Zitat des Tages von Eric Whitacre:
There must be four or five hundred choirs here in London alone. In a way, there's nowhere else on Earth I could go and get this level and passion for singing in the one place.
With vocal and choral music, first and foremost, it's the text. Not only do I need to serve the text, but the text - when I'm doing it right - acts as the perfect 'blueprint', and all the architecture is there. The poet has done the heavy lifting, so my job is to find the soul of the poem and then somehow translate that into music.
I'm not an atheist, but I'm not a Christian, either.
To have a live choir there on the stage and then these singers from different countries signing with us in real time through Skype, it's as if there aren't borders anymore.
I don't know if it is a spiritual, physiological or psychological phenomenon, but I believe now more than ever that singing is a universal, built-in mechanism designed to cultivate empathy and compassion.
When I went to college at the University of Nevada back in Las Vegas, I got tricked into singing in choir. The first thing we did was the Mozart 'Requiem.' That was the piece that changed my life overnight.
I wanted to be a rock star. I dreamed of it, and that's all I dreamed of. To be more accurate, I wanted to be a pop star. This was in the late '80s. And mostly, I wanted to be the fifth member of Depeche Mode or Duran Duran.
I write music that sounds complex but isn't. I frankly never think in terms of theory.
I truly thought I was going to be in pop music. And then I joined a choir to meet girls, and everything changed in the first rehearsal.
When you look back on music history, it falls into these neat periods, but of course, the period you yourself are living through seems totally scattered and chaotic.
I don't feel like I'm an artist with a capital 'A.'
As a composer, I know that all sorts of sounds I hear are making their way into my brain and soul and later sneak into my music.
When I had my first experiences of choral singing, the dissonance of those close harmonies was so exquisite that I would giggle or I would tear up, and I felt it in a physical way.
