Grammy Award-winning composer and conductor Eric Whitacre is among today’s most popular musicians. His works are programmed worldwide and his ground-breaking virtual choirs have united more than 100,000 singers from more than 145 countries.

He goes deep with Hannah Fiddy on the life lessons he’s learned from composing, failing, people-pleasing, the weight of composing within the classical tradition, and how he manages to complete any piece of music.

Let’s kick off with a quick-fire round...

Union Chapel captured by Daniela Sbrisny

If you could instantly be an expert in something, what would it be? Astrophysics
You’ve described choral music as a vocation but if that didn’t exist, what else would you be doing? An astrophysicist or an architect. These things inspire me but there's a meticulousness about both that I don't think I have. So in this imaginary world where choral music doesn't exist, I also have a bunch of character traits that would help me to do those things.
Do you have a party trick? I have a bunch of really dumb jokes that I can string out for 10 minutes at a time with a payoff that is really only worth it to me. I don't know if that's a party trick. I can derail any conversation, how about that?
Something that would surprise people to learn about you? The people who really know me think I'm an introvert. My public persona might not convey that but I'm happiest when I'm in a quiet room with my family.

That’s the easy stuff out of the way, so now time for some slightly longer questions…

You’ve said of the moment you had your first piece performed: ‘For the first time I heard me outside of me in the hearts and souls of other people’. What a treat that must be – to feel understood – yet it must also be difficult to feel like an open book. How much do you think your music represents you, or ‘is’ you in musical form?

While I would like to think that the music I make is as close to the true me as I can get, I recognise all the limitations of my own craft. There's this process of trying to translate who I think I am through my own abilities, and my abilities often fall short from expressing the full measure of it. When I'm at my best as a composer, I think it's the big part of my mind that is helping the small/ego mind learn the right path. So sometimes what gets out there is not just me but it's a path to growth, to evolution. We're really going into the cave…!

I can talk about this for hours! Although you’re best known for your shimmering choral music, you’ve written a wide range of music. Is there a piece or a group of your pieces that you think best represents you and how you feel?

There's a style that I'm known for, that when I look at the totality of my catalogue, is a bit anomalous. As much as I definitely have this dark star that I gravitate around – this gooey, milky, honey inner world that I fall towards – I’m fascinated by and inspired by reason, and an enlightened mind and enlightened thinking. And so there are some pieces that are written like that. Personally I think that the hardest thing to do is to write funny. I've got some stupid pieces that I think are funny. Those things too are part of my personality but often don't get talked about when my style gets talked about.

Eric Whitacre’s Animal Crackers

As well as being hard to write, you’ve said that there’s a tension within the stuffy classical world with writing funny music. Do you feel that conflict between wanting to do it and the weight of tradition (particularly in the choral world)?

I let that go a long, long time ago. I think my superpower is that I didn't start as a classical musician, and I didn’t even read music ‘til I was 20 or 21, so I never really felt the gravity, and thank god because had I grown up really knowing about the masters, that could have been paralysing.

Did you not have it the other way that you then turned up to music college feeling like an imposter?

I grew up in Nevada, in a tiny farming town, and so I knew nothing, I was so green and naive. And then I went to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which had a very green music school. For several years, I was the only composition student. My composition teachers just let me try this and try that. Had I somehow accidentally gone to Juilliard at 18 (where I later did my Master's degree) I'll bet I would have dropped out three weeks later. I would have been completely overwhelmed.

*“I honestly am not sure if I will ever write another good piece again”*

Some of your very popular pieces (e.g. Sleep and Lux Aurumque) you composed 20+ years ago, when you had a much smaller following. Now that you’re more well-known, do you feel the weight of people wanting you to be an earlier version of yourself?

I'm an oldest child so by nature I'm a pleaser. I can really get in my head about not wanting to disappoint people with every new note that I write. Of course, the truth is, everyone is the star of their own movie, and they couldn't really care less. Nobody's out there waiting! Now I sometimes feel the expectation of being Eric Whitacre (and I say that with deep humility and knowing how small a niche of a niche that I occupy).

You’re Eric Whitacre™ the brand now!

It's the oddest thing. Sometimes people can have an experience of singing Sleep, Lux Aurumque or When David Heard and it’s a big, monumental experience in their life. They expect to meet me and to see that same wisdom and depth. I'm just as lost as anybody, trying to get from here to there.

I can imagine it must be hard to not get caught up in all that and feeling like you're doing it for other people, rather than expressing what you need to express right now. Do you think that the weight of fame has changed what you're composing or the process of composition?

I'm lucky because I have a very loud north star. The moment I sit down and try to think about writing what people want or in terms of my career, I feel it collapse. I endlessly have to go back and ask, ‘Who are you really and what are you trying to say?’. It's like a gravity that pulls me back to myself. At the end of the day, it's just me and some notes. An hour before I called you, I had this sudden clarity with the piece I’m writing: this is way more simple than I’m making it. Don’t try to impress, don’t try to dazzle, don’t try to justify. If you like that, write that.

You’ve described each piece as being almost like a diary entry from that time. If it’s flawed, it’s okay, don’t try to fix it. This, and the process of composition – being accepting of the decision you make at the time, even if it’s not ‘perfect’ – sounds like a really important life lesson and something that you might otherwise learn in therapy. Do you feel you’ve taken any other life lessons from the process of composing into the rest of your life?

I think I've learned these deeply spiritual life lessons by being a composer. I'm not a naturally meticulous person. I have big, grand ideas all the time. I think my entire reality is based in apophenia, which is the idea that you see patterns where patterns might not be, so I'm endlessly connecting things. When looking for the signal in the noise, sometimes I think I’m actually generating a whole bunch of meaning that actually isn’t there at all.

There's something about the process of composition that when I find that quiet space, all the questions of ‘What is it? What does it want to be?’, by just being quiet and just listening and just being present, all of that falls away, and then the patterns become incredibly clear. I wish I could take that with me every moment of my daily life. It's been a profound lesson and the image I have in my mind is that I'm just this sharp boulder in a river that's been slowly polished year upon year.

I actually think it's the reason I gravitated to composition. Even more than the joy of making something is that the discipline of composing is making me the person I'm supposed to be. I hope!

I get the sense that you have a very busy mind. Does that noise continue during the process of composition? Or can that be a moment that you get into a flow state where it quietens?

Very, very occasionally. There's a beautiful book by Stephen King called On Writing that’s full of wisdom from the trenches. One of his things is that he just writes every day, period. 1000 words a day, no matter what. I think Ravel said something like, ‘I'll be at my writing desk every day from 8am-4pm. If inspiration wants me, she knows where to find me.’ Some things are just gonna be a default of trudging, but you're not going to get to inspiration unless you're putting in the hours. I'm willing to put up with all the trudging for the few moments of clarity.

Does that mean you have a rigid daily or weekly routine?

No. Left to my own devices, I would just be a feather in the wind. Every other day there’s something new and utterly fascinating that completely consumes me. The only hack I have is to set a deadline, and not one for myself. It can't be, ‘I want to be finished by 1 June’. It has to be, ‘I'm going to work hard to get someone to commission a thing, and they're going to start selling tickets for it.’ So there's no out, I have to do it. It’s the only way, because what happens for me then is that the fear of not finishing in time becomes greater than the fear of starting. Then I start throwing out parts of my life, not answering emails or cutting all social. I just go into my cave, because it's the only way I know I can make the thing.

You must get requests left, right and centre, so how do you pick? How do you hone in on which is the right thing for you to do in that moment?

It's a combination of something I really want to do and opportunity. For years, I had this idea for a piece called Bounce. I had a general idea of what it could be, so my manager and the publishers started shopping it around for two years. And then suddenly a little group of orchestras came through and said they'd love to do that. But now that I'm presented with it I say, ‘Actually I don't want to write Bounce anymore. Can I write something else?’

I relate to this so hard! The excitement at the beginning of the project, which then becomes the drudgery of actually doing it.

And every time you're in the middle of it, you're like, why do I do this to myself every single time?

Every single time. It’s difficult because people often praise good ideas, but no-one praises the fact that you slogged away for a year making that idea a reality, and that’s way harder than coming up with the idea.

I love to hear you say that because I say to my wife all the time that ideas are so cheap. I can sit in a meeting and come up with three great ideas. But to make it? Not only is it just so hard to make it but then it's hard to make it good. Rarely, even on the projects that I decide, ‘Okay, I'm gonna see this all the way through to the end’, do I ever feel like I get to the end and it's what I hoped it would be. I always feel like it's a pile of compromises. I think that's anticlimactic and disappointing, and there's this sense of shame that's with it that I could have done better.

I think the only way to survive is to become a kind of creator that just makes things. And just move on to the next one, on to the next one, just keep making and then you don't have time to look in the rearview mirror. You just have to just keep making things.

*“I can really get in my head about not wanting to disappoint people with every new note*
*I write”*

When you're working on a piece, you must have the puzzle of the structure and the characters of the melodies and the harmonies running through your mind constantly. Or at least, that’s my experience of composing. Does this stop you from sleeping or interrupt your life in any way?

I'm awful at compartmentalising and I wish I knew how to do it. It takes a massive toll on my personal relationships. It is really hard to turn it off and then be present for this thing that's happening and then turn it back on. It can be a combination of things, a melody or a word or turn of phrase, where you're trying to find a very specific solution, and you're trying to solve it over and over in your mind. You're just praying for the answer because it's agony to live with that in your mind. It's like a thorn, a splinter in your brain that you can't get to. You don't even know if it's a splinter. That's the worst part.

It's like you're watching some kind of TV show in your brain and you’re meant to be having a conversation, but you’ve got this other channel on so can't fully commit.

Yeah, that's exactly it. And with that comes shame and guilt. Why can't you be like a normal person? Why can't you just have a goddamn conversation with somebody without it having to be this thing?

As you say, switching on and off is so difficult, and going between modes. Have you figured out any wisdom on this, having recently had a baby, or has that life change altered your output?

Something someone pointed out to me, which makes me laugh, is that half of everything I've written has been about dreaming or sleeping. That can't be a coincidence. Longer pieces like The Sacred Veil exist because I was very recently divorced and my older son was old enough that he was spending weeks with his mother and lots of time at school. There were 10 years where I could never write something like The Sacred Veil. When I go back and look at that period, they're all short, fragmented pieces, and all the pieces that I was writing before he was born, were more epic, longer ones, because you have time to live in that world. Now that I've got my son here, everything I'm writing is short. So just in terms of the amount of brainpower I can devote to something I see really being affected.

VOCES8 sings Sleep

You posted on Instagram: ‘Fail big, fail often. It's the only way to learn and grow.’ Have there been particular times in your life where you feel like you've really learned that lesson?

When young or emerging composers look at my catalogue, most if not all of them are kind of hits. They're pieces that get performed and they're in the cycle. I've probably written twice as many pieces as what's in my catalogue, I just don't publish or promote the disasters. And there have been some disasters. I mean big, high-profile commissions, and I wrote the thing and got the first performances and it was like, ‘Oh my god’. So the beautiful thing that it has taught me over the years is that a total disaster is not the end of the world. You'll completely recover. It doesn't matter how important it feels at the moment, and I don't mean also important in terms of the profile of the commission, also just what you hoped it would be or the amount of time you put into it. It's okay and you move on. So even now I'm writing this orchestral piece. I hope it's going to work, I really hope it's going to be good. But if it totally sucks, I'll try to rewrite as much as I can, but if it never gets performed again it's okay. I'm okay.

So even now, you feel that continues to happen and will continue for the rest of your career? Not like you've now got to a place where you know the formula and can smash it out?

No, it's the opposite actually. I honestly am not sure if I will ever write another good piece again. That's not humility, and it's also not self loathing, it's just being honest. I remember Sondheim said something like, "I can't write a bad piece of music anymore. Every piece of music has a beginning, a middle and an end. I know how to make a song. But is it good?". So yeah I can definitely make something that looks like a piece of music and people play it. But whether it'll have that fire in it, or is extraordinary, I really don't know.

Eric’s latest project, Eric Whitacre’s Virtual School, offers direct access to practical and artistic insights gained over more than 30 years, designed for students, educators, composers, performers, lifelong learners, and music-lovers of all ages and abilities. Check it out at virtualschool.ericwhitacre.com.

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Interview: Eric Whitacre