Eric Whitacre Speaks Out

An Interview With Choral Music's Rock Star

Eric Whitacre muses on how he gets inspired to compose, his special connection with young people, and what he thinks about the future of choral music.

Let’s face it. Composers of choral music usually don’t become stars. So when a roomful of high school students go gaga over one, you know something is up.

The object of their adulation was Eric Whitacre—the phenom from California who has created some of the best-loved works in contemporary choral music. The setting was a choral festival in Minneapolis devoted almost entirely to his music put on by the choral organization VocalEssence.

Performing in the festival were VocalEssence’s small chamber choir and its symphonic choir, the St. Olaf Choir, one of the top college choirs in the country, and a high school honor choir made up of 160 juniors and seniors from schools across Minnesota and into Wisconsin.

The high school students had to meet a high bar of musical excellence to get into the honor choir—preparing an Italian aria, in Italian, as well as demonstrating their proficiency in a number of other vocal exercises. And the rehearsal schedule at the festival was grueling. But, according to the kids, it was all worth it.

“From the first moment, there was an indescribable energy in the room,” said Kristin Althof, a soprano from White Bear Lake High School. “I know I was thinking to myself ‘OH MY GOSH! Pinch me! This has to be a dream.’ I was surprised how laid-back Eric Whitacre was. I was expecting him to be all business, but he was very witty, charming, and humble.”

Music superstars aren’t always approachable. But this one is. In between rehearsals, we had a chance to talk with Whitacre about a range of topics—what it’s like for him to be a choral rock star, how he gets inspired to compose, his special connection with young people, mainly through his website and social media presence, and what he thinks about the future of choral music. Click on the audio players below to hear more in Whitacre’s own words. Below the audio links is the transcript of each segment:

Clip one: Eric Whitacre on his "rock star" status

Choral music doesn’t often have rock stars. We try, but, you know…so when was the first moment you realized, gosh, people are following me around or they want my autograph. Did you feel like it was an odd thing? When was the first time?

Man, this is a really great question. I think there was this convention, the national ACDA convention, in 2001. They had commissioned me to write a piece for the convention, and so I wrote this piece called "Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine" and Charles Bruffy and the KC Chorale were scheduled to perform it. I wrote it for them. And when I came to rehearse with them, Charles, who is just so gracious, said, “Why don’t you conduct it?” I mean, he just gave me the chorus. It was the most gracious thing.

I conducted three different performances of this. And at the time I had sort of short, spiky hair and I had bleached it shock white, so it was like a neon sign. You know, you don’t see a lot of shock white, spiky hair at choral conventions. So I was walking around, really, with this big sign pointed at me saying, “Hey, I am the guy that conducted that piece!” And that, for the first time, was where I as having a hard time getting from one end of the convention hall to the other. That struck me. I thought, “Wow, something has turned the corner here.” There was this kind of electricity…

And then you had to pay a lot of attention to your hair from then on?

Yeah, then my entire career became that as the foundation.

Clip two: Eric Whitacre on composing

I’ve been talking with folks recently about how they get inspired. When you’re composing, whether you have a picture or you hear a tune or it’s words…what’s your process like or is it different all the time?

Each piece has its own process. It seems that the piece reflects, the process reflects the emotional content of the piece. If it is something light and fun, then generally the writing of it is kind of silly and playful. If it’s something very intense, sorrowful, I really go through a funk when writing it. When I was writing "Leonardo Dreams," for instance, it is all about Da Vinci trying to figure out a way to build this machine so that he could fly and the air is calling him and he is pacing at night. I sort of relived all of that as I was writing it. Just tearing my hair out, really felt like I was going mad.

You became Leonardo?

I think so. Method composing. Probably the least efficient way to do it, but I don’t know how else to do it.

And does it come fast, slow, or all over the map?

Unfortunately, it usually comes pretty slow for me. There is a gestation period. Then there is a moment when I commit to it. Even it is commissioned where I say months later, I am actually going to write this now. Then I start scratching things out, it is a struggle and then there will be one golden moment—"My God, that’s it." And we start and there is this long process of refining. I think it is Michelangelo who describes sculpting with a large block of stone and his job was to find the figure trapped inside the stone. It feels like that to me, constantly refining the material until I find the fundamental truth of it.

Clip three: Eric Whitacre on music education

You’ve been very committed to kids and the education process. And I was just standing there as they were talking about where they had come from [for the VocalEssence/Eric Whitacre Extravaganza]. Somebody came from eleven miles south of the Canadian border. I think it took her seven hours to get here.

Really?

That was the farthest away. But then he [Bruce] was asking, how many of you are on the student council, how many were in a choir or state choir when you were in grade school. And there were quite a few. And it’s just so interesting to me the impact, early on, of choral music. And I know you really share that knowledge, and that understanding too, that it makes a huge difference. But tell about your own commitment to kids coming up?

For me, it’s everything. Not only as part of our choral community, just as you said, it’s the lifeblood. It really is like a tree and every time we cut a middle school choral or band or orchestra program, it’s cutting the roots of the tree. And the top of that tree simply can’t survive without those roots. And so we have to feed those young people. It’s not that they’ll go on to be musicians necessarily, but they’ll become administrators, they’ll become the head of corporations, and they can at least relate to the importance of the thing.

Beyond that though, I feel like it just makes better human beings. Even the Greeks knew this, that music is one of the seven fundamental tenets of how to be a person. My commitment is trying to work with or be in contact with as many of them [young people] as I possibly can. That’s either through live performances, or my Web sites, which I spend a lot of time on.

Clip four: Eric Whitacre on social networking sites

You mentioned your websites. So tell me about that. When did you discover that and what has the whole world been for you as a composer and relating to the world out there?

Well, I think the first time I really discovered it was back when Napster was around, the illegal file sharing program. There were some of my recordings out there. At first I saw that a few people had them. You could do a search for it and a couple would come up. And then pretty soon it maxed out. Every time, search upon search. I thought, "Wow people are really trading this stuff." That becomes its own currency, in a way, It’s this new form of communication, right? People are actually trading in this virtual community. I was struck by the power of it.

So I invested a lot of time and money in my website, this was before MySpace and Facebook. My website became a nice place for people to come and see what I had done, sort of an overview. And I included a thing there, “please contact me,” and so I started getting emails from everywhere. And that was a beautiful way to see the impact I was having all over the place. And then once MySpace hit, then all the rules changed, because everybody had access to it. And it’s a free platform just like Facebook and there’s also much more a sense of community. You can almost, in real time, be updating people about what you are doing. I can’t really imagine a career these days without it.

And you said that the music was out there, not with your permission at first. So you saw that as positive, that the music was out there and being listened to?

I did.

Stolen from you?

Yeah, well, it’s interesting. Maybe this is a rat’s nest we don’t have to get into, but I have some complex feelings about the “stealing” of music. I mean, I should just say I think it’s great for music and it’s great for choral music, and for people to hear this stuff. I feel that record companies truly missed the boat nine years ago when Napster was raging. They should have seen that really where the true income stream is going to come from is live music.

I agree with you.

And now they do it. Now bands will release their albums and put all of it up on MySpace. You go and you can listen to it all for free. And all of it is trying to promote the live music aspect. So I’m sort of a big fan of using the recording simply as a loss leader, if you will, to invite people to come hear more.

I think on your MySpace you have things you can listen to and some free downloads, too?

Yeah.

So you figured out how to work that?

Yeah, yeah, and I’m just starting. This year one of the big things on the agenda is to totally revamp the websites and make them even more accessible and interactive.

And there are Eric Whitacre fan clubs, too.

On Facebook, yes. There is even an “I Hate Eric Whitacre.”

Is there?

There is. There’s two of them!

I didn’t know that!

There is. That’s when you know it is really happening.

That’s when you know you’ve really made it, huh?

That’s right!

So do you go look around on those “I Hate Eric Whitacre” sites?

Well, I did. A friend wrote me and said, "Have you seen this?" So I went and joined. I became a member. And what that did is then it shows up on my Facebook that I am a member of that group, so then all of my fans see that and they went on there and started trashing all these poor people who just don’t like my music. I didn’t mean for it to become a little holy war.

Clip 5: Eric Whitacre discusses choral innovation

So fun talking with him [Craig Hella Johnson] and thinking about innovation in choral music and taking some risks. And I don’t know if you have any thoughts about that for the choral world…

I do! I think...

I thought you probably would!

Yeah, I hadn’t noticed it until sort of recently. But I think there are some traditions in choral music that I think could use reexamining. First, and this is mostly the conductors, is it’s just about programming. I know that for conductors it is a badge of honor, and what they consider the true element of the art form. I understand that…the way that a concert progresses, and themes, and piece upon piece and how they relate to each other. At the same time, there is kind of an old-fashioned approach to that that I find almost everywhere. And choral directors, I hear this all the time, “Well, this is what our audience wants and what they’re going to expect and you know we don’t want to change it too much.” That has not been my experience whatsoever, especially with young people, what I think of as the iPod generation. Kids go now from Bach to Beatles to Björk without any sense of irony. They listen just to good music. I am not advocating not performing classical music. But I am advocating this sense of freeing up this very stale form of programming.

I feel that classical musicians in my generation especially are losing this sense [of separation between classical and pop]. I remember one time I was telling a conductor that I like Simon and Garfunkel as much as I like Mozart. And he said, "But Simon and Garfunkel does not invite further reflection the way Mozart does." I thought, that is such an academic approach to it. If anything, Paul Simon’s lyrics invite as much or more reflection to my life as Mozart ever will. Leonard Cohen is a perfect example. It can be as poignant, as meaningful, and as truthful as anything in the classical repertoire. But we sort of put these pieces on weird pedestals in the classical world.

I think it’s okay. Sometimes Brahms just bores me to tears. It’s really boring, but, my God, you can’t say that out loud! Mendelssohn is like, oh please, not another Mendelssohn Elijah. I find that just excruciating to sit all the way through, truly. But we hold it with such reverence, in a way. And I don’t think we should. I think we should reexamine all of those precepts.

What would a really different kind of concert look like, beyond all Eric Whitacre music?

If I was making it? I have a bazillion ideas. The first thing, the first, first, first thing I would do, no matter what, would be to set aside money for a lighting budget. I cannot believe in this day and age we just turn the lights up and everybody comes out and sings for two hours, I mean you can so delicately set the mood with simple lighting. It is an easy thing. I think I would also break up the traditional choral formation, it is so formal. Singers can still sing beautifully from different places and structures on the stage, moving between pieces. Then the other thing, too, is I would try to eliminate some of the formality. I can’t stand the thing where you leave the stage and every time you come back, the audience claps. Oh god. And whenever there is a stage change, the audience sits quietly. This also just blows my mind. There should be some sort of thing to fill that. There should be someone talking or some small group playing, something poignant or something fun. It’s a show—just entertain. Then, within that, I also feel there is great place for connecting with the audience. That whoever the host is, the master of ceremonies, which doesn’t necessarily have to be the music director, but somebody needs to engage the audience. Deliberately, inviting them in, sharing with them things about the pieces and priming them for a great experience.

Clip 6: Eric Whitacre on the future of choral music

As you know, this is a difficult time financially. What do you think we, as choral people, what could we do or what should we be doing to keep this art form vital and on the minds of people who would be funding us?

Boy, I don’t know. It’s tough with the recession because people are really hurting. It is not an ideological problem now, it is just systemic. Everyone is trying to stay above water. I’m not sure any of my creative ideas are going to help with purely financial issues. I love to see choral music and arts in general move toward a more capitalist model. The government doesn’t seem to be helping us, and, of course, we should continue lobbying for that, but I am not expecting any time soon for them to turn to a European model where they fund all these orchestras and choruses. So in that absence then, I think we need to get very savvy about how to make money. And it can’t only be worrying about foundations and private donations. These things, of course, are helpful, but I think that throughout the country, as I have been talking to people, there is this reality happening—that someone who could give $100,000 last year can only give $10,000 this year. Suddenly now arts programs have $90,000 holes in their budget. That’s...

Shocking?

Yeah, it’s shocking. And I think it’s an incredibly weak place for an organization to be. Because your entire program can fall on a single or a couple of elements like that. So I think there needs to be better capitalist models, better ways of actually making money. And one way is, I think, to increase ticket sales. And two, I feel like musician unions have got to sit down and solve this. They have got to quit holding on to these old models or they will kill the whole thing. It is not just the pay scales. For instance, they hold on so desperately on to union recordings. You can’t even release them. I know as a composer, often times I can’t even actually get recordings that were made of the pieces for me to hear. They’re archived; the union won’t allow them to be heard. I think it’s just crazy. It’s isolating them even more.

I lived in Vegas, went to school there 1988-1995, and I saw a sea of change. In 1985, it was a Mecca for jazz musicians. There were people who had been playing there since the 50s and hundreds of hundreds of casino jobs. By the time I left in 1995, nothing. It was because the musicians had a strong strike. They struck for an entire year, walking up and down the boulevard and finally the casinos said well, we don’t need live music then. No one’s going to notice. It just sort of decimated that [industry]. And I feel that a reckoning like that is coming for the classical world if we’re not careful.