Grammy Winning Composer Eric Whitacre Signs Worldwide Publishing Agreement With Boosey & Hawkes

The Grammy® Award-winning composer and conductor Eric Whitacre has signed a new long-term publishing agreement with Boosey & Hawkes covering future compositions and a collection of works for chorus, orchestra and wind ensemble.

Eric Whitacre is one of the most popular musicians of his generation. His concert music has been commissioned by today's most prominent ensembles - including the BBC Proms, London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Rundfunkchor Berlin, Los Angeles Master Chorale and The King's Singers - and is championed by millions of amateur musicians and students around the world.

Whitacre is best known for his ground-breaking Virtual Choirs, which have united singers from over 101 countries in performance through user-generated videos. The ethos of the Virtual Choir is that singers of any ability or experience can join and that every video is included. Over 8,500 singer videos were included in Virtual Choir 4: Fly to Paradise.

Forthcoming events include all-Whitacre programmes with Distinguished Concerts International New York at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York (8/15 Apr), concerts with the Eric Whitacre Singers in London (5 May), the Flemish Radio Choir on tour in Belgium (16-19 May) and the Netherlands Radio Choir at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (2 Jul). Whitacre leads Big Sing California at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (21 Jul) under his artist residency with the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

Next season brings the first full concert performances of his major new work The Sacred Veil with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, setting poetry by Charles Anthony Silvestri exploring themes of love and loss (16/17 Feb 2019). Whitacre is also planning an ambitious new audio-visual project with NASA around his work Deep Field, inspired by the Hubble Telescope Deep Field images.

Eric Whitacre comments:

"It is both humbling and a great privilege to join the largest specialist classical music publishing company in the world, with its extraordinary catalogue of copyrights from Stravinsky to Copland and some of the most inspirational composers of our day. Boosey & Hawkes takes a global view. It respects and develops opportunities and audiences for music through all the media available to us. Working hand in hand with my management at Music Productions, Boosey & Hawkes and the wider Concord Music family, I look forward to a stimulating and exciting future."

Janis Susskind, Managing Director of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers comments:

"We are delighted to welcome Eric Whitacre to Boosey & Hawkes. Eric is an outstanding musical ambassador in his multiple roles of composer, conductor and motivational speaker and an innovator in his thinking about ways to harness current technology in the service of art and community engagement. Eric's global, inclusive outlook aligns with our own aim at Boosey & Hawkes to embrace new media and technology as a path forward for classical music. My colleagues and I look forward to working with Eric on a range of exciting music projects."

About Eric Whitacre

Born in Nevada, Eric Whitacre is a graduate of The Juilliard School where he studied composition with John Corigliano and David Diamond. His list of works includes prestigious commissions for, among others, the BBC Proms, the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Chanticleer, Julian Lloyd Webber and the Philharmonia Orchestra, The Tallis Scholars, the Berlin Rundfunkchor and The King's Singers. Eric's first album as composer and conductor, released by Decca as Light & Gold, won the 2012 Grammy® Award for Best Choral Recording. The recording reaped a harvest of five-star reviews and topped the US and UK classical album charts within a week of its release. His second album for Decca, Water Night, again featuring the Eric Whitacre Singers, secured No.1 position in the iTunes and Billboard classical charts on the day of its release in April 2012.

A sought-after guest conductor, Eric has conducted choral and instrumental concerts around the globe, including sold-out concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra. In addition to several collaborations with legendary Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer, he has worked with British pop icons Laura Mvula, Imogen Heap and Annie Lennox. Eric was recently appointed Artist in Residence with the Los Angeles Master Chorale having completed a five-year term as Composer in Residence at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University, UK.

The range of Eric Whitacre's international reach increased in 2010 with the launch of his ground-breaking Virtual Choir, 'Lux Aurumque'. The online project, inspired by a young singer's video upload, was created by 185 singers from a dozen different countries. Within two months their joint recording attracted over a million views on YouTube and has now been viewed over four million times. The project grew in numbers with Virtual Choir 2.0, 'Sleep', and Virtual Choir 3, 'Water Night', Virtual Choir 4 'Fly to Paradise' receiving over 8,500 submissions from 101 countries. Released in July 2013, the film was launched as part of the Coronation Festival at Buckingham Palace and televised on BBC 1. To date, the four Virtual Choirs have registered over 15 million views.

A charismatic speaker, Eric has given keynote addresses for many Fortune 500 companies and global institutions including Apple, Google, the World Economic Forum in Davos, the United Nations Speaker's Programme and two main stage TED talks.

Photo Credit: Boosey & Hawkes

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