Artwork provided by Jon McCormack.
This episode was written and produced by Colin DeVarney.
Singing with others is a powerful form of expression. That's why the composer Eric Whitacre started the Virtual Choir; an experiment that connects singers from every corner of the globe. In this episode, we hear how a choir can unite people from different backgrounds to achieve a common goal - creating beautiful music.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Pretty Build by Sound of Picture
In My Head by Sound of Picture
Morels by Sound of Picture
Celadon by Sound of Picture
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View Transcript ▶︎
[music in]
You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz. I’m Dallas Taylor.
The music you’re hearing now is not an ordinary choir. It’s a teenager in her bedroom, singing into a laptop microphone. It’s a grandparent performing while their grandchild helps with the camera. And it’s a businessman, reliving his years of choir in school. What you’re hearing are hundreds of individual voices performing both together, and alone. The result is mesmerizing, and powerful, and greater than the sum of its parts.
[music out]
This performance is the first installment of what’s known as the Virtual Choir. It’s a project that connects singers from around the world to create music. The human voice is an instrument we’re born with. It doesn’t cost anything, and we can use it to express all sorts of emotions and stories. And if you sing with others, that expression can be amplified into something more.
But not everyone has the chance to do that.
Eric Whitacre had that in mind when he founded the Virtual Choir in the late 2000’s.
[music in]
Eric: I grew up in northern Nevada, and I really had no musical training. I definitely had an ear. I played piano. My parents tried to get me piano lessons, they just wouldn't stick. I played trumpet in middle school and high school, but I never learned to read music. I would just play by ear.
Eric: Then at 18, I went to The University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And on a whim, I joined choir. On the very first day, I was standing with 100 other people in the room and he said, "Lets begin with the Requiem, and the Kyrie. I didn't know what a Requiem was, I certainly didn't know what a Kyrie was. So I looked over the shoulder of the guy standing next to me and turned to page 10, and we launched into the Kyrie from the Requiem by Mozart.
[music out]
[SFX: Mozart’s Requiem in D minor]
Eric: I'll never forget that moment. That first breath, which to this day entrances me. That first breath that a group of people take before they sing. If you know the Kyrie by Mozart, then you know that it begins with the bass's.
[SFX: Kyrie from Mozart’s Requiem in D minor]
Eric: So we start this fugue subject ... the altos join. Then the sopranos, the tenors, and within about 25 or 30 seconds I just found myself standing in the midst of this cosmic Swiss watch. This level of complexity and humanity that I couldn't have imagined existed before that moment. And I remember doing exactly what I still do when I hear music that moves me, which is that I was standing there not singing, and I began trembling, I kind of shake, and then I giggle. It's like I get this feeling in my stomach. Then finally I had tears in my eyes... and I left after that first 50 minute rehearsal, the world's biggest choir geek. I was utterly transformed.
[music out]
Eric is one of the most influential choral composers of our generation. If you’ve been in a choir in the last few decades, there’s a great chance you’ve performed one of his pieces. The list of his accomplishments goes on and on, but the Virtual Choir remains perhaps his biggest creation. The idea though, came from a small gesture.
Eric: So a friend of mine sent me a link to a YouTube video. He said, "You've got to see this." In this video was a young woman, she was only 17 at the time. Her name's Britlin Losee. And Britlin had gone into a room and made a fan video for me. She says, "Hi Mr. Eric Whitacre, I'm a big fan and here's something that I want to do for you. Here's me singing Sleep."
[Music Clip: Britlin singing “Sleep”]
Eric: This was a piece of music that I had written for choir that had been published, and choirs had started performing. I was thunderstruck watching this. I just was moved by the purity of her voice, and also the purity of her intention.
[Music Clip: Britlin singing “Sleep” continued with other voices]
Watching her video, I thought to myself, "You know, if you could get 25 other people to do what Britlin is doing right now. If they were singing their part alone in their dorm room, or in the kitchen, or in the living room. As long as they were singing in the same key and at the same tempo. If they all just uploaded their parts to YouTube, and I literally started them at the same time then this choir would have to unfold, right? This virtual choir.
[Music Clip: Virtual Choir singing “Sleep”]
[music in]
Eric: I go online to my website and Facebook, and just in all caps, "I've got this idea. Let's make a virtual choir." I have no idea how to actually pull this off. The way Britlin did it was she was listening to a recording and she was singing along with it. But we're not going to be using a recording.
Eric: So I got the idea that what I would do is make a video of myself conducting the piece, but in complete silence. The music would only be in my head. I would upload this to YouTube, and then people would download the sheet music and sit in front of their computers, and watch my little conductor video. I genuinely had no idea if this would work or not.
Eric: I also didn't know if anybody would actually do it. But they did. And almost immediately I could tell, oh this is going to work.
[music out]
There were a few challenges early on though. When you’re singing in a group, everyone hears each other so they can stay in tune with each other. But if you’re singing by yourself though, it’s natural for the key to fluctuate over time, since you don’t have a reference to guide you. So to fix this, they added a piano track for the performers to sing to.
Eric: We've refined that so that now there's usually a choir singing underneath them so that they feel like they're singing into the sound of a choir. Instead of just into a vacuum.
In addition to a video of Eric conducting the piece, he also included detailed musical direction for the singers, just like a conductor would do in a normal rehearsal.
[Clip: Eric’s conducting direction]
With the materials in place, submissions began pouring in on YouTube.
Eric: I think it's one of the great selling points of a choir is that you never have to sing alone. Lots of people like to sing, but maybe don't want to be a soloist. When you're in a choir you can sing your heart out, and you never have to have your voice exposed like that.
These submissions were brought together and the first Virtual Choir was released. The only question was if anyone would notice. Here’s more of that performance of the piece Lux Aurumque, composed and conducted by Eric.
[Music clip: Virtual Choir I begins]
Eric: When I uploaded the first Virtual Choir, I really didn't think anybody but me and my tiny circle of choir geek friends would be interested. And the video went viral, I wasn't prepared for that at all. I started getting all of these requests for media appearances. Then suddenly I was being bombarded with requests from all over the world from singers. Saying, "I don't know what this is, but I have to be a part of it, when is the next one?"
[Virtual Choir I continues and fades out]
Eric: The first one had 185 different singers from 12 countries. At the time I thought, "That's as big as this could ever go." But just based on the number of people writing to me, we all thought, "Oh my God, this could be bigger."
Eric: First what we started to do is just build a better infrastructure. Better tools to help people learn the music. I refined the ability to get them to sing all at the same time. So I made a much better and clearer conductor track. The guide track for them to listen to was clearer.
With these improvements in place, the second piece was finished just one year after the first.
[Music clip: Virtual Choir II begins]
Eric: Then we launched Virtual Choir II which this time was that piece “Sleep” that Britlin Losee was singing the very first time she sent me that video.
Eric: We also bumped up our ability to aggregate the videos themselves. First at that time to find them on YouTube. And then to sort them by sound quality. Those that were recorded the best, and those that were recorded not as good. That became very helpful later on in the process.
Eric: This time we had 2052 singers from 58 different countries. It just overnight turned into this earth choir. I was completely unprepared for that. I could never have imagined it.
Putting that into perspective, this performance featured over ten times as many singers as the first Virtual Choir, and they ranged from nine year olds to senior citizens. If Britlin’s first YouTube video was a tiny snowball, it had now turned into an avalanche with no sign of stopping.
[Music clip: Virtual Choir II out]
The Virtual Choir would only continue to grow, which introduced some interesting challenges for Eric and his team.
Eric: With Virtual Choir III, we knew already going in, it's going to get bigger. So more and more singers wanted to be involved so then we started to build our own infrastructure. We had a small army of volunteers that would connect with anybody that was having technical difficulties. They would station themselves around the globe in different time zones so that anyone who wanted to join, but couldn't figure out how to do it, could join.
[Music clip: Virtual Choir III begins]
Eric: The Virtual Choir III, I think ended up with 3700 something singers from 73 countries. In terms of the style of music, we took it to, I think, as far as we can take it musically. We used a piece that I had written called Water Night that splits a lot. By splits it means that there's lots of different voice parts all making a single chord. So the climax of Water Night has the lines if you “open your eyes, night opens.” On the word, "eyes" it's a 14 part chord.
[Music clip: Virtual Choir III 14 part chord]
Eric: Which was a logistical challenge. Not only to line all that up and make it sound good, but literally just to aggregate the parts. So technically it was a huge challenge for us.
Eric: Spiritually it also really changed, I think, the way we were thinking about all of it. Until then, it had just been about amassing numbers in this extraordinary thing that we were making that seemed to resonate with people in a way. But we didn't really understand it at all. But for Virtual Choir III, we set up some places on my Facebook page, and on my website where people could upload their testimonials. They could write about what it was that moved them about the Virtual Choir and why they joined.
Eric: This is when we started to see some of these stories. These extraordinary stories ...
Eric: There was a man from Cuba who desperately wanted to join, but because of government regulations, was unable to send us a video larger than one meg. So we got our tech team together with him, and Cuba became part of the Virtual Choir.
Eric: There was a man who had gone legally blind and because of that, hadn't been able to sing in a choir for over 30 years. Now for the first time, he could get close enough to the computer screen to see my little conductor track, and he was able to join the choir.
Eric: There was a young woman who had sung in choirs with her mother. It's just a thing that the two of them did together. Her mother was dying of cancer and couldn't sing. So this young woman recorded her video looking straight into the camera but just off screen was holding her mother's hand in hospice as a tribute to both of them singing together, and their life together.
Eric: So suddenly for me too, I was seeing the sense of borders and governments starting to dissolve. There really was just this tribe with a common goal, and a common love. Which is to come together to make something larger than themselves. It gave me incredible hope for humanity, and really restored my faith in people.
[Music clip: Virtual Choir III out]
[music in]
Eric brought people from all walks of life together for a common purpose, in a way that had previously never been possible. From the beginning, the Virtual Choir was about so much more than just singing. But, the Virtual Choir was far from over. More after this.
[music out]
[MIDROLL]
[music in]
By the time the Virtual Choir became a viral sensation, Eric Whitacre was already a sensation in the instrumental and choral music worlds. His music was performed everywhere from middle school cafeterias to the most renowned symphony halls. And while he’s written music for lots of different instruments, vocal compositions are always something special.
Eric: I love writing for instruments. I love writing piano music, but there is something about the voice. Especially when I want to express something that I find to be fundamentally human. Sorrow, joy, love, the bond between a parent and a child. There's just no vehicle other than the voice for me.
Eric: I heard Ned Rorem one time, the American composer, somebody asked him, "Are you a singer yourself?" And he said, "No, I'm not, but I think the reason composers compose is because they can't sing." That really resonated with me. Because I have the soul of a singer. I have the heart of a singer, I just don't have the instrument of a singer. It's tragic situation actually.
[music out]
Eric composed for the voice to express things that he otherwise couldn’t. Choral music can communicate nuances in emotion in a way that speech can’t. With the Virtual Choir, Eric opened up that experience to a world of people who didn’t previously have an outlet. Anyone who’s been part of any sort of team knows the joy of working together for a common goal. But there are lots of people who have never had that chance. The Virtual Choir is a team with no boundaries or limitations. It allows people from any background to make a meaningful connection… albeit a digital one.
Following the success of Virtual Choir three, Eric knew the fourth installment would continue to feature more and more singers. But he wasn’t content to just grow in terms of numbers.
[Music clip: Virtual Choir IV begins]
Eric: Going from three to four, I knew that we would continue to grow with singers.
Eric: What I didn't want to do is just keep making the same thing over and over, and over. I wanted to grow. I wanted to grow the idea. So I thought, "Maybe what I'll do is I'll just go back to my pop roots a little bit." I had been working for years on a musical called Paradise Lost that was part musical, part opera, and then part electronica. There's a DJ and all different kinds of electronica beats in it.
Eric: I thought, "Okay, I'll take a piece from that." This piece called “Fly To Paradise,” and then we'll put dubstep in it. Lets just see what happens. And we made Virtual Choir IV, Fly To Paradise, something completely different.
[Music clip: Virtual Choir IV out]
“Fly to Paradise” featured nearly six thousand singers from over one hundred different countries. It was also a departure from the more standard choral music of the first three Virtual Choirs. Eric wanted to do something that stretched the norm. He’s a fan of pop music, so it felt like a natural fit.
Eric: There is great virtue in popular music. I think sometimes in the modern world it's easy to say music used to be so much better, more sophisticated and now it's this. The challenge of course is we never have the perspective of time. In 1965, yes there were the Beatles. Yes, there was Pink Floyd. But there was also 10,000 other groups that we never listened to. So we've really had the luxury of sorting out the wheat from the chafe. We can remember the 60's fondly because all we remember are the huge hits.
Eric: I would say in terms of popular music versus classical music, or lets say concert music. There's two things about it. One, concert music, when really well written is hyper-constructed. The composer spends weeks and months, and sometimes years constructing this whole world of relationships between notes. The architecture of a well written concert piece is something to behold. It's a marvel.
[Music clip: Virtual Choir V begins]
The first three Virtual Choirs were performances of more traditional choral pieces. The fourth was a take on a new genre. The question was, where would it go from here? It ended up taking years to answer to answer that question.
Eric: Mostly I just wanted to make something different and at the time I was in the throws of writing this piece called Deep Field. Deep Field is inspired by the image of the same name that was taken by the Hubble telescope in 1995. To me that image, the Deep Field image is the most important image in human history. It shows us how impossibly large our universe is, and how truly small we are in it.
Eric: I wanted to write a piece of music about that. Originally my concept, which is how the piece was originally performed is that it would be for orchestra. This big orchestral piece, and it would ... the music itself would follow the story of the Hubble.
Eric: And in my mind what would happen is I would turn to the audience, and I would give a little gesture to the audience, and they would know then to push play on their smartphones. And everybody had pre-downloaded an app. What would happen is as they push play, you would have a fly through to deep space, and then this final reveal of the Deep Field image on the phone. But then also from each phone was emitted a small electronica sound. Which on its own isn't that interesting but when you have 1000, or 2000, or 5000 phones in the audience playing a sound all at the same time. Then you surround them with a choir, it really is something special. It feels a bit like you're floating in space. Like you're inside the Deep Field image itself.
Eric: There's the Virtual Choir that comes in at the end.
[Music clip: Virtual Choir V virtual choir section]
Eric: Then we had a film made. So there's the piece itself, then we added the Virtual Choir and then we made an entire film, a 23 minute film to the piece itself.
Eric: And now what can happen is orchestras can perform the piece live with the film being projected.
Eric: The conductor just follows the film hits all the right moments and then at the end when the Virtual Choir is revealed, now the audience has all of the shimmering electronica on their phones, the Virtual Choir is being projected from the screens, and then a real choir is surrounding the audience. So now it adds this other dimension. Not only do we have all of these people in the room creating the sense of floating in space, but now you're joined by over 8000 virtual voices on the screen.
[Music clip: Virtual Choir V continues]
The Virtual Choir began with simple gesture from Britlin Losee. Today, it’s a global phenomenon that connects people across borders, age, experience, and beliefs. It’s a team of humans expressing in a way they otherwise couldn’t. But while the Virtual Choir certainly isn’t done, Eric isn’t really sure what comes next.
[Music clip: Virtual Choir V out]
Eric: I definitely want to keep doing the virtual choirs. It's fun, and it's a great way to get people interested in singing. And for me as a composer, it's just a great way to express things that I'm feeling.
Eric: I don't see how we can get bigger in terms of an ideological thrust. What do you do after you've done the universe? So maybe this time we get more smaller, more intimate, or I'm not sure.
Eric: One thing that will remain the same is ethos we've had since the beginning which is, if you upload a video, you're in, there’s no auditions. Every single person who makes a video gets to be part of the choir. And I'll continue that as long as we do the virtual choirs.
[music in]
The Virtual Choir is based around a belief that singing connects us in a unique and profound way. The voice is our most natural instrument, and it’s important that we use it to express ourselves the best we can.
Eric: I believe that singing is the single most fundamental way we have of communicating with each other, more than even speaking. There's something about a voice, when singing, that it carries terabytes of emotional information. When I listen to an amazing singer, say Ella Fitzgerald...
[Music clip: Dream a Little Dream by Ella Fitzgerald]
Eric: It's not just the music, it's not just the words that she's singing. You hear her entire life. There's something about the magic of the voice that can do that.
[Music clip: Dream a Little Dream by Ella Fitzgerald continues and fades out]
[Music clip: Virtual Choir 2]
Eric: There is something truly transformative that happens when you get a whole bunch of people together, singing at the same time, it's extraordinary. There's now all kinds of scientific studies that show that the physiology of it is transformative in itself. That stress hormones decrease. It's good for breathing, it's good for your musculature. There's even some studies now that suggest that people who sing together, their heartbeats begin to synchronize.
[Music clip: Virtual Choir 2 swells]
Eric: There's nothing like singing together to teach a sense of compassion and empathy.
[Music clip: Virtual Choir 2 continues]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film and games sound incredible. Find out more at defactosound.com.
This episode was written and produced by Colin DeVarney and me, Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was edited and mixed by Colin DeVarney.
Thanks to Eric Whitacre. You can listen to his extensive catalogue of music on Apple Music or Spotify. You can find him online at eric whitacre dot com. Also, be sure to visit our website 20k dot org there we’ve posted of all 5 virtual choirs.
Finally, if you know a great story in the choir, band, or orchestra world, be sure to tell us about it. You can do that by writing us on twitter, facebook or by email at hi @ 20k dot org.
Thanks for listening.
[Music clip: Virtual Choir 2 out]
