The arrival of the composer Eric Whitacre and his family in London as permanent residents brings a ray of Californian sunshine to our cloud-bedraggled lives. American musicians who have chosen to move to Europe to work have always made an interesting group, headed by jazz players of the calibre of Josephine Baker and Sidney Bechet. Of course they had reasons for seeking work elsewhere which do not apply to the very white Whitacre. But, given that at a casual glance the US appears to offer so much opportunity to everyone, why come all this way?
In Whitacre’s case I get the impression that he really likes the UK. Since he is probably the most listened-to composer of his generation, it doesn’t really matter where he puts pen to paper, meaning that the move must either be because he has had enough of long-distance flights, or, like Tom Lehrer, he is actually more celebrated here than there. Either way, his genius for turning the internet to advantage (and landing a modelling contract with an internationally established men’s clothing house) has given him enviable freedom. There is also the small matter of how much he admires English singers.
I have wondered how he is finding it here. In one sense the difference between California and London is as great as between Delhi and London, and rather less than between London and Paris. How is he faring with a people who follow a game which may last five days and end, thrillingly, in a draw? Or with those who habitually maintain a distinction between ‘momentarily’, ‘presently’ and ‘right now’? Or living alongside those who, as the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once observed, are unique in the world in looking over their shoulder, when you point a camera at them, to see who the real object of your attention is. Not very Californian, is it? Nor is the irony that underlies so much of our expression.
I hope he has found his feet in all this, since he cuts a glamorous figure and writes very good music. I can measure his popularity by the sheer number of performances I hear about every week. His Lux Aurumque is currently being prepared by my son in his school chamber choir, and was performed last Sunday by the choir of Queen’s College Oxford as the anthem at Evensong. Merton College Choir has just released a recording of his When David heard. The Tallis Scholars have just commissioned him. In addition he will be Composer in Residence at Sydney Sussex College Cambridge for the next five years. And now his own Eric Whitacre Singers, recently formed of London professionals, has started to appear in the concert hall and on disc.
With these titles and with such groups taking him up one would be forgiven for thinking he was a quasi-Anglican composer. In fact, if I understood him correctly, he is not interested in setting religious texts per se, but needs the words — any words — to work on his imagination and release musical ideas. The result, in pieces like Lux Aurumque, is a sound-world of chord clusters, or blurred harmonies, which seem to have their roots in that old chestnut the distant choir in the vast Gothic cathedral, their sound drifting down immense corridors to the listener as if from heaven. Such a model won’t do for renaissance polyphony, but it does do very well indeed for the slow gestations of Whitacre’s more chordally-based idiom. And it appeals. One enthusiast writes online: ‘i feel like im floating on a cloud with a harpe and angels fly by singing this song to me while im on my way to hevan.’
Nothing shows off the success of Whitacre’s music better than his inspired invention of the virtual choir on YouTube (Arts, 20 November 2010). In the first place he recorded himself conducting it to a click track. He duly appears on a big black screen, centre stage. In front of him is his ‘choir’, which is made up of many hundreds of people — including Ed Rex of this parish — sitting at home singing into some form of video camera while their voices are transferred on to the general tape. When I last looked, 2,722,388 had watched Lux Aurumque; and 2,052 people from 58 countries had taken part in the virtual choir performance of Sleep.
And this from a composer who originally made his mark in the symphonic wind repertory. My guess, though, is that the sounds he can inspire from his London professionals — surely in a different category from what he can have in the US — will give him a new lease of creative life. And keep him rooted here.
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