Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir 5 now taking video submissions
by Jeremy Rogers
Grammy Award winning composer Eric Whitacre has announced he is accepting submissions for hopeful participants in his Virtual Choir 5 arrangement of his 2015 song "Deep Field".
Image from NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team
"Deep Field" is an orchestral piece with light choral elements that was wholly inspired by the Hubble Space Telescope, arguably the most well known of NASA's orbiting telescopes. The melodies of the piece are meant to represent Hubble's history of needing several major repairs after it was launched into orbit. The Hubble Space Telescope has captured some of the most iconic images of outer space, including the famous "Pillars of Creation" photograph originally captured in 1995 and revisited in 2014 with a higher resolution camera.
Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir started back in 2009 with an arrangement of Whitacre's choral piece "Lux Aurumque" which included 185 singers from 12 countries. It was followed up with Virtual Choir 2.0, a rendition Whitacre's choral piece "Sleep" releasing in 2011, sporting over 2,000 voices from 58 countries. The 2012 Virtual Choir 3 had over 73 countries represented in the choir of nearly 3,000 submissions all singing Whitacre's "Water Night."
Virtual Choir 4 changed the established formula by changing from classical choral music to a piece from Whitacre's musical Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings, a musical that incorporates choral and operatic singing with electronica and trance music. The choir was made up of nearly 8,500 videos from almost 5,000 people singing "Fly to Paradise."
Whitacre is known for embracing dissonance in his musical arrangements. He won the 2012 Grammy for Best Choral Performance with his 2010 album White & Gold.
Singers interested in entering a video need to sign up on the Virtual Choir 5 website.
