Eric whitaker cloudburst

1. #ERIC WHITAKER CLOUDBURST HOW TO#
2. #ERIC WHITAKER CLOUDBURST FULL#

Thomas Tallis’s English anthems show the stresses and strains of England’s break with Rome. Palestrina’s Masses breathe the air of Counter-Reformation Rome. Look at other great religious composers, and they all have that quality of being rooted in a coherent style, and in a definite time and place. The counterpoint is in the tremendous North German tradition that stretches back through Bach’s great forebears such as Buxtehude.

#ERIC WHITAKER CLOUDBURST FULL#

They are full of chorale melodies, those sturdy affirmations of the Protestant faith that Martin Luther designed to be sung by the ordinary man and woman. They are absolutely rooted in their own time. But there’s nothing timeless about Bach’s great Passions and cantatas. We forget this, because we like to praise Bach for his “timeless” beauty.

What better way to keep it real on the right than name-dropping Burke? The Disdainful One continues,Īnother was the fact that music sprang from a particular time and place. The severity of strict rules is one thing that enabled Bach to “keep it real”. He would have agreed with Edmund Burke that “difficulty is our true friend”.

He actually relished the difficulty of writing counterpoint, and liked to make things even harder for himself. The language had tough rules, and yet Bach never dropped any hint that he found them irksome. It wasn’t something he could just pick up and put down at will. In music, this tussling with something difficult and problematic is symbolised by the composer’s tussle with a musical language.įor a great religious composer such as Bach, the musical language he was born into had the force of law, as unavoidable and exacting as religion itself. He, quite conservatively, emphasizes the musical importance of rootedness, rules, and tradition, all of which he believes Whitacre lacks:

#ERIC WHITAKER CLOUDBURST HOW TO#

This disdainer does know how to get a good harrumph going - the proper conservative response to having one’s musical lawn infested by Whitacres, I suppose. “I’m not an atheist, but I’m not a Christian either,” is about as close as he gets to a credo. To begin with, he avoids anything that might smack of belief.

Sincerity needs content… In the case of Eric Whitacre, content of any kind is exactly what’s missing. Our disdainer continues, “Whitacre is so sincere I suspect he would glow in the dark.” Or at least it’s a problem many performing musicians wish the composers whose music they have to perform had. If that’s the problem, it’s a problem many composers would like to have. Whitacre is beloved in the choral world, but also, sometimes, disdained - for being overrated (he is, although overrated can still be good), for being gimmicky (also true, though his gimmicks often land), and for writing music “suffused with a sense of easy spiritual uplift… Everything maximally radiant and beautiful, and beautifully sung. “Tell me, burnt earth: Is there no water? Is there only dust? Is there only the blood of bare-footed footsteps on the thorns?” “The wilderness and the wasteland shall be glad for them, And the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.”Įric Whitacre is a conductor and composer with matinee-idol good looks, personal magnetism, a slick marketing strategy, and arguably common sense, too: he recommends young composers not waste time acquiring training in academic theory beyond what they need to write music that sounds good.