Love at first sight
Whitacre has long been a known quantity in Belgium. With his contemporary but accessible style and innovative projects, he unleashed a veritable revolution in the choral world: his first album, Light & Gold, from 2012 won him a Grammy Award, and the next album, Water Night, also rose immediately after its release to first place on the iTunes Classical Charts. With his online project Virtual Choir, he has also been able to reach a wide audience across the boundaries of geography and age.
Since then, Whitacre has been working as a composer and conductor with choirs around the world, from VOCES8 to The King’s Singers. He also has a special bond with the Flemish Radio Choir. On his first visit to Belgium, in 2016, it was, as he puts it, love at first sight. In the meantime, he has won the hearts of Belgian audiences with various choral projects. From a programme centred on composers he admires, through his first evening-long composition The Sacred Veil, to the Belgian première of Deep Field, his latest project in the Virtual Choir series. This time, he is conducting the Belgian première of Eternity in an hour, a work that had its world première on 4 September 2024 at the Royal Albert Hall in London. For this work, Whitacre has not limited himself to composing and conducting, but also is at the controls of an entire battery of electronica.
Pausing time
Whitacre often draws inspiration for his works from poetry. Thus, he has in the past used verses by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and, for some of his best-known compositions, worked closely with his childhood friend and poet Charles Anthony Silvestri (°1965). Whitacre sees the interaction between a poem and his music as a relationship that you enter into: ‘First there’s the stage of seduction, when I’m first reading it and the poem is flirting with me. Then there’s the part when I’m completely “into it”. Then there’s the stage of a real relationship when I’m trying to express myself musically – so the music sounds like the poetry feels to me.’
His fascination with Blake’s poem dates back to his teens. Even then, he saw exciting parallels between the first four lines of the poem and the Buddhist philosophies he was studying at the time: ‘It’s about taking a single moment, or something as insignificant as a grain of sand, and seeing within it an entire universe…. It’s about, as a Zen Buddhist would say, having a beginner’s mind – letting go of the “sickness” of experience and seeing the world as it is.’
And that is exactly what Whitacre tries to do in this composition. With the help of the human voice, four strings, a piano and synthesizers, he puts time on pause, as it were, for an hour. He takes a specific moment as his starting point, a simple musical fact that he spins out for several minutes. Voices are stretched out and manipulated electronically, and the choir and musicians in turn respond to certain impulses generated by the synthesizers. The decision to use synthesizers as an equal part of the instrumentation is no accident: ‘As I really started to think deeply about the instrumentation, I realised how perfectly [electronics] fitted with the first line of Blake’s poem: the word “grain” is now part of the vernacular of synthesis. “Granular synthesis” is where you take a sound sample and chop it up into millions of pieces, or “grains”. These are then used to make sprays or clouds of sound. And so, by doing this during the performance, I’m integrating Blake’s words on an even deeper, poetic level.’
The result is a nearly seamless stream of voices and sounds; music that oscillates between minimalism and ambient. And most of all: music that is created in the midst of the moment, making each performance unique.
