Internationally acclaimed composer, conductor, and UNLV graduate Eric Whitacre ('95 Bachelor of Music) is nominated for a 2012 Grammy in Best Choral Performance for Light & Gold, his debut album as a conductor. The 54th Grammy Award ceremony will be held at 8 p.m. on Sunday, February 12 and airs locally on CBS.
Whitacre is one of the most popular and performed composers of our time, a distinguished conductor and public speaker. Coming to classical music relatively late in life when he joined the UNLV choir, the first work that Whitacre sang - Mozart's Requiem - changed his life. Inspired to compose, his first piece Go, Lovely, Rose, was completed at the age of 21. He went on to the Juilliard School (New York), earned his Master of Music degree and studied with Pulitzer Prize and Oscar-winning composer, John Corigliano.
Commissions include works for the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Chanticleer, Julian Lloyd Webber and the Philharmonia Orchestra, Rundfunkchor Berlin, The King's Singers, The Tallis Scholarsand the BBC Proms among others. His musical, Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings, won both the ASCAP Harold Arlen award and the Richard Rodgers Award, and earned 10 nominations at the Los Angeles Stage Alliance Ovation Awards. A versatile musician, he has also worked with legendary film composer, Hans Zimmer, co-writing the Mermaid Theme for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.
Eric's ground-breaking Virtual Choir, Lux Aurumque, received over a million views on YouTube in just 2 months (now approaching 3 million), featuring 185 singers from 12 different countries. Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir 2.0, Sleep, was released in April 2011 and involved more than 2,000 voices from 58 countries.
An exceptional orator, he was honored to address the U.N. Leaders programme and give a TED Talk in March 2011 which earned the first full standing ovation of the conference. He has addressed audiences at Duke & Harvard, Seoul Digital Forum and JCDA Conference in Tokyo. Following his Visiting Fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University (UK), Eric was appointed Composer in Residence in September 2011.
As a conductor, Whitacre has appeared with hundreds of professional and educational ensembles throughout the world. He has conducted concerts of his choral and symphonic music in the US, Japan, Australia, China, Singapore, South America and much of Europe. Forthcoming conducting engagements include New York's Carnegie Hall, Berlin's Philharmonie and London's Royal Albert Hall.
Many of Eric Whitacre's works have entered the standard choral and symphonic repertories and have become the subject of scholarly works and doctoral dissertations. Whitacre has received composition awards from the Barlow International Composition Competition, the ACDA and the American Composers Forum. In 2001, he became the youngest recipient ever awarded the coveted Raymond C. Brock commission by the ACDA. Whitacre was born in Nevada and currently lives in London with his wife (Grammy award-winning soprano, Hila Plitmann) and their son
