Light & Gold

About the Artist If you had to choose a perfect illustration of the globe-shrinking power of the internet, you could hardly do better than Eric Whitacre's "virtual choir" recording of Lux Aurumque. Edited together from 185 separately-recorded vocal parts from singers around the world, each performer individually guided by Whitacre's own conductor's video, the piece has erupted into a YouTube phenomenon which has already notched up well over a million hits. Choirs and audiences had already felt the emotional force of Whitacre's music, but this magical and somehow slightly miraculous incarnation of Lux Aurumque suggested that its potential could be limitless. The liberating power of communal singing has driven hit TV shows like Glee or, in the UK, The Choir, but Whitacre took the idea several steps further. He managed to make the entire planet his constituency, bringing together singers from all countries, classes and walks of life to create choral music of awesome emotional power and technical accomplishment. He really did teach the world to sing. The composer is proud of his achievement of course, but adds that "even more than pride, I think I'm just flabbergasted by it. Truly, the whole project began as just a whim. Never in my wildest dreams did I think it would start getting passed around and go viral, so it's really astonishing to me." In Latin, Lux Aurumque means Light and Gold, which happens to be the title of Whitacre's new debut album for Decca. It's a mixture of works from the Whitacre catalogue alongside three World Premiere recordings of new pieces, all of them freshly recorded for the occasion. It's the perfect gateway through which new listeners can experience the allure of Whitacre's music for the first time, while giving existing fans pristine new recordings of some of his most successful pieces, tailored by the composer himself. "This album is the first time that I've ever conducted on record my interpretations of my own pieces," Whitacre explains. "The new pieces haven't been recorded before. Previous recordings of the older works have always been nice, but they've never been exactly what I was hoping they would be. That's the most interesting part for me; it's finally a chance to say it the way I'd like to say it." The pieces on the disc are performed by the British chamber choir, Laudibus, alongside Whitacre's newly-created vocal group, the Eric Whitacre Singers. "That will be a permanent ensemble," he explains. "Knowing I can hand-pick my own group and mould them from the start is pretty thrilling." For a one-stop dose of Eric Whitacre's music, the album is hard to beat ("there are some pieces that are new, and then of course we had to put a couple of hits on there," deadpans the composer). It includes new versions of his Five Hebrew Songs and Three Songs of Faith, as well as a newly-Whitacre-ised take of Sleep (the piece with which Whitacre first tried out the "virtual choir" concept on the net). Among the new works, Nox Aurumque (Night and Gold) was conceived as a companion piece to Lux Aurumque, while The Stolen Child is based on the Yeats poem of the same name. Whitacre composed the latter as a commission to mark the 40th anniversary of the King's Singers and the 25th anniversary of the National Youth Chorus of Great Britain, and he needed to devise a composition which could accommodate both of them. "I thought `jeez, what text can I possibly find that justifies having six men up there with all these young people'?" he recalls. "Then I remembered The Stolen Child, and it's perfect. It's about these woodland fairies who are calling these children away from the world of adults. I decided I would make the King's Singers the Woodland fairies, and they loved that description! Then the big chorus became the young people, all of this seduced youth. The strange thing about it was I wrote it in this very high kind of romantic, Brahmsian style. I wasn't expecting that at all, it just came gushing out of me." That's an indicator of the way that Whitacre's music manages to remain rooted in the classical tradition while pulling in influences and references from countless different sources. Asked to cite his musical inspirations, he lists classical composers including JS Bach, Bartok, Stravinsky and John Adams, and he has a particular passion for Debussy. "I'm entranced by almost everything I've ever heard by Debussy. It's just so beautiful and I aspire to that, and I find it ends up in my music all over the place." But during his teens, Eric played pop music and dreamed of being in a synth-pop band, so there's a universe of other sounds filtering through his work. "I feel equally influenced by Bjork and Radiohead and Peter Gabriel and Rodgers & Hammerstein and Thomas Newman, the film composer," he adds. "Maybe it's just being in the iPod generation now where there are no genres any more; it's just whether music is good or bad." At 40, Whitacre is young enough to be an enthusiastic embracer of mo
ASIN: B003ODHXEG
VSKU: DBV.B003ODHXEG.A
Condition: Acceptable
Author/Artist:Eric Whitacre
Binding: Audio cd
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