CJ Replay: Whitacre

(An excerpt from the Choral Journal  article Textural Density in the Choral Music of Eric Whitacre by Andrew Larson)

 

       Whitacre’s choral works exhibit harmonic flamboyance, crushing dissonance, and striking harmonic relationships abound in his works. Part of his compositional genius lies, however, in the accessibility of his works to listener and singer. Despite their lavish harmonies, the voice leading of individual voice parts is relatively simple. The pitch content of most voice parts consists of stepwise motion and triadic outline. It is the combination and intersection of simple voice parts that creates the frequently dense harmonic language exhibited in this repertoire.

       The extensive use of divisi, that is, chords with five or more tones in an SATB texture, has become one of Whitacre’s choral trademarks. (In many rehearsals, the author hears Whitacre’s name used as an adjective to describe dense chords or dissonant clusters.) One can easily tell by studying Whitacre’s music, however, that not every musical segment contains divisi or dense chords. The voice-leading techniques appearing in this repertoire allow the composer to freely and frequently move between tonally sparse or tonally dense segments. This article seeks to show that the rich cl;1ords and seemingly vertically oriented clusters in Whitacre’s choral music are the result oflinear, voice leading processes. More important, the hallmark of these voice-leading techniques centers in their ability to produce adjacent chords containing different numbers of tones. This author calls the process “textural density variation” wherein Whitacre produces segments of music where tones are either accruing or disappearing in subsequent chords. It will then be shown that this process can take precedence over, or even replace, traditional harmonic function and voice leading.