22-07-2025
Composer Eric Whitacre
"May I be a guard for those without one, a guide for all who journey on the road, may I become a boat, a raft or bridge, for all who wish to cross the water."
Eric Whitacre, the man dubbed "The king of choral music," loves poetry and is fond of quoting these words from an ancient Buddhist prayer.
"In my music, what I imagine people are expecting, and are hoping for, is a combination of these dense, ecstatic, clusters of moments that send chills down your back, a spiritual experience, which listeners are hoping to be transformed through.
"I take that to heart. It's a responsibility, and I want to help them. 'May I be a boat for those who cross the water' — that's what I hope to do with my music — but it can paralyse you creatively."
The still youthful, self-described Grammy Award-winning American composer, conductor and speaker, who defies the stereotypes of the choral director, is one of the most recognisable names in choral music.
His emotive, ecstatic sound, with its trademark arresting dissonances, has won hearts all over the world, and became a YouTube sensation for the first time in 2009 (years before the pandemic turned many of us on to choral singing) when his series of pioneering Virtual Choirs brought together more than 100,000 singers from over 145 countries.
But now, at 55, after several decades of roller-coaster success, he's feeling the weight and expectation of his fame.
"The kids, they remind you, how fresh the world is and how new it is."
Signed to Decca in 2010 for his first album Light and Gold, which won him the Grammy, Eric left his base in Los Angeles to live the UK for six years until 2016, immersing himself in the English choral tradition whilst undertaking a residency at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. "For me the English choral tradition going all the way back, is really some of the most beautiful music ever written."
These days he lives in Antwerp with his wife, the Belgian soprano Laurence Servaes. He's the father of a 4 year-old and a 19 year-old, and almost wistfully recalls his own baby steps as a musician and composer.
"The kids, they remind you, how fresh the world is and how new it is. I found myself, when I began. I didn't read music. I started singing in choir at 18 and wrote my first piece at 21.
"Every day then was electric, brand new. And there was a sense of playfulness about it. I was only making to make a thing. There was nothing else. Now it's career. Each piece comes with a commission and a level of expectation."
"From that day on I was the world's biggest choir geek."
Born in 1970, in a small town in the Nevada desert, Eric recalls he had "an insatiable curiosity" as a child.
Then as a teenager he became obsessed with making music with computers: "I wanted to be the fifth member of Depeche Mode," the 1980s British electronic music group.
He was a big fan of Wendy Carlos too, and became the proud owner of one of the very first EMU drumulators and an Ensoniq ESQ-1 thanks to the proceeds from a McDonald's commercial he made when he was 14.
"My life was really transformed by those instruments (and that commercial both in terms of music and in terms of girls). Especially because I think I learned basic counterpoint and formal structure from sequencing songs I wrote on the ESQ-1."
But apart from noodling on his grandmother's piano and playing in a techno-pop band, Eric, had no idea of where he was heading, so he joined a choir.
The director David Weiller had heard him improvising in his unsuccessful audition for a music scholarship to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and invited him to come along to a choir rehearsal of Mozart's Requiem. "I've never been transformed the way I was then. I was standing in the middle of counterpoint and sophistication and elegance that I didn't even know existed. From that day on, I was the world's biggest choir geek."
Composer and conductor Eric Whitacre. ( Supplied: Eric Whitacre. )
David Weiller, Eric's "most important mentor," not only got him singing but encouraged him to conduct and compose. He wrote his piece Go Lovely Rose for Weiller as a gift. Later he asked Eric to become assistant conductor on West Side Story. "It changed my life."
Go Lovely Rose is one of the first pieces with Eric's instantly recognizable musical style, which he suspects evolved from that time. Particularly the ways he uses harmonic suspensions; moments where two or three-note clusters sound, then move apart and resolve.
"I went to a concert in Phoenix, part of the national conference of the American Choral Directors Association. There was music by Pärt, Tavener, Bernstein… that completely blew my mind. Another influence was an album called Hearing Solar Winds by David Hykes and the Harmonic Choir. All these came together and combined with all the film music I knew from the 1980s." Eric has since worked with the legendary Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer.
At the age of 25, he moved to New York to undertake his masters at Juilliard. After a disastrous period of "tough love" with his first composition supervisor David Diamond, whose policy with mavericks like Eric was "to crush and rebuild," he found someone much more sympathetic: John Corigliano.
"From John I learnt how to structure what I was writing. He taught me to take a giant piece of paper and draw the entire architecture of the piece from beginning to end, before I'd written a note, and the idea has served me well ever since."
"I feel like a kid again."
Eric is a frequent and very welcome visitor to Australia to conduct our choirs and run workshops, and I found him delightfully open, thoughtful and optimistic in our interview.
In June he conducted the Australian premiere of one of his recent successes, Eternity in an Hour, with Vox, the young-adult ensemble of Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, the joint commissioners with the BBC Proms which premiered Eternity last year, and Flemish Radio Choir.
Inspired by the words of William Blake, it's scored for a blend of voices, string quartet, piano and "an ethereal blanket of electronics." It was the first time Eric had conducted and performed live synths on-stage since his teens. "I feel like a kid again."
"I'm hoping that I can continue this, performing live with electronics, singers, and instrumentalists; maybe ramping it up, making it more theatrical with lighting, and in big beautiful spaces like cathedrals and warehouses."
"The current political climate is compelling me even further, to just make beautiful things a bigger truth."
Living as an expat in Belgium, "Proper Europe" as he describes it, has given Eric a very different perspective on his birthplace and "Trump's America."
"Americans live to work, but working to live is the European way and is woven into every fabric of life. It took me many months to move to a slower pace, and see deep wisdom, it's changed my way of living."
His music has changed too. "There is this freedom in the USA that you can express yourself boldly and loudly and wear your heart on your sleeve. However, my impression of the art I've experienced here, is that it's been intellectualised into an oblivion. It's lost the ability to connect, human being to human being. There's no sense of it being a communal experience that changes things or transforms us.
"But I think I'm writing a little less American, more subtle. More refined writing as I've learnt the rhythm of Europe. For me, art must be a balance of intellectual rigour and emotional depth."
Earlier this year his violin concerto The Pacific Has No Memory, inspired by the Los Angeles-area wildfires in January this year, was premiered at Carnegie Hall by Anne Akiko Meyers and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, with a further performance this month from co-commissioners, the Colorado Music Festival.
"It's an odd thing. Often people are talking to an 'idea of me.' I'm humbled by that. I'm the first born child and a people pleaser, but I also feel compelled to grow."
In a world smitten by wars and an exponential growth in human anxiety, Eric says he'll continue to gravitate towards things that are beautiful.
"Even if it's tough, grief, it's always with an eye towards beauty. The current political climate is compelling me even further, to just make beautiful things a bigger truth. It's the only thing I can do. I feel powerless otherwise. It's my contribution to the conversation."
