Eric Whitacre: Sounds that haunted cyberspace

from Telegraph:
The haunting melodies, agonisingly beautiful harmonies and sense of mystical anticipation make Lux Aurumque an excellent starting point for a voyage around Whitacre’s catalogue. It’s also the piece that triggered an online stampede earlier this year when Whitacre’s “virtual choir” production of it became a YouTube phenomenon.

... Whitacre is today launching Virtual Choir 2011, a global search for singers to create the world’s largest online choir in a performance of his piece Sleep.

The tech-aware Whitacre is also a keen user of Twitter and Facebook to maintain a dialogue with fans and colleagues, but his YouTube coup was the moment when household-name status came calling. His compositions have already sold more than a million copies in sheet-music form, finding favour with thousands of choirs worldwide, and his pieces have proved to be commercial gold dust on a variety of recordings (not least Polyphony’s 2006 Whitacre collection, Cloudburst, on Hyperion).