Junior high chorus

Cloudburst and Other Choral Works; Eric Whitacre, composer; Polyphony; Stephen Layton, conducting

Junior High started in the autumn of 1978. Every kid that advances out of elementary school has his or her list of anticipated freedoms, new found rights and privileges. Mine? Lockers, candy bars for lunch … and study hall. I looked forward to the study hall the most. We never had anything like this in elementary school. Imagine … getting your homework done at school, leaving it in your locker (LOCKER!!! Yea!!!) for the next day, keeping a light book bag, and more time to watch TV in the evening … or play the piano. The cost … Ha! Cost! … of this study hall was a sabbatical from all things singy, chorussy and choiry. I could live with that. Band was enough. Besides, I was a scholar and I needed my study time. Yup. My priorities were absolutely in “oar-dair”. More studying, parents would love that, conscience clear, cased closed.

All it took was the prettiest girl in my class to come to my desk, at the end of my first study hall, and say, “Erik, what are you doing in here? You’re the best musician in our school. We need more boy singers. Won’t you come sing with us?” And then she turned on the baby seal eyes and said, “Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaase?” I rallied every speck, every morsel, every smidgen, dram and dollop of academic integrity in order to invoke a justified harangue about my supplemental scholarly requirements, the narrow, lonely path to a 4.0 and the extra free time at home with my Mom, Dad, sisters and kitty … and said, Okay.

I’d been pathetic before, and I’ve been since – but that was the most pitiable plummet I’ve ever sustained. If I’m thirty minutes smarter today than I would have been at my high school graduation commencement ceremony in May of 1984, it came from my one and only study hall on the first day of Junior High.

In January of 1999, I accompanied the twenty-fifth South Dakota Honors Choir when they performed for the regional convention of the American Choral Directors Association in Sioux Falls. The ACDA had invited the choir to repeat their concert from the summer before. It provided me with the opportunity to work again with the great choral conductor Dr. A. In addition to his concert with the Honors Choir at the convention, he brought his own choir to present a concert. And on that concert, I heard, for the first time, the music of Eric Whitacre.

Mr. Whitacre is an internationally renowned choral composer, conductor and clinician. He looks like a surfer dude. And young people absolutely love him.

Eric Whitacre has, many times, claimed that he never participated in anything … ANYTHING … musical, in school or at home, before attending the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. He had grown up in Las Vegas and enrollment in the local University was only logical. He had announced no academic major at the time. All of his classes served to fulfill basic academic requirements.

On the first day of classes, Eric’s roommate burst into their dorm room and declared, “Dude! You gotta come join the chorus! They need men. And the chicks – are – AWESOME!” When he walked into the choral rehearsal room the next day, the chorus was rehearsing for a performance of Mozart’s Requiem. Mr. Whitacre typically concludes his story by saying that “I came for the chicks – but I stayed for Mozart”.

His biography from that point on renders one of the strangest, yet motivating, transformations I’ve ever stumbled across in the classical music biz. Without any appreciable history of musical instruction of any kind, he began to hear and compose music in his head. Not just happy, little thirty-two measure long ditties – but complex, harmonically innovative structures that can easily underpin the weight of the deepest, most esoteric text of any culture. After graduating from UNLV, he went on to study at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. Since that time, he has received commissions, commissioning awards, honors and invitations to conduct all over the world. His compositions range from the very serious and moving “When David Heard” to the very entertaining and ridiculous “Godzilla Eats Las Vegas”.

I admit it. I am envious of his success. Although, turnabout is fair play, I suppose. All humility in tact, I would guess that others have envied the relative ease in which music flows through my ears and under my fingers. Somebody has to be near the top of the envy chain. I’m sincerely glad of his monumental success. He probably had more study halls than I did.

Credits: To Dr. A. What big ears you’ve got, Maestro. It’s always a pleasure to work with you.

This is the forty-second of my final forty-five CD’s.