In the recent In Their Minds article I highlighted a piece of virtual collaborative creation involving contributors from US, France and the UK who had never met each other and are, probably, unlikely ever to do so. What is highlighted below is on an altogether grander scale but uses a similar methodology to the WikiLoops example described in In Their Minds, i.e. a template track establishes a pattern from which a composition can grow.
The BBC World Service is the dark horse of the BBC stable but, yet, its portfolio of documentaries are invariably of very high quality offering considerable insights, information and education. One standout example is In the Studio which describes itself as:
The programme that gets inside the minds of the world’s leading creative figures, and finds out how they work and think.
Each week it focuses on the processes adopted by a single creative, not just composers and musicians. In the schedule, however, there are some great interviews with composers, producers and musicians including, the focus of this article, the Grammy-award winning American composer and conductor Eric Whitacre. He has featured twice in In the Studio with the most recent because, as Covid-19 spread throughout the world, his Virtual Choir projects took on a whole new dimension and meaning. His 2020 composition Sing Gently piece involving 17,572 singers from 129 different countries which at the time of writing has over 2 million views on YouTube. He has been creating such virtual choir projects for over a decade with his YouTube Virtual Choir channel showcasing the results.
One standout quote of the Inside the Studio interview is Whitacre’s description, as a tyro member of a university choir, of his moment of revelation and transformation from would-be pop star:
It was the first time I had ever experienced music in three dimensions, and it was definitely the first time I had ever experienced music with that complexity and that sophistication. And that was it. My life was forever changed … Even more than the music, that day was the first time I had ever felt part of something much larger than myself.
So how does he compose a piece like Sing Gently? His process sounds deceptively simple. At circa @8m50s into the programme he states:
For each piece that I write, before I write a note of music I create what I call the emotional architecture … I’ll draw in abstract forms the emotional journey that I’m hoping the audience and performers will go on in the piece … an emotional guidebook. Once I’ve got that structure I’ll sit down at the piano or just walking around singing to myself and try to come up with the music …Once I’ve got that architecture then I go looking for what I call the ‘golden brick’. And the golden brick for me is a chord or a series of notes that contain all of the DNA for the rest of the piece in it … It’s not just a musical motif, it also has a kind of meta message in it … With Sing Gently it’s very simple … it starts with just the piano … and the idea was that, here embedded in the first [plays x2] notes … these two very very disparate notes, very far away from each other and here in middle was the glue [plays x1 note] that holds them together … There in those first notes is all of that information …Then as a composer I use that motif throughout the piece. That become the governing principle … It rarely comes just formed. I have a rough idea then I agonize and agonize … I’ll lose sleep over that trying to get it just right. Then the setting comes in a combination of trying to paint musically the words, then also to use my golden brick idea … So ideally then every vocal line, every note is in service to this larger idea.
But 17,572 singers? The very scale could have impacted upon the outcomes negatively, but Whitacre had thought that through.
I remember very early thinking that knowing that we were going to have a massive number of people that I’ve always thought that, rather than hearing a massive number of people making a massive sound, more powerful is a massive number of people making the smallest sound … something about that restraint of power just send chills up and down my spine … as delicate and gentle as possible … that’s where the magic happens, at the microscopic level.
It is impossible to listen to this programme without being touched by the deep spirituality and humanity of Eric Whitacre. The programme should be on the ‘must listen’ resource list for anyone interested in making or learning about music, of whatever genre.
