born January 2, 1970 in Reno, Nevada) is an American composer, conductor and lecturer. He is one of the most popular and performed composers of his generation. In 2008, the all-Whitacre choral CD Cloudburst (released by the British ensemble Polyphony on Hyperion Records) became an international best-seller, topping the classical charts and earning a Grammy nomination. Robert Hollingworth commented: "what hits you straight between the eyes is the honesty, optimism and sheer belief that passes any pretension. This is music that can actually make you smile." In addition to Whitacre's litany of choral and wind ensemble compositions, he is also known for his "Virtual Choir" projects on YouTube, bringing individual voices from around the globe together in a cyber internet choir. His virtual choirs have exposed his music to a new audience and have helped it gain an unprecedented popularity. Whitacre signed a long-term recording deal with Decca in 2010 and continues to develop his award winning musical Paradise Lost. A condensed concert version was given at Carnegie Hall in 2010. Plans for the stage show and soundtrack extend into 2011.

Biography

Eric Whitacre is one of the most popular and performed composers of our time, a distinguished conductor and public speaker. Coming to classical music relatively late in life when he joined his college choir in Las Vegas, the first work that Eric Whitacre sang – Mozart’s Requiem - changed his life. Inspired to compose, his first piece Go, Lovely Rose, was completed at the age of 21. He went on to the Juilliard School (New York), earned his Master of Music degree and studied with Pulitzer Prize and Oscar-winning composer, John Corigliano.

Countless recordings feature music written by Eric Whitacre, but his first album as both composer and conductor on Decca/Universal, Light & Gold, won a Grammy in 2012, reaped unanimous five star reviews and became the no. 1 Classical Album in the US and UK charts within a week of a release. Eric's second album, Water Night, will be released on Decca in Spring 2012 and will feature many world premiere recordings.

He has written for the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Chanticleer, Julian Lloyd Webber and the Philharmonia Orchestra, Rundfunkchor Berlin and The King’s Singers among others. His musical, Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings, won both the ASCAP Harold Arlen award and the Richard Rodgers Award, and earned 10 nominations at the Los Angeles Stage Alliance Ovation Awards. A versatile musician, he has also worked with legendary film composer, Hans Zimmer, co-writing the Mermaid Theme for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. In 2011, Eric conducted the winning entries of the Abbey Road 80th Anniversary Anthem Competition, recording the London Symphony Orchestra and his professional choir, the Eric Whitacre Singers, in Abbey Road Studio 1.

Eric’s ground-breaking Virtual Choir, Lux Aurumque, received over a million views on YouTube in just 2 months (now approaching 3 million), featuring 185 singers from 12 different countries. Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir 2.0, Sleep, was released in April 2011 and involved over 2,000 voices from 58 countries. Virtual Choir 3 received 3746 submissions from 73 countries and is currently in production for launch in April 2012.

As a conductor, Eric Whitacre has performed across the world with orchestras, choirs and bands and he gives regular guest workshops in addition to his Soaring Leap initiative: a dynamic, one-day workshop for singers, conductors and composers to read, rehearse and perform several of Eric’s works, digging deep into the poetry and exploring the compositional tools. An exceptional orator, he was honoured to address the U.N. Leaders programme and give a TED Talk in March 2011 which earned the first full standing ovation of the conference.  He has addressed audiences at Duke & Harvard, The Economist, Seoul Digital Forum and JCDA Conference in Tokyo. Eric was appointed Composer in Residence at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University, UK, in September 2011.

Many of Eric Whitacre's works have entered the standard choral and symphonic repertories and have become the subject of scholarly works and doctoral dissertations. Whitacre has received composition awards from the Barlow International Composition Competition, the ACDA and the American Composers Forum. In 2001, he became the youngest recipient ever awarded the coveted Raymond C. Brock commission by the ACDA. Eric Whitacre was born in Nevada and currently lives in London with his wife (Grammy award winning soprano, Hila Plitmann) and their son.

Style

Whitacre writes music that incorporates contemporary sounds and influences while demanding precision, intonation and ensemble. He is probably best known for his choral works; however, both his choral and instrumental styles use his signature "Whitacre chords," or pan-diatonic clusters usually arranged in successive increasing or decreasing density. Whitacre achieves this growth and decay by splitting voices divisi—in one case up to 18 parts. These sonorities can often be read as seventh or ninth chords, with or without suspended seconds and fourths. Perhaps his most famous chord is a root-position major triad with an added major second and/or perfect fourth. Whitacre makes frequent use of quartal, quintal and secundal harmonies, and is also known for his use of unconventional chord progressions. His use of rhythm often involves mixed, complex, and/or compound meters. His pieces sometimes include frequent meter changes and unusual rhythmic patterns. Another trademark of Whitacre's pieces is the use of aleatoric and indeterminate sections, as well as unusual score instructions involving, in some cases, hand actions and/or props.

Projects

Virtual Choir

Whitacre's Virtual Choir projects were inspired by a video sent to him of a young girl singing one of his choral pieces he then began with a test run of Sleep, then Lux Aurumque in 2009 and was followed again by Sleep in 2010. The video for Lux Aurumque, featuring a virtual choir of 185 voices from 12 countries, was described as a "musical experience that works better than anyone might have expected", their video receiving over 1,000,000 hits in the first two months of its release.

The 2010 version of the Virtual Choir 2.0 "Sleep" began in October 2010 and the video submission process was completed on 10 January 2011. Whitacre spoke at The 2011 TED Conference and this video was released on April 1, 2011, accompanied with a short 2 minute example of the "Sleep" project. The YouTube release was on April 7, 2011.

On September 27, 2011, Eric announced on his blog his plans for a "Virtual Choir 3". On December 21, 2011, it was revealed that the piece will be "Water Night", an a cappella piece written in 1995. By the entry close date of February 1, 2012, 3,746 videos had been uploaded by 2,945 people in 73 countries, singing one or more parts of Water Night. The completed work is planned to be released as an audio-video art installation during 2012.

Recording projects

Whitacre's first album with Decca, Light & Gold was released in October 2010. From October to December 2010, Whitacre was a visiting Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge during Michaelmas (Autumn) Term.

Whitacre's second album with Decca is scheduled to be released in the spring of 2012 featuring some of his newest compositions for chorus and for orchestra.

Performance projects

Whitacre has worked collaboratively with Distinguished Concerts International New York (DCINY) and is due to collaborate with them again in 2011 in New York, Vancouver and Los Angeles. With regard to his musical "Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings", he was described by the New York Times as a "younger, hipper Andrew Lloyd Webber, with fleeting hints of Bernstein and Sondheim".

On 24 October 2010, he conducted an all-American programme with the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus at the Barbican London, in a performance that featured his commission for the London Symphony Chorus entitled Songs of Immortality. On 28 November 2010, he sat on the panel of judges for the final episode of Choir of the Year, broadcast on BBC Four and BBC Radio 3. In December 2010, Whitacre conducted the I Vocalisti choir in Hamburg, and was a guest conductor of the Christmas performance of the Berlin Rundfunkchor.

On 6 November 2010, Whitacre conducted Côrdydd, a Cardiff-based mixed choir, and friends in a concert of his work at the BBC Hoddinott Hall in the Wales Millennium Centre.

He composed a piece for the Sidney Sussex college choir, and worked with students in masterclasses and workshops. The concert version of his musical Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings was performed to a sold out audience at Carnegie Hall in June 2010.

Whitacre is a founding member of BCM International, a quartet of composers consisting of himself, Steven Bryant, Jonathan Newman and James Bonney, which aspires to "enrich the wind ensemble repertoire with music unbound by traditional thought or idiomatic cliché."

Awards and honors

Whitacre has won awards from the Barlow international composition competition, American Choral Directors Association, American Composers' Forum and in 2001 became the youngest recipient ever of The Raymond C Brock Commission given by the American Choral Directors Association. His musical Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings earned him a Richard Rodgers Award and received 10 nominations at the 2007 Los Angeles Stage Alliance Ovation Awards. The album Cloudburst and Other Choral Works received a Grammy nomination in 2007 for Best Choral Performance. Later, his album "Light and Gold" won a Grammy for Best Choral Performance in 2012.

Works

Wind symphony

• Equus
• Ghost Train Triptych
  • Ghost Train
  • At the Station
  • Motive Revolution
• Godzilla Eats Las Vegas!
• Noisy Wheels of Joy
• October
• Sleep (choral transcription)
• The Seal Lullaby (choral transcription for wind symphony and piano)
• Lux Aurumque (choral transcription, transposed a semitone lower from C-Sharp Minor to C Minor)
• Cloudburst (choral transcription)
• Libertas Imperio (From Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings)

SATB choral

• A Boy and A Girl (poem by Octavio Paz)
• Alleluia (adapted from his October)
• Animal Crackers, Volume 1 (Poems by Ogden Nash)
  • The Panther
  • The Cow
  • The Firefly
• Animal Crackers, Volume 2 (Poems by Ogden Nash)
  • The Canary
  • The Eel
  • The Kangaroo
• The City and the Sea (poems by E. E. Cummings)
  • i walked the boulevard
  • the moon is hiding in her hair
  • maggie and millie and molly and may
  • as is the sea marvelous
  • little man in a hurry
• Cloudburst (poem by Octavio Paz)
• Five Hebrew Love Songs (poem by Hila Plitmann)
  • Temuna
  • Kala Kalla (Light Bride)
  • Larov (Mostly)
  • Eyze Sheleg! (What snow!)
  • Rakut (Tenderness)
• Her Sacred Spirit Soars (poem by Charles Anthony Silvestri)
• Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine (libretto by Charles Anthony Silvestri)
• Little Birds (poem by Octavio Paz)
• little tree (poem by E. E. Cummings)
• Lux Aurumque (poem by Edward Esch; translated into Latin by Charles Anthony Silvestri) (also set for male chorus)
• Nox Aurumque (poem by Charles Anthony Silvestri)
• Oculi Omnium
• The Seal Lullaby (poem by Rudyard Kipling)
• She Weeps Over Rahoon (poem by James Joyce)
• Sleep (originally a setting of Robert Frost's poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"; for copyright reasons the published version uses a specially-written text by Charles Anthony Silvestri)
• Sleep, My Child (Choral transcription from Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings)
• The Stolen Child (setting of a poem by William Butler Yeats, commissioned in 2008 by the National Youth Choir of Great Britain and The King's Singers for their respective 25th and 40th anniversaries)
• This Marriage (poem by Jalal al-Din Rumi)
• Three Flower Songs
  • I Hide Myself (poem by Emily Dickinson)
  • With a Lily in Your Hand (poem by Federico García Lorca)
  • Go, Lovely Rose (poem by Edmund Waller)
• Three Songs of Faith (poems by E. E. Cummings)
  • i will wade out
  • hope, faith, life, love
  • i thank You God for most this amazing day
• Water Night (poem by Octavio Paz; translated by Muriel Rukeyser)
• When David Heard (from II Samuel 18:33)
• Winter (poem by Edward Esch)
• What If (lyrics by David Norona and Eric Whitacre)

SSA choral

• She Weeps Over Rahoon (text by James Joyce)
• Five Hebrew Love Songs (poem by Hila Plitmann)
• The Seal Lullaby (text by Rudyard Kipling)
• I Thank You God (text by E. E. Cummings)

TTBB choral

• Lux Aurumque (poem by Edward Esch, translated into Latin by Charles Anthony Silvestri)
• The Seal Lullaby (text by Rudyard Kipling)

Choral works not yet published

• Alleluia
• Oculi Omnium
• Songs of Immortality
  • Lie still, sleep becalmed (poem by Dylan Thomas)
  • After Great Pain (poem by Emily Dickinson)

Orchestral

• October
• Winter
• A Boy and a Girl
• Lux Aurumque
• Water Night
• The River Cam
• Winter (for strings, choir and sitar)

Solo voice

• The City and the Sea (poems by E. E. Cummings)
• Five Hebrew Love Songs (poem by Hila Plitmann)

Music theatre

• Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings, a musical featuring electronic, world, and orchestral instruments; classical singers; and many different styles of music.

Other arrangements

• Rak HaHatchala (Only the Beginning) [aka Five Hebrew Love Songs]; for soprano voice, solo violin, piano

Film and Television

• Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, co-composer (with Hans Zimmer) of the Mermaid Theme and choral segments

Publishers

Whitacre is published by Chester Music; G. Schirmer; Walton Music; Santa Barbara Music; Shadow Water Music; and Carpe Ranam Music.

External links

• Official website
• Eric_Whitacre on WikiMusicGuide
• Biography on Hyperion Records
• NPR Review of Cloudburst and choral audio. September 28, 2006
• Music Productions Ltd (Management company of Eric Whitacre)
• Eric Whitacre write-up on ChesterNovello web site
• Eric talking at TED about the virtual choir
• Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir 2.0, 'Sleep'
• Classical Archives Interview